Bruce was curious about the car on the front of Cris Reas album
Auberge, the car is indeed a lotus 7 (well a caterham 7) - and I want one.
If you listen to the first track you can hear him trying to start what
sounds like a pretty highly tuned engine.....
This leads me to another point - in order to start a good healthy
Caterham fund I need to sell my Spitfire.
I advertised it about four weeks ago and a week before the adds
came out it decided to go awol. The exhaust was coming out of the
rocker cover and the compression on cylinder three was 50 get this 50
psi. I put a little oil into the cylinder and the compression stayed down
so I guessed at valves and put on a spare head that I had. Retested the
compression and it was still 50 psi blaaggghjhjhh. I then took off the
head and dropped the sump and pushed out the piston in cylinder three
hey presto both compression rings were there but one of them was in about
15 different bits and had eaten the piston between compression rings. A
set of new pistons (apparently getting one is a bad idea as they are
balanced as a set) and rings, a bit of roughing up the bores and all back
together. The engine was stiff at first but has now losened up (about 3 miles
later) but the car still runs rough. It sounds like it is pinking like crazy
and not picking up cleanly at all. I retested the compression and rechecked
the valve clearences and the compression was up at about 215 to 220 per
cylinder now I suspect that this is way too high for a 9:1 stock 1500 spitfire
engine. The only idea that I have is that the valve springs on the 'new' head
are shot or that it is a 1300 head (I believe this would explain the high
compression values) the part number of the head on the car is 312246 does
anyone know what type of head this refers to (UK head not US).
This car is really starting to bug me so any answers would be really great.
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