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Jaguar Mechanic Wanted

To: british-cars@encore.com
Subject: Jaguar Mechanic Wanted
From: gerry@speedy.att.com
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 91 09:55 EST
> But there's no brake fluid on the floor?!? Ok, maybe I trashed the 
> master cyl, and it's on the floor of the car. Nope. As fas as I can tell the 
> only brake fluid on the garage was in the bottle on the shelf.... 
> This is really weird. Anyone got any bright ideas?

Does your car have a vacuum-assisted brake servo ? If so then
you'll find that is where all your brake fluid id hiding. I had a similar
problem on my car several years ago, where I was losing brake fluid
very slowly, but could never find an external leak. One day I removed the
brake servo, and hey presto, about a pint on blackish brake fluid came
out. I fitted a new brake servo and have not lost a drop of fluid since.




> ????????????? how ???????????
> one turn of a sticky cable is still one turn.
> A sticky cable can cause a speedo to "bounce"
> but the cable will not turn faster.

I still hold true that an over reading speedo may be because of 
unlubdicated cable. Let me explain. Several months ago I fitted
a HALDA Tripmaster Rally computer to my Midget. For those who don't know
this is a purely mechanical device which measures distance to 1/100ths of
a mile and has the capabilitiy to run forwards or backwards (and a couple
of other features - but I digress !!!)

Anyway, the way this device works is that you have to splice a T-piece into
the speedo cable, and a second speedo cable runs from this T-piece to the
HALDA. The T-piece is 1:1 ration, ie 1 turn in = 1 turn out.


                                  _____
                T-piece           | S |
                ------            | P |
================|    |============| E |
                --||--            | E |
                  ||              | D |
                  ||              --O--
                  ||
                  ||
                  ||
                  ||
               --------
               |      |
               |HALDA |
               |      |
               --------

I installed the HALDA as above (according to the instructions), but when 
I went out on the rad to calibrate the unit, I noticed that my speedo
was reading 60 at 40 mph. How could this be if the T-piece ratio is 1:1 ?
Anyway I phoned up the manufaturer and they sent me a set of shims which
you install on either side of the T-piece, The only function that these
shims do is to increase or decrease the amount of binding of the speedo cable
as it enters the T-piece. After experiement with several shims I, got my
speedo to read almost true. (I like my speedo to read ~ 5% slower than
true - rallying people may know why !!!!!).  Notice that at no time
did I change the ratio of the incoming cable to the outgoing cable, I 
only changed the tension of the incoming cable. (I still don't understand
why this worked but it did, I originally also thought that 1 turn of
that cable is one turn of the cable)

So I come back to my original statement of several days ago that a badly
reading speedo may be due to bad lubrication.

Gerry


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