I’m Not a Pheasant Plucker

I figured I could take a short break from demolishing my new home to regale you with a tale about a brace of plump pheasants.

My daily commute is your typical 20 mile moron jam.  Most of the road is 70mph dual carriageway but you are lucky to average 40.  So on my journey home I usually take the path less trodden, rural country roads where it is possible to average (ahem) the 60mph National speed limit.  About a year ago I was blasting along in my Grande Punto, singing along with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers when I large pheasant trotted out into the road ahead of me.  I braked to give it a sporting chance but I wasn’t about to end up in a ditch for it, so the outcome was inevitable.  Of course he couldn’t just go quietly, dispatched swiftly by the bumper, he had to try and haul his fat ass off the ground and ended up going straight through the radiator grill. Pheasant 1 – FIAT 1

Fast forward two weeks and I’m barrelling along the same road in the wife’s 500, blissing out The Black Keys when my peripheral vision locked on to a hostile projectile coming in from 10 O’clock at an altitude of about 8 feet.  It was plump pheasant’s kinsman with revenge in his heart!

At the time it was actually comical.  The pheasant was so fat it looked like a football.  It actually flew like a football that had been chipped over the hedge, descending in a lazy parabolic arc until it hit the round plastic bumper on the nearside front of the 500.  It bounced off the bumper, I could swear it even made a “boing” noise and flew back over the hedge with exactly the same trajectory.

The 500 bumper popped back to shape with nothing but some crazing of the paint to show for the ordeal.  Unfortunately the lights didn’t fair as well with both the headlight and driving light being broken off their mountings.  So that’s Pheasant 2 – FIAT 2

Fast forward a year and again I’m Rolling along that road with Limp Bizkit, when the water level warning sounds and the temperature gauge goes off the clock.  I limped, formula 1 “lift and coast” style to a near by garden centre for a splash of water before limping home.

    

 

 

 

 

Upon investigation I found that right behind the impact point, on the inside of the radiator cowl was the cooling fan resistor, which had been broken from it’s mounting and become wedged between cowl and radiator cores.  It had bounced around in there until the spade like connectors had punctured the core.   Game, Set and Match Mr Pheasant.  Well played!

 

 

Exhausted, Frustrated and Bereft

The exhaust went on my friend’s 500 Sporting this week, so I spent some time yesterday fitting a replacement with him.  A pretty straight forward task which didn’t take long.  While the weather was good we took a look at his Barchetta, which has been flattening the battery when left standing.  I suspected the diodes in the alternator were allowing reverse flow, as the charge rate isn’t brilliant either but after disconnecting the alternator there was still a drain.  The previous owner has wired the stereo to be permanently live and disconnecting this reduces the current drain significantly but the jury is still out on whether this is the cause.

I’ve been patiently working at removing the paint from the frame of Pandora’s engine cover. For large areas of panel I favour the polycarbide preparation disks that fit on an angle grinder.  They strip paint in seconds with no damage to the metalwork.  Unfortunately they get ripped to pieces by edges, corners, bolt holes and the like, so no good for the job in hand.  So I thought I’d turn to a faithful old helper… Nitromors.

This stuff used to be the de-facto paint stripper by which all others were measured and would fetch paint off a body panel in minutes.  It’s active ingredients being volatile organic compounds, it has recently fallen foul of the EU’s ban on anything that actually works.  Replacing the VOC’s with New Improved Enviro-Bollocks has resulted in a product that does sweet F.A.!  It’s like losing an old friend.

First Service

I’ve got a LOT of leave to use up at work, so today I had a day off and got the 500 serviced.  The service interval is supposed to be 18k miles.  With the nature of my daily commute the DPF recharge cycle means the oil service light usually comes on at about 12k.  You can tell when it’s due because it begins to sound a little bit like a diesel and smell like one too!  I’ve been a bit premature this year, with about another month before I’d expect the oil service warning but for the last two years I’ve been out there in sub-zero temperatures, servicing it at the end of December/beginning of January.  So I figured what the hell I’d do it now, between rainstorms of biblical proportions.  Oh for the temperate climate of jolly old Blighty!

