Tired

With all the excitement of plating the car and filling the tanks for the first time without a jerry can, I didn't notice a small problem developing. The little coolant line that joins both intake manifolds and T's off into the expansion bottle was rubbing against the A/C pulley belt. As you can guess the friction burnt a hole in the line and I had coolant squirting out. Considering the line is only 5/16" it wasn't much but it filled up my bucket quiet quickly when I left it parked over night.

If you know anything about me you'll know I'm not a morning person. My body physically just doesn't function properly until about 11am. I literally feel sick. So the fact I got up at 7am today to buy a new coolant hose from CarQuest, is evidence itself to how determined I am to not be defeated by this piece of British junk. Stopped at CanadianTire on the way back and picked up some 50/50 premixed coolant. Put in the new line and topped up the coolant.

The rear left carb had been leaking from the float chamber plug for quite some time now. It wasn't much so I ignored it. Today it just didn't want to stop. So I decided to remove the left carbs and install new plugs. I began taking the carbs off the car at 9am. Tiringly it took 1-1/2hours due to the clutter on the left hand side (Brake master cylinder, Brake fluid reservoir, Coolant expansion bottle) and my morning wearyness. My left arm was quite raw by the time I got both carbs off. Cleaned out the float chambers. Adjusted the float height (16mm-17mm) and installed the new chamber plugs. The carbs went back onto the car a lot easier than they did coming off. It was near 1pm at this point and my previous arrangement to have the timing adjusted at Ural's garage had been missed.

Pushed the car out of the garage (too much fuel on the garage floor) to start it. It started and the leaks were gone. Idle was very high though for some reason. Near 2000 rpm. I messed around with the idle but I just couldnt get it to come below 1000rpm. Really strange considering I used to have this thing idle at 650rpm. Merv (a chap from the Ottawa Jaguar Club) came by with a Uni-Syn carb balancing tool. We messed around with it for a bit, but couldn't get it lower than 1200rpm. It looks like the linkage has to be readjusted.

Took it for a test drive. Drove pretty badly. I knew it was ignition related so I started messing with the distributor. Turned it all the way anti-clockwise and the car didn't start. Turned it all the way clockwise and the car started but ran really rough. Slowly moved it bit by bit, and test drove it each time and managed to get it fairly nice. Seems to be driving better-than-badly right now. I can take it onto the street without scaring pedestrians too much at least. Definitely need to sort out the timing properly. But I'll have to wait till Tuesday to get Ural to look at it. He has the strobe light for setting the timing.

Rubbed a bottle of ArmorAll Leather Care into the seats. Seems to work ok for $8.59/bottle. Makes the leather soft and cleans it a little. The rear seats really needed some moisture. They would crackle whenever you sat on them. A little better now.

Parked the car in the garage. Sat in front of the computer and updated the blog. God, I'm tired.