Saturday 9th September - Minor jobs.

 A few little jobs on the cards today, but none of them very time consuming. The first job was to fit the remaining two group 5 alloys onto the Zetec Cortina. It was then moved out of the garage so I could some proper pictures. I think they suit the car really well. 😊

The next job was to replace the spark plugs in my Green Cortina. I have never done this, so it's well overdue. This is a straight forward job and didn't take long. I wanted to do the ignition timing as well, but I'd wait until Dave Maton arrived to do that as ideally it needs someone to adjust the distributor while someone else reads the strobe light. 

While waiting for Dave I got the Triumph into the garage, got it up on axle stands and topped up the gearbox oil and differential oil. I also greased the propshaft UJ's at both ends. The Club Triumph Round Britain Reliability Run is only four weeks away now, so good preparation is key.

Wheel bearings were my next port of call and the nearside front bearing did have a bit of play in it, so that was adjusted and corrected. When I was at the rolling road session on Tuesday the man working on my car said that the small piece of carbon in the middle of my distributor had dropped out and he had put it back in with a bit of grease. When I took the distributor cap off this morning, it dropped out again, so I fitted my spare and ordered another spare. Cant be having that failing on the RBRR. 

By now Dave Maton had arrived and we set to work on the ignition timing on the Green Cortina. We did this easy enough but the car still didn't seem to have that much power. To be honest, it's never felt that fast, but I just put it down to the fact that I was used to driving a 2.5 litre injected Triumph and a fuel injected twin cam Cortina, and this was just a 1600 crossflow.

Dave removed the air filter cover and looked down the carburettor and it transpired that the butterflies weren't opening fully. The throttle linkage looked ok, but there wasn't enough movement on the throttle pedal to pull the linkage fully open. So we made adjustments to the the throttle pedal so that the butterflies in the carb were opening fully. What a difference! The car now drives a lot better and also a lot quicker. It sounds great with the new exhaust as well. Pleased with the mornings work, Dave and I then headed off for a carvery!