The service was straight forward, as I’ve come to expect from the little gem.  Nothing untoward to report, with little to no wear and tear apparent.  Even the brake pads still look like new.  I suppose I should use them more but the damn things slow you down.

However, I did find time to tackle a niggle that has really bugged me for the last 6 months or so.  The little 1248cc Diesel runs like a sewing machine, very civilised for an oil burner.  But for the last six months it’s sounded like a tractor at idle.  If you lay a hand on the air filter usual decorum is restored.  The culprit being wear in the rubber grommets used to mount the filter.  It’s not just an annoying noise, the air flow meter is mounted in the filter housing and all that vibration can’t be good for it. I’ve resolved the problem for now with a bit of heat shrink sleeving and I’ll order some new grommets for the next service.  I also found that the air filter housing was being distorted by the filter when fitting. I had to poke the filter into the gap between lid and housing to ensure the centre hinge was playing along.

But hell, if that’s my biggest gripe with the car, I suppose I can’t complain.

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Business As Usual

Things have been uncharacteristically quiet around The Scuderia recently.  I’ve had a few distractions that derailed my plans for a while.

I spent a few weeks chasing a new property with great workshop facilities but that came to nought.  So after much grumbling and feeling sorry for myself I’m resigned to soldiering on where I am.  It’s far from ideal but at least it won’t put me in the Workhouse.

After pulling myself together but before I could get back to work, I succumbed to the dreaded Fresher’s Flu.  One of the pitfalls of working at a University is that every year thousands of new students arrive from all over the world to pour all their varied and assorted strains of “The Dreaded Lurgy” into a melting pot, to be liberally distributed amongst people who have not yet had opportunity to build immunity to their particular brand of unclean.  The fever has subsided but the cough and runny nose persists but onward I must go.

I have a lot to get on with too.  I’ve got some woodworking to do to help a friend out.  There are five cars outside that all need a service.  I’ve got plenty of work to do on my project cars.  And I’ve decided to make some panels to sell too.

Watch this space!

This 12” Disc Is Heavy Metal…

Funny how one small job leads to another isn’t it.  Tyre wear on the 500 means I need to track it.  My home made tracking gauges will work on the 15” wheels of the 500 (more on this at a later date!).  But it’s real pain setting the tracking without radius plates, so….To the bay of E.

OK, so a set of radius plates will run me to about £400!  I’ve got some 2mm plate left from making my benches and a big box of ball bearings.  Some scrap MDF and some 1.6mm sheet.  Sounds like the recipe for radius plates to me.

First I need to cut some circles.  Two discs of 10mm thick MDF with a series of holes to retain the bearings.  Bought radius plates often just have a ring of ball bearings, spring loaded to keep them on centre.  Because my discs will only be 2mm thick I want a bit more support than that.  And I have got a LOT of bearings, so let’s not be tight. So the first job is to make a circle cutting jig for the band saw.  Just something functional for now, I’ll polish it later. 

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Then two discs of 2mm thick steel plate, so I need to make a trammel for my plasma cutter from whatever is in the scrap bin.  Then zip out a couple of 12” discs.  (I appreciate that only people of a certain maturity will know what Heavy Metal is and only those that are older still will appreciate the 12” disc gag).  Finally bend some C section channels in the mini folding brake to make a frame around the outside.  Then it’s just a case of assembling the puzzle and applying a lick of paint.

Tomorrow, after the Grand Prix, I’ll actually set the tracking!

Nailed It

I’m going to have an enforced hiatus in the tin bashing now.  Other stuff has caught up with me and I can’t ignore it any more.

I woke up to a flat tyre on the 500 this morning, so tonight has been about fixing that.

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While I was fixing it I noticed that it’s taken the inside edge off the front tyres.  They were getting close to the wear bars when I serviced it, so I’ve got a pair to go on but there’s no point fitting them without tracking it first.

