10th July - Start on the butt list....

Saturday was spent at the RNAS Yeovilton air day where the Vulcan XH558 actually flew!

I have not seen this in the air for at least 25 years and it was a moving experience to see that 'flying' delta wing bomber chugging across the sky with it's bomb bays open. Designed in 1946 and flying from the 1960's with a 'stealthy' radar silhouette 30-35 years before the B1? Pity this is the only one flying and it is now on borrowed time....again?




Now back to getting Trig's bits fixed.

STEERING

Looking under the front axle this morning I found that I had replaced the steering stop screws with new stainless ones (from Minivin) some 'years' back and there was a world of clearance between the inside of the tyre and the front leafs on either side. The 109 is always going to have a larger turning circle than a Mini but lets see how much we can improve it, eh?

The wheels have a better offset than they would have had originally as they are early 110/late 109 LWB rims so I have a good chance of improving things anyway?

Checking the steering stops I managed to get an addition 3/8" wound in from each screw and there is still approx. a 2" gap from the edge of the tyre to the leaf on either side. These changes have made a huge difference for the better.


BUMPER

Twizzle came up trumps yesterday while I was at Yeovilton and had dropped off a tidy galv Series bumper. It isn't military spec. but tidy ones of that type are as rare as teeth on chooks so this could be modded to take the S2 bumperettes with the addition of a few holes.

After several hours with the wire wheel, brick acid and a drill it all looked like this.

I now need to knock up a bracket to relocate the number plate to the bumper. Currently it restricts airflow to the oil cooler.

RUNNING ON SVO

Following my thoughts that it was fuel starvation (and having checked and rectified the kinked pipes to the fuel selector anyway) I took a further look at the fuel/SVO tank.

What I found was that the inline filter was OK but the pick-up pipe from the tank was still fitted with a fine mesh gauze over the tip. Not a conducive medium for cold veg oil to flow through?  The dieso tank pick-up had had a damaged gauze anyway and I had already ripped that off so I swapped them around so the 'non-gauzed' pick-up was in the SVO.

Took the 109 for a run on veg and it seems (for now) that that has done the trick. So time will tell if this was the cause?