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Re: Richard Moss's 1990 Sterling

Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2008 1:24 pm
by Freewheel
Epic recent work there Rich - which I have missed on 800,co,uk over the Summer.

In fact many of your historical updates occurred around the time of its initial demise ~ 24 June.

Re: Richard Moss's 1990 Sterling

Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2008 12:51 am
by richard moss
Freewheel wrote:Epic recent work there Rich - which I have missed on 800,co,uk over the Summer.

In fact many of your historical updates occurred around the time of its initial demise ~ 24 June.
Paul, May and June were pretty busy as I was working up to the MOT.

Re: Richard Moss's 1990 Sterling

Posted: Sun Oct 05, 2008 1:44 pm
by Richard Clements
Rich,
I forgot to say I found one of those stat housings in my pile of spares/junk in the garage

Re: Richard Moss's 1990 Sterling

Posted: Sun Oct 05, 2008 9:45 pm
by richard moss
It's OK - I now have a spare stat housing on my spare engine!

Because I don't trust my current engine (it has a noisy bottom end, I think, and has always sounded harsh), I bought this on ebay:

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I'll give it a good check over to make sure that it's OK and then I'll have to decide if I'm going to keep it in reserve or fit it anyway. I suppose that my decision will be made if the one in the car goes "boom" in the next week or two.

Re: Richard Moss's 1990 Sterling

Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 10:25 pm
by richard moss
I braved the engine bay to see if I could get to the bottom of my rough running and discovered that I'd made a bit of a mess of my cambelt change, having not fully tensioned the belt and also managed to get the rear camshaft timing out by one tooth. Subjectively the car feels better but that may just be my imagination, although I'm pretty sure that it pulls better from low revs. I also tried pulling off the plug leads one at a time when the engine was running and found that the centre one on the front bank (number 5?) made little or no difference to the way the car runs.

There's a good spark so I wonder if I've got a sticky valve? I'll have to double check the tappet clearance on that one when I get a chance. A replacement plug and plug lead made no difference, so I reckon it's a mechanical problem (unfortunately).

On a more positive note, the car had always smoked on startup and gave the symptoms of worn valve stem seals. However, whilst looking for air leaks a few weeks ago I fund a split breather hose and since replacing that there's been no smoke. I would have expected the split hose to reduce vacuum and reduce the likelihood of oil being drawn into the cylinders but as well as being split, it had also collapsed and so was blocked. Once replaced with a bit of hose from my shed the smoking stopped. For reference, this is the hose in question (shown on my "spare" engine).

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Re: Richard Moss's 1990 Sterling

Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 10:30 pm
by richard moss
richard moss wrote:I'm going to have to change the grille - this one appears to be warped.
That's better:

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Re: Richard Moss's 1990 Sterling

Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2008 2:15 pm
by richard moss
I've been having trouble with the main beam and headlight flash not working most of the time. Some times it worked, sometimes it didn't and sometimes it worked if you kick the relay panel under the dash!

Chief suspect is the headlight changeover relay, on the relay panel behind the fusebox, under the dash (in the same place as the Central Control Unit on a mk2). The panel is held in by a peg at one end and a 10mm nut at the other. The relay is the only tall black one on the panel and looks like this:

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I pulled off the cover and resoldered all the joints (apart from the ones holding the "silicon chip" on) and after refitting, all seems well.

I think I've cured my intermittent dim RH headlight, too.

9 time out of 10 it would be at about 2/3 normal brightness, but occasionally it would be OK. Not being a fan of dim dip, I've disconnected that but that didn't make a difference, so I changed the bulb. It now seems OK but I don't really see how I would previously have an intermittently dim beam.

Still, it's all OK now (I think).

Re: Richard Moss's 1990 Sterling

Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 1:17 am
by richard moss
richard moss wrote: also tried pulling off the plug leads one at a time when the engine was running and found that the centre one on the front bank (number 5?) made little or no difference to the way the car runs.

There's a good spark so I wonder if I've got a sticky valve? I'll have to double check the tappet clearance on that one when I get a chance. A replacement plug and plug lead made no difference, so I reckon it's a mechanical problem (unfortunately).
Well, here's weird one for you.

Today I checked the compression on number 5 cylinder - ZERO PSI. Now, that's not good! I double checked it and also checked adjacent ones (all reading OK) so I know that it wasn't a duff compression tester. I double checked the tappet clearance and that was fine too.

So I planned to swap engines this weekend, using my recently acquired spare.

I had to run the car today anyway (it wasn't tooooo bad on 5 cylinders) because I had to run down to Cinderford, near Gloucester to drop off an engine I'd sold via ebay. However, by the time I got down there the car was running smoothly, quietly and delivering power properly again - instead of being lumpy, noisy and short of low end torque. It's not so smelly, either, now that it's burning its fuel properly.

When I got back it was too late to check the compression on number 5 but it certainly looks as if the stuck valve has freed itself off after a good run. Low cost engineering at its best.

All praise the Italian tune up!

Re: Richard Moss's 1990 Sterling

Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 4:36 pm
by The Flying Dutchman
Yes, it's always a pain to waste a 16 Euro bottle of Forte Gas Treatment to loosen your valves. :mrgreen:

Re: Richard Moss's 1990 Sterling

Posted: Sun Nov 02, 2008 11:41 pm
by richard moss
For some reason, I find this number rather appealing:

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A bit of aerosol paint work this weekend. TWR bumpers now colour coded to match the lower third of the car and the scruffy door window frames (which always suffer from the paint rubbing through to the primer).

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