With not very long spare this evening, I just did a couple of little things.
Main one was to try and cure the exhausts blowing out of the header/head connection. So, I unbolted the exhaust
(in this case the left one) and this photo here shows the gaskets, you can clearly see which one is blowing, and
from both sides too which at least means the header flange is probably not skew-iff.
Then I splattered exhaust assembly paste all over the place, I don't really
like using this on the head, but I can't see what choice I've got and presumably this is what Dax expected me to
do with it. I did borrow some high temperature silicone sealant from Jim, but decided on the old-fashioned approach,
at least initially, as this stuff is supposed to expand when hot, which might make it seal better.
After that was done, I ran the engine for a few minutes, but it was late and I didn't want to make too much noise.
I started looking at the other side of the exhaust today, and realised that
one of the reasons that this side of the engine was making such a noise was that I'd put in a couple of the gaskets
the wrong way round...
All I managed to do was to just remove the exhaust system from the engine. (One of the bolts is incredibly difficult to get at...) However, having taken off the system it was obvious that there is quite a lot of oil coming out. In fact, there's some on the outside of the head where I have the ill-fitting gaskets where it's just sprayed out of the gap. Whether this amount of oil can be put down to running in I really don't know...
Interestingly, the oil seems to be concentrated around cylinders 2 and 4, with a bit coming out of 6. Number 8 is just a bit sooty, which is probably a slightly rich carb. (The cylinders, btw, are numbered from the front of the engine and as the banks are staggered slightly, so that the big ends don't bash into each other, the even numbered cylinders are in one bank, the odds in the other.)
What can be causing all this is beyond me....
After a huge amount of musing, even thinking about taking the engine out, I
decided to put it all back together and see whether the engine will continue to improve on the oil-burning front.
This could be a monumental case of sticking one's head in the sand, of course.
I re-attached the right hand exhaust system, this time putting the gaskets in the right way round and eventually fired it up again. It sounded much nicer this time, just a nice deep rumble. It was hard to tell in the garage at night (with the double door open by the way) but there didn't seem to be as much oil smoke around. I could be fooling myself though.
Finally for today, in order to send the instruments back to Greengauges I took
the dash out and took all the instruments out of that after labelling all the wires properly. I wonder what they'll
say about them??
I sorted the front sidelights this evening. On the Rush these, along with the
indicators, are attached to bars that mount on the upper wishbone mounting bolts. I ran the wires for these down
the inside of the bars. (I poked them down with the aid of a trumpet cleaner that I nicked from Tom. A trumpet
cleaner is like and extra long pipe cleaner, by the way and is used by trumpeters, such as Tom, to clear out the
bowels of their instruments.)
This means that two thirds of the indicators work now!
The next job is to mount the nose cone, which should make it look much more like a car...
in case you've got to this frame directly and can't get out, go here.