During the week, a new toy had arrived for me to play with. It was at a good price and I thought it might be a good bit of fun. It's a 1964 2 door Mk1 Cortina, but with a Nissan CA18DET engine. Which is a 1.8 litre, twin cam, 16 Valve, Turbo engine. Allegedly pushing 250bhp, but that's yet to be verified. It's also in Alan Mann racing colours which I've always liked.
I'd been to look at it the previous Saturday and when out on a test drive, it was the first time in a long, long time that I've sat in a car while the driver has put his foot down and I've thought to myself 'Holy Shit!'
It has a digital speedo and when the seller put his foot down the numbers couldn't keep up with the speed. The scenery from my view in the passenger seat came towards me with an alarming acceleration that I'd not witnessed before. I thought my Zetec Cortina was quick, but this is something else. So, a deal was done and collection and delivery arranged.
It's not completely to my liking, so for now it will go into the garage until it is.
Anyway, back to the Green Cortina. I wanted to get this running today as I needed to get the new Cortina into the garage. So, I started on it as soon as I got home from shopping which was around 8am. Gavin arrived to help around 9am by which time I'd fitted the starter motor, connected the clutch cable and fitted the dust shield between the back of the engine and the bellhousing.
We were soon ready to start the engine, but for some reason we couldn't get fuel through the electric fuel pump. Filling the fuel pump up manually seemed to bleed it and get it operating, but I then noticed that my throttle pedal was rock solid. Investigation of this revealed that the excess of the cable had found its way under the rocker box cover when I had tightened it down and was stopping it from moving! So with this corrected, we tried again.
After various attempts, we had to alter the timing and swap some plug leads around. I'd said to the engine builder 'If you remove the distributor, can you mark it so it goes back in exactly the same place please, because it's spot on'. But he didn't.
Eventually, we got it running good enough to drive, but it's still not 100%. By now I was running out of time as I had somewhere to be by lunch time, so we moved the cars around and called it a day. At least it's running though and more importantly, its not pissing oil out anywhere. it was good to see it out on the road as well as it's been in the garage far too long. I'm looking forward to taking it on a run with its newly rebuilt engine.
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