I made a set of laser tracking gauges a few years ago but I really need some radius plates to go with them.  I need to get something sorted this week and get the job done at the weekend.  So no pressure!

Best Laid Plans

And all that.  My hopes of getting the wheel arch put to bed this weekend suffered a minor setback due to an incident involving £35 worth of unleaded and our FIAT 500 Diesel!  As a result a sizeable chunk of my long weekend was spent draining the fuel tank and refilling it with the right juice.

Some progress was made though.  I ground the welds flat and started dressing them out.  I learned an important lesson here too.

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When I welded the arch in I made a mistake.   I described the process in an earlier post but let me reiterate.  I started to weld at the top of the arch and initially everything went very well, with rapid progress because the panel fitted well for a good 1/3 it’s length.  As I got closer to each end it became more difficult to fit up perfectly and I had to dress the HAZ to stretch it back into shape.  This is where I went wrong!

Because I didn’t have to, the top of the arch remained un-dressed (ooh err missus).  Because I did have to the bottom of the arch got well and truly leathered to bring it back into line.  So once the welding is complete I’m left with a very uneven HAZ, some needing stretching, some not so much.  Working out which areas need what is not easy.  I should have welded a length, let it cool and dressed it before moving on to the next bit.

The problems are not insurmountable but have made my life a little more difficult.  Ho-hum.

Next time I’ll show you the gizmo I made for shaping the wheelarch lip…

Busy days and more to come…

Last weekend I serviced a friends 500 Sporting. Mostly routine stuff but there are a couple of things that are noteworthy.

At service time I always take the opportunity to do a bit of preventative maintenance.  The bleed nipples in FIAT calipers for example are prone to seizing and either snapping or stripping out the threads on alloy calipers.  So they always get removed, wire brushed and copper greased before reassembly.

I also take the opportunity to cover key areas with a liberal coating of Waxoyl.  All the threads that I’m likely to have to tackle in the future.  Track rods, strut bolts and suspension mounting bolts.  Steel brake pipes and unions.  One day in the future I’ll reap the benefits of being able to remove these items with ease, because I had the foresight to do this now.

You also learn to spot design flaws that will give problems in the future. The 500 has a big one behind each front strut!

Where the chassis leg meets the inner wing behind the front suspension there is a ledge on top of the box section with a half inch lip on the outside.  This traps all of the crap thrown up by the front wheels.  If I didn’t dig the road dirt out every 12k miles I swear you could grow plants in it like a window box!

So I dig it out with a small scraper then give a good brush out with a stiff bristled brush before lathering it with Waxoyl.  By doing this every time I take the front wheels off, a future disaster is likely to be averted.

On the subject of disasters, on the morning that Phil brought his 500 over for service his driver side door handle broke!  His car is only a 2007 model so we were a little disappointed by this.

The hinge at the front of the handle has seized on it’s pivot and continuous flexing had snapped the aluminium casting.  He’s managed to continue using it carefully and I got him a replacement handle today.  It turns out that the front hinge is actually screwed to the handle and can be replaced without replacing the whole handle.  A nice design which I think just about redeems them for our disappointment with the original breaking.  Another valuable lesson learned about preventative maintenance though.  I’ll be sure to direct some white grease into the hinge at every service now too.

Next weekend it’s the turn of my nephews Honda to get a service. Then our own 500. Then I might get back to some restoration…..

* Expletives Deleted *

Yet again I’ve got a stone through the bloody windscreen!  This time on the 500.  I’ve already repaired stone chips on it twice, so that’s a grand total of three times for the 500.  Which coincidentally is also the number of times that it’s happened to the Grande Punto!

In 25 years of driving I’d never had a chipped windscreen but in the last two years I’ve had 6!

I’m beginning to get paranoid, could they really be out to get me?  This feeling is not helped by the fact that a couple of weeks after I collected a pheasant through the front bumper of the Grande Punto at 70mph, it’s mate took out the nearside headlight on the 500…..