The Start Of Something Big

May 15th 2013

I've alluded to the engine not having the guts to haul us all up hills before and the last trial  before the summer break really showed this. Ian is about 7 stone heavier than the previous owner's passenger and this really hits us when trying to trickle uphill. As soon as you apply any throttle, to avoid the inevitable stalling, the wheels break traction and you're scuppered. I've tried a bit more momentum from the bottom of the hill, but certain combinations of corner and slope drag the engine speed down.
Watching the 1300 and 1600cc cars you could hear them actually backing-off the throttle but maintaining progress on steeper or slimy bits  then squeezing the throttle once past those awkward bits.

I'd already sold the Imp engine before the trial, so it was it's last outing. That's why I didn't do the Monday event as it looked like it would have required a bit more blasting than I wanted to do, with someone else's engine.
Back home on the Monday it was engine out and ready for the buyer to collect on the Tuesday.

I'd already got a Suzuki 8 valve engine. It is remarkably similar in size and weight to the Imp one. It's from a Vitara so it's 1590cc. All that extra capacity is supplying torque. The peak power is less than the Imp, but available from lower down the rev range. The torque should be much more accessible.

Here is the hole waiting to be filled.

In fact as the new engine has a deeper sump (even after some planned modification) and as the old car kept whacking it's sump, I am going to raise the engine in the car slightly. This means taking out the bulkhead and altering the gearbox mounts.

As you can see this gives me an opportunity to alter a couple of other things, like the pedal mountings. I reckon moving them forwards an inch or so would give me a bit more space to operate in.

The new engine arrived on a pallet and I haven't seen it running so I am taking a lot on trust. I can always refurbish it once I've got it to fit the car. I cleaned it up and started sorting out the adaptor plate to mate it to my gearbox. I had considered using a Jimny gearbox to make the installation easier, but the gear ratios are not much cop and my existing box has an intermediate straight cut gear which will probably become my gear of choice. The extra work should be worth it.

And extra work there is. The starter has to be mounted on the adaptor plate as the flywheel has to be changed for a 10" Jimny one, to fit into my Talbot gearbox. The starter can't fit in the existing cut-out in the bellhousing as there is an important engine casting there, so I have to cut a new hole in the bellhousing.
The Suzuki spigot shaft bearings are too small for the Talbot input shaft. I may get away with using a phosphor bronze bush in the flywheel.

The initial lining-up shows how different the engine and bellhousing are. The weld on the lug on the bellhousing must be a repair. There is a new crack beneath the lug. This will need repairing.
The Imp engine was suspended on the gearbox without any engine mounts of it's own. I will make some engine mounts for the new installation to take some weight and shock loads off the adaptor plate.

With a proposed 6mm thick adaptor plate the spigot sits nicely into the crank end. The flywheel added on takes it almost up to the splines, so the clutch ( Imp plate) should slide nicely along.

In an attempt to get the two sets of bolts for the gearbox and the engine concentric I made a hole in a sheet of perspex, mounted it on the input shaft, and marked the gearbox mounting holes. Then I put the perspex on the motor with a simple aligning device in the crank, which I cobbled up, and marked the engine mounting holes.

Having got them in place I could cut out the centre of the plate to give clearance for the oil seal housing.

The circles with white around them are the gearbox bolt holes. I had been going to make the plate of alloy, but decided to use steel so that I can tap the plate for a couple of the gearbox mounting bolts. That way the adaptor plate can stay on the engine with the flywheel mounted and the gearbox will be removable.
If I make the plate so it remains on the gearbox when splitting it will need to have a hole big enough for the flwheel to fit into it, which I think would make it rather weaker.

Once the plate is made in steel I will fit a couple of dowels to locate it's alignement securely in place on the gearbox. Then I can move the plate about using the slogger of the engine bolts to get the (0.25mm) clearance of the spigot shaft in the spigot bush absolutely concentric. Nip up the bolts and drill some more adaptor plate /engine dowel holes to fix the position. That should provide me with repeatable, accurate, alingement.


The starter will go in a hole to be cut on the right in the picture. I'll have to make a spacer to hold it away from the adaptor plate in order to get the alignment with the ring gear correct. The starter solenoid will foul the clutch master cylinder reservoir, so I'll have to mount that remotely (the reservoir).

