Silverstone Classic

160 mile round trip to this event, part cross country but mostly M40 and dual carriageway. Calibrated by GPS, motorway speed around 63-65 @3500 rpm seems to be a reasonable compromise between making progress and liiting noise and vibration levels. Unfortuately the worst NVH is between 3000 and 3500, 54-62mph. 

Hot weather and an hour of start / stop traffic entering the circuit meant that the engine temperature was getting far too high. So, heater on, fan on high, which just contained the engine temperature but cooked the occupants! I have a quote from Kenlowe for an auxiliary cooling fan.... maybe it's a good idea? 

The event itself was good. Great to see old F1, classic touring and sports cars being driven hard. Also loads of old sports cars in the car club displays. 

Silverstone itself is a bit tatty, and they had only opened a couple of grandstands. Refreshment options were severely limited too, with sky high prices.

That's better

Cycled over to collect the car and to inspect the failed y-section, which had indeed failed at the circular weld. It had obviously cracked much earlier and the cracking had gradually increased - only about 15% of the circle was bright metal.

Driving home, it was clear from the start that there was a serious misfire with the engine under any load, and tickover had dropped indicating one cylinder may have gone walkabout. I decided to carry on home and have a closer look myself.

Having let the engine cool a bit, the plugs were removed one at a time..... the spark gap on no 1 plug was completely bridged with carbon. As I had mislaid my plug-cleaning wire brush in the house move, I decided to fit a new set of plugs, although these had shorter bodies - a quick call to Max confirmed these would be OK.

So on to the test drive - a bit sluggish to begin with (probably no 1 cylinder was a tad gummy) but a few miles at high revs improved things considerably.

A very hot day so windows down meant it was a bit difficult to judge noise levels - but the combination of the new propshaft, a full set of cylinders and an intact exhaust certainly seems to have improved noise and vibration levels.

Note to self - check plugs more frequently.

Wire brushes and new feeler gauges purchased, ironically a 10% discount for me as a British Cycling member!

And I should have said, I've settled on tyre pressures of 24f/28r.

Exhausted.

We thought that a trip down to Dorset, around 250 miles in total, would exercise the car nicely.

Luggage loaded easily, as the boot has reasonable space and there is quite a lot of room behind the seats for squashy bags.

The route down was via a section of the M3 and then through Salisbury. The car is very noisy at motorway speeds so single carriageway roads are much more relaxing, even though there were several hold-ups in which the car threatened to overheat. The car seemed to get noisier, particularly on the overrun and I made a note to investigate when we arrived back home.

We were both extremely tired when we arrived after about 2.5 hours and with hindsight may have been breathing a tad too much CO.

We stayed for 3 days at in lovely cottage about 2 miles inland from Durdle Door.




The weather was good, and we drove into Weymouth and to visit friends who have a cottage nearby.

I decided to drive back via the M27 and (slower, 60ish mph) along a short section of M3, stopping for lunch at Hinton Ampner, a NT property between Winchester and Petersfield. A lovely place, grand house and fantastic gardens.

Then things started to go badly wrong. The car started to misfire under light load, and the noise increased. Finally, about 20 miles from home, on the A31 near Alton, the Y connector between the exhaust manifold and straight pipe failed, dropping the front of the straight pipe section on the road. I was able to coast into a layby which was fortunately very close, looked at the options and called the RAC. Helpful chap turned up after about 45 minutes and tried to lift the pipe up using plastic cable ties.... I pointed out that these would melt so he added a bit of wire onto the gearbox mount. He then suggested that we drove to Farnham and try an exhaust centre. We drove a few miles, slowly, with the RAC van following. The car was incredibly noisy, lots of misfiring and backfiring and of course fumes all around. So I pulled into the car park of the Bull pub near Bentley and asked the RAC to send a tow truck.

So we sat in the pub garden and drank tea until the tow truck arrived about an hour later. The driver was a real star and took great care of the car which I drove onto the tilted flatbed. We were then driven back to Camberley.

So, this morning, Paul from Swiss Cottage (see the first blog post!) collected the car with his usual efficiency, and took the car to Lakeside. Max confirmed that that a weld on the (new) Y-section had failed, so a new one will be ordered and fitted, hopefully in the next couple of days.

With a bit of hindsight, it's obvious that the section had been starting to crack, hence the noise and fumes on the way down. The misfiring just before the exhaust failed was due to lower back pressure messing up mixture, timing, etc.

Summertime

Some great drives in the last few weeks, including a visit to to the Festival of Speed at Goodwood.

One of the best new road cars there.

In other news, I've managed to resolve a few more rattles and areas of vibration, through the use of cable ties and sticky-backed foam!

The car now has a new propshaft, and that has also reduced the level of vibration. Kudos to Max, who managed to remove the old one and replace the new, defying the workshop manual by doing this without removing the diff or engine/gearbox. And also swapping the coupling at the diff end when he found that the flanges on the old propshaft and diff were non-standard (it seems a few left the factory like that).

Rear brakes adjusted (so the handbrake works again!), the bendix on the starter motor cleaned, exhaust mount reattached and engine oil, gearbox and diff topped up.

Finally for now, a view of the massive cars car at our local BMW dealer..... where it rained, proving that the Elan isn't entirely waterproof. More on that later.