We have been working on a couple of our project cars this week as we need to free up some spaces in order to get the next batch of customer cars into the workshops. On top of that Adam has had some long expected stock arrive in a couple of split shipments although they were ordered at the same time.

Customer Cars

We have Derek’s car with us in for a little bit of differential work which is causing some problems. this is an awesome looking car and not in your face with the stripes.

With some space cleaned out we hope to start on her this week.

Workshop

We have a car in to rectify a problem that somebody else couldn’t fix. We tend to get a lot of these throughout the year(s) with the newer Mustang restoration ‘experts’ out there keeping us busy. This particular engine was running rough with a cough and splutter along with some erratic idle. To try and work out what was going on Adam has had to get out his old school equipment. Not many modern day ‘mechanics’ would even know what this is as a ECU on modern cars and a laptop does it for them.

It turned out that it was a mixture of things. ‘Mixture’ being part of the operative word with the carb settings being all over the place to compensate for the distributor.

The distributor was checked with the dwell meter and it was as expected being all over the place. this narrows things down a bit and we were thinking that the dizzy was to blame. We removed the distributor and checked it by hand for play which would randomly change the ignition timings. The carb was set up in such a way to try and cater for it. The carb was removed in order to be cleaned out, checking the jets and the float chambers to start with. Parts of the carb were a little gummed up with the good ol’ E10 ethanol fuel which took some cleaning but we got there in the end. The dizzy was swapped over for a spare that Adam had laying around and the dwell was rechecked which had now settled down and was much more in line with what we are expecting. With the ignition timings now stable the cleaned and default setup on the carb didn’t take long to set for our defaults.

Immediately the car fired up and sounded better straight away. The car was taken out and road tested and felt like a new engine in comparison to what was driven to us before we worked on it.

We now need to speak to the customer about what he wants to do with the dizzy, go full electronic, like for like points replacement, or go halfway house with a Pertronix setup retaining the stock look with electronic control.

WebShop

It came to our attention that we had sold the last two of our Holley Sniper EFI Kits. Unusual in the fact it was two in a week. When we checked around it became clear why; Holley had none, Scott Drake had none, in fact nobody we could see had any ‘in stock’. We did have three of our stock, but we have kept one back for our own ‘Wolf’ project. So we too are now out of stock, but with Adam’s contacts he things he has a tracked a couple down.

It seems that when suppliers don’t have them in stock where they are always cheaper than us, customers then come to us to buy them at a realistic price once shipped and taxes paid in the UK. Nobody has moaned about the price (which had been the same for months), when they can get one next day! They did moan about the postage though, £8 courier on something that costs a lot of money just doesn’t make sense to us.

In the above photo Adam has taken in some of the stock and moved the Sniper ready for collection into the office. Below here he is inspecting the latest batch of parts from ACP.

If you wonder why some of the packaging are opened when you get it; it’s because Adam will randomly check one or two in a batch. Nothing more sinister than that.

Here we have a few parts waiting for collection that were supposed to have been an urgent collection. Almost a week later they are still here. Perhaps by the time you read this they will have been collected, we hope so.

We have started to get some more of the unusual items in stock, like Edelbrock carb calibration kit, some standard oil pump drive bars and some performance alternatives. Something we had been looking to stock for a while now, new distributor springs, tiny but critical.

Finally a limited slip differential we had ordered in for another loyal customer.

Stay Safe & Take Care!