The gearbox mounts will need altering and some entirely new ones making for the engine.
It gets more complex as you progress.

Then just the carb, exhaust, cooling and alternator to go. Oh yes the ignition as well, but that should just plug into the existing pack (hopes).

Shocking Lack Of Communication

May 30th 2013

Oh dear. I haven't been keeping up to date with the blog and progress on the car has been leaping ahead.

Where to start?  Well moving on from the last post I finished the adaptor plate to connect the engine and box. I made dowels to locate it to the motor and also to the gearbox. These were welded into the plate so the bolts to the motor and to the box are not locating the two, just clamping them together.

The counersunk hole is where an engine bolt is beneath the bellhousing flange. The same applies to the bolt welded on beneath the starter hole, as once the gearbox is on you can't reach that.


I had decided to fit the plate to the engine rather than the gearbox already. Luckily the 6mm steel I was using allowed a 2mm clearance between the plate and the flywheel.

The spigot bearing in the flywheel was far to small for the input shaft on the Talbot gearbox so I found a great local engineer who made me a new spigot bearing to fit into the flywheel. You can see the spigot bearing here. It has a PTFE liner and a "top hat" cut around the outside so that I can get a socket on the flywheel bolts.
I had to swap the Vitara flywheel for the smaller Jimny one (10") to get it to fit into the Talbot bellhousing. The Jimny clutch cover fitted over the Imp driven plate. It all seems to fit together, although I've been warned that the driven plate is thicker (8mm) than most (6/7mm) so may not clear properly when running! 

The 2mm clearance between the flywheel and the adaptor plate

I had to align the starter with the ring gear and as I was using the "fat" Vitara starter, but a smaller flywheel it meant grinding a bit of the cylinder block (and the starter casing) to get clearance.

Fitting the box to the engine was a long process as I had to get the input shaft and the spigot bearing in the flywheel absolutely concentric. It meant standing the engine on it's nose and putting the gearbox on top. Then moving the box and measuring until it was as close as I could get it before drilling the dowel holes from the plate to the gearbox. Now they are fixed it should be possible to repeat the proper fit any time I replace the box onto the engine.

The next thing was to have a trial fitting and mmark where the engine mounts needed to be. There are no mounts in the chassis as the Imp enginewas just hung on the front of the gearbox. Not an idea I was fond of. It had created a crack in the bellhousing. It had been previously welded up, but needed another attempt, which my new friend did for me.

The sump was a daft shape with the sump plug hanging down from the bottom. You can see it in the picture of the flywheel at the top of this post. I scribed a 2" mark around it and cut the bottom off. I had some 1mm plate so cut a patch and was going to weld it with Mig, but a test piece showed that it was too easy to overheat and blow through on a long run. So, you guessed, I got Richard (I'll give him a name, and as that is his name, that's the one I'll use) to weld it using Tig, which is more like gas welding. I really wish I could justify having gas welding gear as that's what I am good at. But apart from little rushes of activity like this it would just lay idle.

Just about ready to think about getting it all in the car.

This shot is before the cutting of the sump


I'm rushing through this a bit as the detail would be a bit boring and there is a lot to describe.


The next post I'll describe the fitting. Ian, my passenger, came to give me a hand.

Nice Clean Bits To Work On

Jun 30th 2013

Now that the car has had all the old dirty bits removed and the "new" engine has been cleaned up it's a pleasure to work on.
 I made some new engine mounts to support the front of the engine. The old motor had no engine mounts and hung purely from the gearbox bellhousing. That's not a terrific idea as the box is alloy and one of the mounting lugs had a crack. I've got that welded up by my new friend Richard.

I've also raised the gearbox by an inch at the front (no metrics on here, matey). This is so that the engine slopes slightly backwards and increases the ground clearance a bit more. The spacer is just tacked in place for the present.

Of course, I had to slip the engine and box into the car to get the position for the new mounts

The red bits are the new mounts and the new gearbox mounts further back

I noticed the master cylinder mounting plate was bent, so straightened that and tacked a reinforcing rod onto it. The clutch master cylinder is undergoing a transformation as the reservoir will foul the new starter so I have to fit a remote reservoir.

