The Dark Wob

The one suffering from VSR. Would be interesting to know what caused it.

fried onions wrote: ↑Wed Aug 28, 2019 6:37 pm The one suffering from VSR. Would be interesting to know what caused it.

Unleaded.

+thrashing the tits off it.

It rarely saw north of 60mph in my ownership. Although in fairness in top gear that is something like 3,850rpm and at the time of expiry it was doing 65...

But yeah, I gave up on lead additives about a year in on the basis that the Spitty guys seem to think you may as well run it until it starts burning oil and then send the head away for conversion as it'll take 20,000-30,000 miles to lose it's lead memory.

Mine burnt oil pretty much as soon as I got it anyway...

I always run my Midget (1500 Triumph engine) with castol valve master.
As much for the octane boost as it ran better as anything else. It worked out cheaper than using expensive unleaded too.

Head No.1 de-valved.



I started giving it a stage one tidy but I'm just not happy with the water passages. Here they are vs head no.0:







The passages on the block don't show the same corrosion so I suspect this head is from another car. Somebody on the Spitty page suggested the coolant pipe out the top was deleted for the Mk4, so perhaps it's a mk3 head on a Mk4 block?

Unsure what to do now as the original head has really bad VSR and the valve springs have eaten themselves into the head itself, presumably due to poor oil flow?

To distract myself I went to FOADwerx for some welding...







Not exactly a factory finish but there is now some actual metal there and you can't peel what is there off by hand like you could with the old repair...

FOAD did the lion's share of welding as my work is very slow and very shit. Really I need to practice more than once every couple of years... I also ran him out of gas, because bastard.

I wonder how much you'd known or noticed if you just thrown the engine in and ran it.

Wouldn't have been possible, it's missing various studs and gaskets.

Big end and mains in replacement engine be fuckerated.





The crank surfaces are quite scored, aside from No.2 which seems to have missed the memo on catastrophic wear. Prosumably at some point it's pulled something abrasive through the oil...

Oil pump is not terrible.




I also had to move the car, because roadworks.





When I pumped up the tyre this happened:



That's water under the petrol tank, and there isn't supposed to be a hole there...

I towed it along the street with the Acclaim and then half arsedly cleaned it to make it looks less abandoned.








Beautiful.

How bad is that crank? Those shells look much less bad than I was expecting.
Can you feel scored as you run a finger nail over it? You might get away with just having it polished but it would really take a machine shop to say for good.