Having got the Smart Roadster back on the road I had time to think about the next project. Since the Spitfire road car project was going nowhere and enthusiasm was entirely lacking I decided to move that into storage and get the race car back into the garage.
There is a list of smaller jobs for this car that I've been building up since I put it back on the road after the major rebuild in 2015. It also needs a new engine which is why it came off the road again but that's something to tackle later.
The first thing to do was to have a good look underneath the car and see if I could see where all the oil was coming from. The last time I used the car was for a track day and it was making a lot of blue smoke, particularly on overrun.
Most of the underside of the car had a good layer of oil. There was some concentration towards the drivers side but poking around was inconclusive. My initial thoughts were that the crankcase was pressurising and blowing oil out of several places but obvious locations such as the dipstick tube seemed to be dry.
In the end I gave up and cleaned up the mess so I could at least work under there without transferring it all onto me. This was necessary as the next task was to remove the exhaust.
Yes, there's a big stack of plywood (and a lot of other junk) accumulating in my garage. It's in the way but I have nowhere else to store it for the time being.
The reason the exhaust had to come off is that when I rebuilt the car last time around I welded in a threaded boss for a lambda sensor in the collector at the front, the intention being to have an air/fuel ratio meter on the dashboard. Unfortunately I made a mistake and there wasn't enough room between the exhaust and the chassis to actually fit the sensor. I'd since worked out though that there was room on the other side of the pipe so it had to come out again to weld another boss in the right place.
I've fitted a plug for now until I get the sensor, gauge and wiring installed.
The next job was to repaint the rear brake drums. I painted these with some "brake caliper paint" I'd bought on EBay during the last major rebuild but that paint was terrible, it didn't cover well, needing to be applied really thick to get a decent coat and then it didn't cure properly either. And then it burned with the heat from the brakes on the first track day.
I cleaned all that off with my trusty wire-brush-in-an-angle-grinder and repainted them with proper VHT paint, cured in an oven. The colour is a little paler than ideal but it's a lot better than before and should stand up to the heat properly too.
Another easy job on the list was to replace the steering track rod ends. The joints themselves were fine but the rubber boots had almost entirely dissolved. Not good given how short a time they'd actually been fitted to the car.
I replaced them with a brand that claims to be of a high quality and were certainly more expensive! Time will tell whether paying more actually gets a better quality item. Having said that the replacements actually had the correct imperial thread on the stud which is a good start. Hint to reproduction parts manufacturers, there is no "metric equivalent"!
With all the easy jobs done the next thing to tackle was the radiator fan. I've never considered huge oversize fans to be a good idea since they cover up so much of the radiator's cooling area. When I rebuilt the car last time I fitted a tiny eight-inch fan to the radiator, mostly because it made it easy to fabricate the necessary brackets. This turned out to be too small however as the car wouldn't keep cool at idle. I'd already bought a larger eleven-inch fan a long time ago but never got around to fitting it.
The question then was how to fit the much bigger fan into the space that the small one used to occupy. That long bracket on the small fan has a hole each end that fits to a mounting point either side of the radiator and those mounting points are fixed so the new fan had to fit the same mountings.
OK, so it's not very clear in that picture but since I'd already covered my workbench in masking paper when I painted the brake drums it made an excellent drawing board for a full size diagram of the two fans and all the mounting points. Once transferred onto some aluminium I cut out the awkward shapes and used belt and spindle sanders to finish them.
Etch primer and satin black spray paint followed, plus some rivets and I was pleased to discover that the whole assembly fitted the car with all the bolt holes lining up nicely.
I also changes the electrical plug that came with the fan for one that matched my custom wiring loom. I like these waterproof Supaseal connectors and I've used them for quite a bit of the exposed wiring on this car.
Incidentally, whilst fitting the fan I had to remove some of the cooling pipes to get access and discovered quite a lot of sludge in the coolant so that will need a good flush through at some point as well.
The last job on my immediate list was the rear nearside wing and B post. After the last rebuild the B post proved to be flexing slightly and had pulled away from the front edge of the rear wing. The rear wings of this car are fibreglass and are only riveted along their edges, and that not particularly well. I think that the car transfers quite a lot of stress through those panels and the original curved steel wings form a box section with the inner wing panel that has a lot more strength.
Ideally I probably need to remove both outer wing panels, strengthen the B post and then refit the outer panels or even weld in steel ones (which are no heavier than the fibreglass replicas). I wasn't prepared to go to those lengths at this stage though so I decided to take the easier route and bodge it with Tigerseal! I justified this on the grounds that if it didn't help I'd be no worse off and if it resolved the issue then I'd saved myself a lot of work.
Drilling out the rivets allowed me to pull the lower edge of the wing away from the body and clean up the flange of the steel B post panel underneath. This panel wasn't in terrible shape so I just treated it with a dose of rust converter for the light surface rust.
Once that had plenty of time to go off I applied a bead of Tigerseal adhesive/sealant, pressed the wing back in place and left it overnight. I refitted rivets at the bottom edge and in the wheel arch flange but I've left the front edge with just the sealant for now. Once the car is back on the road I'll see how much flexibility the sealant allows and decide whether it needs rivets as well. Of course I also got black sealant all over the red paint around the joint so I'll have to tidy that up later too.
I think that's quite enough for one update! There's more work afoot but I'll tell you about that later.
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