Once the mounts were made, I fitted the gearbox on it's own so that I could trim and refit the bulkhead. The notch in the top is for the distributor which fits on the back of the camshaft. More of this later, suffice to say that it needed a bigger hole and that if I had done more research I could have fitted a more suitable distributor. 

Once I'd got this fitted it was time to put the engine in. I decided to slip it onto the gearbox in the car. It may have been easier to remove the bulkhead again, fit the two together as a unit and replace the bulkhead yet again. However with Ian (my passenger's) help we got the engine in and bolted up. All the bolts fitted in their various holes and we spent a while shimming the gearbox mount to within a few thou" to make sure there was no extra stress on the mounting lugs.

This is Ian trying to get a captive nut started in a very difficult spot.

Before fitting the engine we checked the timing belt for condition and tension, and checked the cam timing whilst we were at it.
Over the next few days (weeks) I set about fitting or modifying all the little bits that were needed to operate the new motor. The clutch slave cylinder needed it's brackets altering to line up with the new position of the clutch release arm. I made a new pushrod as I had moved the gearbox forward 15mm to get the distributor to fit without cutting the chassis frame. This meant the old pushrod was a little too short.

That piece of stainless bridges the gap between the cut ends of the original bracket. I thought I'd leave it bolted rather than weld it in case further adjustments are needed.

This shows the new braided supply pipe from the remote reservoir to the clutch master cylinder. The starter solenoid made it impossible to keep the reservoir on top of the cylinder. It's now mounted on the bulkhead.

I had to rewire the loom as the alternator and distributor are in different places and the ignition is completely different. I don't need the Chrysler Electronic ignition as the Suzuki has it all in the distributor. I only use the original coil now. I got some loom tape to wrap the wires in. It's shiny pvc, but isn't sticky so it's not a mess like insulating tape and can be undone easily.

This shot shows the temperature gauge sender and the flange I cut from 6mm steel for the carb adapter. I'm fitting an SU type carb instead of the enormous downdraft eco/emission jobbie that the motor came with. SU constant depression carbs are good for low speed torque, which is what I need. The copper pipe is the new fuel feed. It used to be on the other side of the car.

In order to get the carb at the right angle I tacked a piece of exhaust bend onto the manifold flange and then lined up the carb flange and tacked that in place.

This is the finished adapter.

It seems that people doing this conversion on Vitaras find problems with carb icing. I've found in the past that that seems to occur at quite wide throttle openings at higher speeds. As this car uses small throttle openings and rests between runs I think heat soak should solve any problems that may have been going to happen. We'll see.

This is the carb fitted. The top flange wasn't quite flat and fearing the lugs snapping off the carb (I'm not using Webber style O rings) I spent a few hours grinding it as flat as I could get it. I asked Richard to plane it flat, but mounting it on the bed of his milling machine was too tricky as the faces are not aligned in any plane.

I'll draw a close to this bit as I still have the exhaust, cooling, cam cover, skid plate, more bulkhead mods and bonnet bulge to cover.

I'll save those for the next post.

All The Fiddly Bits

July 7th 2013

Now that I'd got the main lump installed I had to fit the accessories.

Exhaust
The exhaust was the first obvious thing to do. The existing cast iron manifold wasn't bad and buying a Vitara downpipe gave me the flange and Y-piece to re-arrange to fit into the car. I bought some mandrell bends in the correct-sized pipe to allow me to get the curves I needed and set about cutting it all into bits and rebuilding it.
 It was a bit like juggling jelly as everything moved about until I got some tack welds on.

Then I put it in the vice and welded it up

A coat of stove paint and fitted it to the car

The next job was to make a heat shield to protect the oil-pressure gauge pipe which runs just behind the exhaust manifold. Luckily I had kept a bit of alloy heat shield from the previous installation,  so used that.

With the body panel replaced it looks fine.

The cooling system
...was quite different to the last installation, but I used the same radiator and re-piped it using silicone hoses. I don't know why really as the car only gets used 20 or so times a year, so rubber hoses would have done and, as I found out, the silicone hoses are more difficult to get water-tight connections with.

You can also see the new fuel pipe coming through the bulkhead. It was on the other side of the engine for the Imp installation. You get a good view of the remote clutch fluid reservoir and pipe as well.

