Waffle

Bloody hot! 34C here today...I spent the day stripping the rear subframe and axle assembly for the E-type, it'll go off for powder coating and be stuck back together, its all in superb order actually, someone liked the grease gun...

Sweated my tits off...Have to strip the suspension from the front subframe tomorrow and that will go for powercoating too. Its such an easy car to work on bar the welded castle nuts! I will take the front and rear subframes to the paintshop and bolt them on so the body is rolling with the bonnet properly fitted before its trailored back here or it'll be buggered bouncing on a trailor with no wheels on!

Beast is being a good boy atm, nice in this weather, nothing to report bar I like my lowered suspension alot, the car is welded to the road and moves about far less than before....I had to increase the rear tyre pressures from 15psi to 18 as the excessive camber tends to mean the tyre is being deformed more as it runs on the inside edge more I think...dialled out that transitional wiggle a bit....Brakes are good, but slack isnt as good as Mr Wolfe's, its in the rear cylinders and maybe the fluid...I will have to take a crow bar over there and pry some more info from him if we meet again 8-)

Looking forward to getting my hands dirty in this engine....I will do a pop-up piston job for sure...Remember pop-up pistons give a far greater ratio increase per 0.001" than skimming the head as there is no squish area....I will need to do the maths, around 0.010"? Dunno yet. I'll need to lathe edges of the piston crowns a bit to clear the headgasket...I read pop-ups have more benefits in head distribution as well as compression and keep the heat in the head etc...Its a commitment move as the block face will need a good skim, but then you could skim the top of any pistons used in the future down to the block if its no good...Not sure what to start on, suppose getting the block clean but not dipped and cleaning the crank and rods is the first step, then a rebore and pickup some pistons I can then start to see where the crank throws and pistons are in relation to the block face...and get this started...I'll lighten the rods and sort those and my current set can be retained as balanced spares...The rods look to me like light ones that I found before they are different to the late ones?! I'll save the pistons in it for a rainy day...

The bearings that came out where washed and stuffed in a margerine container and then the container was filled with oil...You can still see the original bearing face machining marks so looks to me like the bearings have been no miles at all and assembly was clean, you can still see some very tiny marks from assembly on them too, so they will be going right back in they are mint. Thats saved me a few quid! no grind needed either the cranks mint, just a little dirty...I'll stick it in the crank machine at the shop and polish the journals before nitriding thats all thats needed.

Core plugs are all newish, won't bother removing the water ones...I will increase the size of the water holes in the block face, or port them if you like easy work, you can get 30% more area as the entry is a horrible casting on most feeds.

Well pleased with the engine! Can't bite the expense of fiddling with it atm, so I might do some cost free jobs like lighten the rods and powerwash the block, sonic wash various stuff with aggressive cleaner and ermmmmm....not much else!