Wiper blade fitting

It took a lot of fiddling to get the wiper blades to maintain contact with the windscreen through the full sweep. A lot of trial and error bending the arms but after about half an hour or so they were ok. Unfortunately this process was interrupted when the wipers jammed on the windscreen but the motor kept on pushing, and bent itself out of the flimsy bracket I originally made.

So, a beefier bracket was made out of L-section which screwed into the scuttle hoop from the side and underneath to make it massively more rigid. The first bracket only screwed from underneath and hence wobbled all over the place. The new bracket remained perfectly still and rigid. I had to replace the tube that the wiper cable runs in as that got all bent when the wipers jammed. The replacement stuff is a bit stiffer and seems noisier when it runs, even when packed full of grease.

Radiator Refit

The radiator was mounted far too rigidly so we thought we would have another crack at it. The radiator was mounted on some pretty useless rubber washers to the cradle, which was hard mounted to the chassis. The new plan is to firmly and rigidly mount the radiator to the cradle, but then suspend the whole radiator/cradle assembly on some rubber bobbins to absorb the vibration (and there is a lot of it!) from the engine.

This meant extending the cradle as it fixes to the outside of the front chassis rails and now needs to account for the width of the bobbins. Thanks to my slowly improving welding skills this wasn't too difficult. The radiator now sits about an inch higher so hopefully is less likely to get damaged. Made some slight adjustments to the lay of the pipes to get better clearance on a few bits too.

The upper rad mounts also got re-fitted with some nice rubber bobbins

With the radiator out whilst doing all the above, I had a look at mounting the mesh in a more sturdy fashion as the brackets I made were only glued to the body. I drilled and countersunk a few holes and screwed the brackets in properly.

Exhaust Refit

Loads of jobs arising from first engine start. The first one being the exhausts. They were blowing quite noticeably where the collectors fit to the sidepipes so I re-fitted them with some of the high temp copper-silicone stuff I used on the manifold instead of gaskets. I also reapplied the silicone to the header-collector joints a little more generously then I did the first time. Additional improvements also include a number of self tappers on the header/collector slips for a bit of extra peace of mind that they won't wobble apart.

Ah, also re-did the rear brackets to get the pipes a little closer to the body and use some beefier bobbins and two fixing points as we noticed on dissasembly that they had rotated slightly and the end piece had partially come away from the sidepipe.

Goodwood outfits

Thought I'd just post a picture of us dressed up for the Goodwood revival