The next two items to sort were the cam cover which is shabby and has a breather pipe on the top which will make my bonnet bulge to cover all this, even higher. I also needed to make a recess in the bulkhead to accommodate the distributor whilst maintaining the fire retarding properties.

The Cam Cover
In order to lower the height I needed to cut the pipe off the top and relocate it on the side.



The inside of the cover is heavily baffled so I couldn't get to the inside to collect swarf from the drilling. I didn't want it swarf hiding in there and then getting flushed into the sump when it started running so came up with a cunning plan.

I cut the pipe of with an angle grinder using a 1mm disc and placed the pipe where I wanted it on the side.

Then I welded that on before drilling the hole. When I drilled the hole I put a magnet into the cover through the hole from the old pipe location.

This collected all the metal swarf.

 Last job was to weld a bit of metal over the old hole, and paint.

Bulkhead
You can see in the above picture the sealing strip on the bulkhead takes a detour around the distributor. I had to modify the bulkhead panel to achieve that.

The first part was to cut and bend 3 bits of alloy to clear the distributor and form a flange for the rubber sealing strip (which seals against the underside of the bonnet)

With the rubber fitted you can see how the seal is made.

You can also see in that picture how the HT lead from the distributor goes through the bulkhead to the coil. The coil is the only bit of the electronic ignition that remains from the Imp installation as the ECU pack is actually inside the distributor on this engine. That took a bit of Googling to work out how to make it all work. I didn't want to wire it up wrongly and frazzle the ECU. The wiring diagrams all over the internet show the Vitara with a modern horseshoe coil with multi-plugs, which I didn't have. However, joining a Suzuki forum at Suzuki4U and asking the question brought some answers from people who know about these cars and it became obvious the old-fashioned oil-filled coils were originally fitted to this engine. Great help there. Thanks.

The car was now in a position to actually try firing up the engine. Don't forget, I don't even know if it runs yet. The motor arrived on a pallet.
I connected everything I needed except the fuel pump. Took out the plugs and whizzed it over on the starter. The oil pressure picked up and went to over 50 psi just on the starter.
I put the plugs in, connected the fuel pump.
It started straight away! The oil pressure showed at 80 psi. There was no throttle cable or choke control, so I set a fast tickover and I managed to move the car backwards and forwards to make sure the clutch was clearing properly (there had been concerns the driven plate and the clutch cover wouldn't match).

       

   

Bonnet Bulge.
To cover over all this work may see sacrilege, but it has to be done. I needed to form a bulge in the bonnet to hide it all from view.
I stuck bits of expanded polystyrene on the bonnet and carved it roughly to shape with an electric carving knife.

Then followed layers of plaster, car filler and papier mache to get the shape I wanted.

I smoothed it all down and painted it with household primer and smoothed and filled it again until it was pretty smooth. Some people suggested taking a mould from this and using that to make a final version. I preffered the idea of just layering up the grp on this and using that as the bulge. My reasoning was that it was less work and finished article would need modifying anyway to get a good fit.

So that's the way I did it. The outside was of course rough grp, but I put flow coat on that and flatted it down and car filler etc etc.

The paint was a failure. I have a spraygun but for the amount I needed (small) I thought aerosols would be as good.
No. Halford ones were very rubbish. Carplan were better but humidity stepped in and robbed me of a gloss finish. The nozzles blocked easily as well. I ended up flatting it and compounding it, so I may just as well have got some cellulose and done a proper job with my spraygun.
Anyway it looks half decent now.

The final bit "up top" (for the moment) was to fit an air filter.

Skid Plate
Meanwhile, below, I decided that a skid plate would be a good investment. I seem to bash rocks quite a bit, so something to limit any damage would be sensible.
I got a sheet of 6mm alloy treadplate and had the guy put a bend in it in his hydraulic press. Then made some brackets from the new engine mounts (I had planned this so had extra pieces below the engine already there) and also the gearbox rear mounts.

I put a slight bend in the plate to follow the line of the gearbox (I had to drive over it in my Grand Vitara) and bolted it up.

It has the dual advantage of also protecting the clutch slave cylinder

This is the progress up until the first test run.
I'll post about that next.