OK, there have been a few things I've wanted to get sorted on my car for a while now and with CLM only days away what better time to do them ready for the trip across france.
First on the list was a rolling road tune up, the car has always seemed to run fine but I had replaced the Webers some time ago and had rejetted them to factory solex sizes to get me in the ball park. Although I had tried to dial in the idle mixture as best I could it still smelt a little rich and I was never really sure it was perfect so thursday afternoon I booked it into Hi Tech motorsport in Cradley Heath for them to take a look.
They got the car on the rollers and it was producing a weedy 68bhp!
I couldn't believe it! But after a quick tweak of the timing and stepping down 2 sizes on the main jets I was upto 97bhp!
Another slight tweak on the timing and I was upto 99bhp and 110 ft ibs of torque! Not bad considering it came from the factory with just 90bhp and 90ft ibs of torque! So I am pretty sure its running 1720 B&Ps but the 110ft ibs of torque makes me wonder whether there's a mild cam in there too? Mick at Hi tech seemed to think there could be as the cam kicks in quite violently at about 2200rpm and the torque line on the graph is very steep from that point until it reaches 2500. Not too sure how this compares to a factory graph? would be nice to compare to see what they look like.
After going for a drive it feels like a totally different car now, OK its still no rocket ship but it pulls in every gear really nicely now and that extra torque just makes you want to keep accelerating even when you don't really need to.
OK so 2nd job on the list was a trip down to Tuthills on friday for them to set up the suspension geometry and corner weights. After lowering my car last summer I knew the settings would be wrong, I had tried my best to mark up the old settings when I dismantled everything but you could tell from driving it that the toe in was way out as cornering hard took more effort than usual and the car wandered and felt nervous at speed.
Within about 30 seconds of arriving at Tuthills one of the guys came over to have a chat and immediatly knew it was too low at the front (which I kind of knew but I liked the way it looked too much to raise it up
) He took it for a test drive and decided it wasn't that bad but still needed raising a little to be correct. After an all round check with their gauges they decided that although my front end had 7mm difference in height from left to right and the rear had 1mm the corner weights (which are the most important part) were spot on at :
RH front - 35
LH front - 35
RH rear - 40
LH rear - 40
The rear suspension wasn't bad either, just 1 degree out on camber! Seems my sketchy method of marking up before dismantling the rear had almost paid off here
The front camber was a little bit off too and the toe in at the front was way off as expected so after correcting this, raising up the front a little and correcting the rear it was all done and a quick test drive up the road confirmed that it was all feeling a lot better, cornering had returned to effortless and the car held its line at speed with very little extra effort from the driver.
So after 2 days of fettling the car has seen quite a transformation and is feeling really good to drive, the return journey home last night, via visiting relatives in the cotswolds was fantastic, and I kept finding myself taking extra long detours just so I didn't have to park her up and get out quite so soon.
Am looking forward to CLM even more than before knowing how nice the drive should now be
