altezzaclub

Yep- before you start it one morning take the rad cap off and fill the rad right up. Then start it and leave it idling. if water expands up and starts to pour over the rad top, then bubbles suddenly appear, the head gasket is leaking compression into the water jackets. When it cools it sucks a little water back into the cyl and that causes a misfire when you start it in the morning for a couple of seconds until the plug fires and dries. If you get a small stream of bubbles all the time its pretty bad. It will lose water every time you fill it up, but only the top litre or so. Does it use water. The block water jackets may be getting full of rust, but really you've pretty well sorted everything except the gasket.

Yes- & do Volvo have an LSD option?

Much too dangerous, it was killing everyone! Except you will find as many death certificates listing "Died from lead in petrol" as you will find "Died from second-hand cigarette smoke"....

Just drove it, like usual... without seeing any other RWD Corollas at all, which is also usual. Haven't seen one in Cairns in three months except one AE86. The last thing was to use a couple of insulation blanket spikes to hold my underbonnet blanket up above the airbox flap. Might add that to the build topic.

Yes, pinking is the fuel mix exploding instead of burning, and is initiated by the spark plug. Usually on wide throttle and low revs, so you can overcome it by changing down a gear. Different to that is the pre-ignition from the mix actually dieseling without the spark plug being needed, which it what a motor will do when you turn it off and it runs on. You can fix both with raising the octane, and fix pinking by retarding the timing. Having just gone from 95 down to 91octane to see what happens, I get a touch of running on after switching off, although I haven't had it pinking on acceleration.

damm! those quads and trumpets are pure sex! This will be a great machine!

I've used E10 95octane from the independent station nearby for the last few years. Currently I'm in Cairns for a few months, so from2500ft down to sea level, and I've just tried $20 of 91 this week. It doesn't pink, which I expected, but does run-on a little when turned off, just a couple of coughs. I'll probably go back to 95 for the 2500km trip back South next week. That's on a skimmed head for compression in the high 9s, carbs and a cam.

Extractors won't do much without a larger exhaust system. I ran the 2" extractors into a 2" resonator to start with, and welded that into the stock system. It was 6months or something later that I put inch & 3/4 to the rear, and THEN it made a difference. Its got a nice growly sound but is not noisy enough to be noticeable.

Probably easiest to hotwire it, just run a +ve battery to the coil & see if using the key for the starter will run it. Without the dashboard the only thing missing will be the ignition light and gauges, but if you had a rev counter in it you might have lost the coil power.

Have someone pump the brake pedal up and down quickly 5 times while you hold the bleeding spanner. When they finally hold it down you open the bleed nipple then close it. Then repeat several times. If that doesn't work, loosen the line at the strut an see if fluid can be pushed out. If not comes out then the problem is back towards the master cylinder. Try bleeding the front brake outlet on the cylinder in that case.

Concentrate on this. Check that you are getting voltage to the coil when cranking and if you are, where is it going. Once you have it running reliably on the old system convert it back over.

If you're using it on the highway go the 3.9 You'll never use top in competition, so gearbox ratios will be more important anyway. I found tyre size made a much bigger difference than diff ratio, fat 14" geared me up more than changing the 4.1 for a 3.9 for this trip up to Cairns.

I had the same thing initially as I just put stock size mains and bigends back on the crank. I never had it dipped to clean the tar off and the new bearings were a fraction of a mm wider, which was enough to grip the tar at the edge of the crank journal. It looked like nothing, but when it had been cleaned it was fine.

That's 85% of the secret! Don't make the exhaust noisy or the car too low and don't drive like a hoon. You can always say the mods were necessary to keep up with modern day traffic, your 1960s designed motor made it a slow-traffic hazard as it was! I told the girl to say the car was modified for fuel economy, not performance if she ever gets hassled on her 'P's

Yes, you can see straight through it. It takes the crackle and backfiring out of the system, and then you follow it up at the end of the exhaust with something that you CAN'T see through. I like the tri-chamber design, an oval with the middle empty and each end packed with fibreglass. The sound goes straight into the wall at the rear part and gets absorbed by the glass, while the gases flow across the middle to the exit pipe. Plenty on the web about muffler design. Don't use a hot-dog as the final muffler, just don't!

