A little more progress on the car to report.
Work is progressing nicely at MDA.
Adrian is trial fitting my 'new' Merkur PAS rack into the existing cross-member. A little more material needs to be removed from the custom V8 mounts to allow the column shaft to fit.
Mat is continuing to weld up the cage - work is focussed on the front turret triangulation at the moment - and also the custom pedal box which looks a great solution.
When the rack is in it's resting place, and the front part of the cage complete, then we'll look into fitting the cross member etc back in which will signal time for the engine to go back in too...
I've never been quite happy with the boggo Ford PAS pump, and by chance I found this on e-bay the other week.
It's an ex Nascar pump with aeromotive fittings. (They used similar V8's to mine) It must be a quarter of the weight of the original I pictured in my last post - although I will have to source a separate fluid resevoir of course, and get a bracket made to fit it all. I thought at first I really had my prayers answered as it came with a really nice pulley too, then I quickly realised it's a grooved pulley, whereas I need a V-belt pulley. Not to worry... 2 steps forward and all that...
Given that things are moving along I needed to turn my attention quickly to getting tyres fitted on my Comp 6sp MO's. I went for Toyo R1R's. 225/40 (18).
They're a track day tire sitting roughly between the T1R's(?) for the road and the R888's for the (dry) track. With any luck they should be able to deal with our inconsistent weather! Size-wise I will be ok on the back, but I think I'll need to do some serious trimming on the front arches. 215's would have been ideal but they're hard to come by, so I'll just see how I get on with these to begin with. With a V8 and something like 3* neg camber to deal with, the more rubber the better I reasoned..
I've also needed to sort my hubs out. These are Scorpio 24v items. They didn't need anything more than a good clean up and a lick of paint, so out came the wire brush attachments and the drill.. Here's the before and after..
I'm pretty pleased with the way they turned out. I painted them in high temp silver. As the finish of that tends to be quite flat and not so good for keeping clean, I've used Gunk Engine lacquer on top. With these high temp paints I also find that a spell in the oven helps the paint go off nicely (Don't tell the missus..)
Apart from that I've been busy sourcing a few Goodridge fittings for the oil breather, as well as the oil cooler. All told I'm spent out with 3 more weeks to pay day - I knew those tires would dent the budget!!!
Cheers
Iain