Sucessful MOT and miscellaneous engine and steering issues.

14th July 2011

I had took my buggy into Leaders my MOT station at 10:20am on Tuesday 12th July 2011 . To be honest I had to nurse my engine all the way and eventually arrived on time. The MOT went fairly well but my wheel on the nearside was hitting my chassis and a rear bearing nut was loose so initially my car failed on two points which I felt was quite good considering the car had been into complete bits. I corrected these small problems quite quickly the Steering box on my new beam had no stops and it had been bolted in with the stop on the front working but not on the rear. I unbolted the steering box and rotated it. This was much better and I tightened the rear hub nut . My buggy passed the MOT that afternoon.

When I got the buggy home I realized I had not torqued up my Torsion Arms I torqued the Allen machine screws and the locking nuts both to 33 kg/ft 4.5 kg/m. I had noticed that one of the arms was pulling out. Once torqued these felt much more solid.

Now anyone knows who has built a car and has just got it running on the road, this is were the real problems start to be ironed out. My engine was not running very well and I decided to change my distributor back to an Bosch 009 unit as this had run on a car before. This improved the engine somewhat. I then re-timed the car at 30 degrees advance at 3500 RPM . Again there was another small improvement in performance. I then adjusted the linkage bar as I had noticed it was a pulling more on the drivers side carburetor bank. The car seemed to be a little happier.

My Fibrefab SWB RAT 1600 Twin Dell DRLA 40
with Engle 110 cam

I took the car onto some rough ground to see how the suspension handled. The car seemed to run quite well. The next few days would be a constant battle to improve the cars performance tweaking the linkage kit and trying diagnose the problems with my SVDA distributor. Would all these issues clear before Bug Jam 2011 and my car be capable of making the trip.