What happens if you run it w/o the vac on at all and use a timing light to check deg against revs. Then just draw an advance curve on graph paper. I had this happen when I used too light a spring to hold the weights in, and at the 1000rpm idle it and already advanced through 70% of what the weights were capable of adding. That was when I was re-curving the electronic dizzy to get it to advance faster on The Girls KE70, as the 5K electronic dizzy I fitted had massive springs and never advanced satisfactorily.. You should have say 8deg at idle and another 25deg added by about 2000rpm. When you're accelerating the vac is zero, so you run purely on the weights. When you lift off the vac adds the extra 10deg to burn the lean mixture. If you set it to 8deg with manifold vac on, say it adds 10deg, then you really have -2deg without vac. That means you will peak out at 15deg instead of 25 with the weights, which will make it flat at revs over 2500. It must show some advance when you rev it if those weights move OK, I think you just have the 5K dizzy problem.. http://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/42407-the-girls-ke70/page__st__45

The problem I find with my dirt-cheap one is that the castor wheels are crap and have too much negative camber! They don't swing in the right direction when jacking , I think they were too cheap with the bearing ring that they sit on. Start off cheap and if it craps out in a few years go up one price bracket... The lift is the thing to look for, they will all jack up one end of a Corolla easily enough, but sometimes not high enough.

My Armstrong Siddeley had a centrifugal clutch, but that used three "L"-shaped arms with weights. You sat at the lights in first gear with your foot off the clutch, and as you accelerated it took up the drive automatically. With its pre-selector gearbox, the "clutch" pedal actually worked the gearbox and the clutch never disengaged when moving. You kept selecting one gear ahead and just pushed the pedal to change. Maybe this would work OK with dog gears like a motorbike box.

Find a good 4K, one that you can drive first, and pull the 3K out- Just seal it up and put it aside for a few years. Pull out the plugs and put oil in each cylinder then wind it over by hand a couple of times. Take the carb off and spray CRC "longlife" down the inlet manifold to coat the back of the valves. Then you can always resurrect it in the future when you want to sell it as original.

Have to be key switch or relay, not starter. Shouldn't be the relay as it would only activate when the key switch sends it a message, which should only be on "start" position. The starter only responds to current down the solenoid line, so it shouldn't be involved at all. So strip the key switch out and convert the "start" circuit over to a push button!

When it next doesn't start, take the air cleaer top off and have someone try to start it while you hold your handd over the carb for 2seconds when cranking. The vacuum will suck hard at your hand and instantly pull fuel into the throats if there is any in the bowl. It should flood it then you can see if it starts with plenty of fuel. If it does then the choke might not be working well or the fuel leaks out of the bowl. Don't stick your face over it in case it backfires or you don't like your eyebrows... If it doesn't help then fuel starvation is probably not the problem. Does it close right across the throat when you pull the knob? The instant start stuff catches fire really easy, so it will fire the motor up lean or rich I expect. The fact that it starts, runs for a minute then stalls suggests too rich to me, too much choke, but its hard to say.

Yeah, its a big country.. I have to get 600km per tank and fill up at the right places. All the house-fixing/painting gear fits in the car (plus the beer fridge!) & the boot is still empty for the microwave and kitchen gear/food. Then three T-shirts, 2x shorts and 3x underpants! Oh, and a towel in case I have to hitchhike! ...and one tyre has a slow leak where the wheel weight was under the bead. So that is a pump-up each morning. :(

Nope- all caps are the same. Make sure the cutout in the cap fits the tab on the dizzy (to make sure it only goes on one way round) and then put the leads in the same order. A new cap might solve the problem for you. Do a compression test, if the valves are burnt it won't want to start. .... Drive it out to Dave's with a slab of beers and let him look at it!

nope- but car needs to be in neutral to rotate it ! :laff: Actually the auto will be different, you can probably rotate it in 'drive'. OK- so when we have the points gap & timing right, we should be getting a good spark at the right time. Poor spark comes from a weak coil, too open or too closed points, or a weak condenser, late or early spark from timing incorrect, no spark comes from one of those things broken or a dizzy cap/lead shortout, or a dud plug. That leaves carb. Take off the air filter and check the choke and throttle. The throttle is usally OK, it sits on the idle screw for a minimum but make sure the cable pulls the butterfly right open on full throttle. The choke should be wide open when you take the filter off, and make sure it closes completely when you pull the knob. Now, what happens when it doesn't start?? Does it not fire at all and just crank over and over? Does it cough when you are cranking it but not catch? Does it start to run then dies?

yep- you can google the names of the components and find out what each does. EGR & BVSV etc. Here's the auto one-