I thought I would make a thread about my progress with my latest project. Some of you will probably already know the car well and hopefully I won't disappoint too much with my efforts.
For those that don't know it too well, it is a puma with the S1600 kit and converted to run the 4x4 Escort Cosworth engine and running gear. The shell I am lead to believe was converted by a company called DJM and the rest of it was built by Pumaspeed.
It had covered nearly 20,000 miles by the time I bought a little over a year ago now.
So on to the photos, to date I have over 400 photos of work I have done to the car and aspects of it that I'm trying to photo so I have something to go back over. I will share all the interesting ones as some are quite repetitive!
So this is how the car arrived at home, it was dry when it turned up and then quickly rained an hour or so later which showed the cars first gremlins..
I noticed after it had rained for an hour or so that there was a rather large oil slick appearing running down the driveway.. I knew the car was a bit oily but wasn't quite expecting this amount! In total by the time the rain had stopped the patch was half the size of the car out to one side so I knew then I needed to do something about it.
I took it for my first drive a few days later and over a couple of days covered around 20-30 miles in it. Bit clunky and very noisy but as I was expecting to be honest.. I was told about the release bearing whining but after my first few journeys it was something I knew I had to get fixed.. The clutch pedal was awful and even for a cable clutch it was bad so had a look into this..
Found these..
These were wedged in between the rubber stop and plastic housing case on the bulkhead around the cable.. The idea being I guess to take up some slack on the cable but in doing so made it stiff and feel horrible.. With them removed and the self adjust quadrant on the clutch pedal allowed to adjust the cable feels better, although the pedal still flaps a bit before it starts operating the cable. Eventually I will move it onto a hydraulic clutch and put the standard puma pedal box back in.
At this point with one little task investigated I had an opportunity to take some better pics of the car
Lastly a photo with brother Ben's Puma in the background
Left the car for a few days and noticed that it was full of condensation.. It had been raining so I knew I had a leak somewhere which turned out to be a pretty bad one..
Someone had butchered the bulkhead grommet that allows the ECU wiring to run into the engine bay, so badly that my footwell was full of water.. I knew this was going to need to be replaced but the only way to do it using the standard grommet was to get another from the scrap yard and feed a new loom through it.. At this stage this was put on hold and the release bearing was the next aspect to tackle..