Messages

Manuel,
You will know if you have the uprights reversed side to side because your Aceca will also be going from side to side - of the road that is.
To be more helpful if you hold the upright vertical with the king pin towards you then the king pin lower end should be angled forwards in the direction of forward travel. If you have a correct pair then this configuration will only be correct if you have the upright on the correct side.
Be aware that it has been known for cars to have gained a mixture of uprights over the years - a pair of one side or the other. There is also the existence of two variants of the upright - one with 3° caster angle and one with 5° caster angle. Sometimes there is a 3 or a 5 stamped on the upright, but not always. However with a suitable piece of pipe or rod, with a similar diameter to the king pin, fitted in the upright, the different angles are immediately apparent.
It is some years now since I fitted the uprights to CSX 2033 the wrong side round and my family will never let me forget it, moreover I shall never forget the driving experience. The reactions certainly got sharpened up.......
Barrie

Yes Thomas I know what you mean. One aspect of life which cannot be escaped. However there will be many, many memories which are happy and you will find yourself driving with a little smile
Barrie

I managed to hit on a wonderful day's weather for my drive. We travelled this scenic road many a time, it seems a long while since. Here is a picture:



This is CRS 9520 at Tap o' Noth, on the Cabrach, A941, which runs through the hills all the way from Rhynie in Aberdeenshire to Elgin in Moray. Such a magical experience, on near deserted roads, that I decided that this would only be Part I of my 2023 Drive for June. Part II was even better, more of which in next month's ACtion.
I hope other's drives have been as moving and rewarding - do share
Barrie

Hello Everyone,
What with one thing and another I have failed to give Terry anything about 'Drive for June 2023' for ACtion, however as the drive operates somewhere in mid June and adheres to the 'No Plan Plan' the lack of a reminder is really rather in character.
To recap, for those less familiar, the idea is to go for a drive, as once you did, remembering that special person no longer with us. Perhaps taking one of their favourite routes and calling in to a well remembered watering hole. Some of us take a run in a small group, some alone with their thoughts - it matters not, we all celebrate those miles and those memories from our motoring past.
This last year is especially full of A.C. memories as we have said farewell to some great characters who drove many a highway and byway behind that wonderful art deco AC badge:

Tony Morpeth
Stewart Brown
Ron Mulacek
Terry Rodgers
Frédéric Delaere
Frank Ashley
Antoine Prunet
Alan Blunt

So take a drive in your A.C. (for those poor souls bereft of an A.C. any lesser car will do) remember them and remember your own and last of all, when you get back home and the car is garaged and slumbering again, give a thought to your chosen charities and make a gift. There is a special Just Giving page, if you wish to use it, where the gifts will go to Alzheimer's Research UK:

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/driveforjune2020?checkoutMode=Headless

Have a lovely drive, see you on the road
Barrie

Constant,
I cannot answer the specific question - obviously you will have tried Koni sources, but the distance pieces, as you describe them, look just like the distance pieces that come with spherical bearings (Rose Joints.) Maybe the spherical pieces you need are also to be found associated with these readily available bearings ?
It does seem unlikely that Koni would make their own version if something was available off the shelf ?
Good luck with the search
Barrie

Dear Gary,
I hope you might change your mind: I for one will miss your pithy comments and not having your regular updates on the 'Old Girl' will be greatly missed. We all get our Club impression from ACtion and this Forum so losing your 2 litre Saloon perspective might tend to reinforce the Ace and Cobra centricity which you oppose....
Turning to the relationship between Council of Management and The Membership I suppose it is no great secret that I am uneasy about recent Council activities, including some 'diplomatic' care being applied to the minutes prior to publication and yet, in fairness, I find myself having to defend our Council from your comments about secrecy: The Council meetings are open to observation by Members and with the adoption of 'Zoom' this has become easy. Members are made welcome and their views are, where appropriate, solicited and listened to. Meetings are recorded and the minutes are written up from the recordings. Of necessity ACtion cannot publish, in full, the verbatim script from a two hour meeting. Possibly Gary you have already attended a Council meeting as a Club Member ? If not perhaps you should before leaving us.
Finally the difficult and universal problem of Registers. Remembering that 'the love of money is the root of all evil' we have seen the serious difficulties which other 'one make' clubs have got themselves into in recent times and, again in fairness, our Club had the foresight some twenty years ago to sort out some policies and guidelines which, thus far, have saved the Member's subscriptions being wasted on legalities. With respect 'running a registry of facts' is not simple. Going back a few years I would have agreed completely with what you propose - record in the registers what is known and let the rest of us make our own minds up. However we live in a World where truth is subordinate to self interest and even a Registrar who proposes such a system, as you describe, finds it necessary to form a judgement on a claim of ownership based on forged papers. Quite correctly that Registrar formed an opinion and rejected that claim.
I hope you and the Old Girl enjoy many miles of A.C. motoring and I hope we might meet one day should you be this far north or I make a rare appearance at an A.C. event thus far south
Yours aye
Barrie

Nick & Eddie,
Glad you chaps are making progress on this quest for wheel arch protection. I would instance one consideration which will require your continued attention: The mounting of these stone guards is only as strong as the mesh which is clamped behind the alloy penny washers. The mesh, being fine aluminium, is vulnerable to corrosion and fatigue. On my Aceca, back in the happy days of the sixties, I experienced failure of a stone guard as it dropped on to a wheel and was ripped off and got mixed up with the hub, brake hose and sundry bits of suspension. Fortunately I was proceeding at a sensible pace - most unusual for me at that time. In any event it required quite a bit of disentangling at the roadside and the failure on the mesh around the penny washers was all too apparent. Needless to say I never fitted the guards again. So do keep an eye on the mountings at every service interval: 500 miles remember.....
Barrie

Garry,
Gather the evidence and pursue the council responsible. Photographs and measurement of the pothole depth and any witness statements from locals as to how long the pothole had existed will help. When my 3000ME was damaged by a bodged up road repair I got some hundreds of pounds in costs for removing the engine and repairing the bent gear change rod.
It will take persistence and time as they will try and wear you down to the point of giving up
Barrie

In addition and hardly intuitive, over greasing bearings will cause excessive wear. Really, as noted above, if the hub is correctly packed on assembly (half grease and half airspace) then no further grease is required for thousands of miles.
Barrie

Flywheels carry various marks depending on period and model, but they all seem to have a 1|6 mark which is Number One and Number Six at TDC. Transferring these marks to the crankshaft damper with a white correction marker is a convenient ploy. I have often wondered how accurate these flywheel marks are, but they are certainly accurate enough to give you a starting point. You can use a large protractor to give you, say, a 12° BTDC datum for ignition timing on the crankshaft damper. Personally I just mark 10° and 20° BTDC and then you can see what is happening with the distributor advance and retard as RPM changes.
To be absolutely correct you need a pointer fixed close to the damper periphery so that you can take a reading,
Barrie

Hello Damper Puzzlers,
There is a long thread on this topic somewhere on this Forum which explains the whole saga, however I can't find it. To summarise:

1) Armstrong dampers are long gone. They could be rebuilt for a few years by someone in Yorkshire who bought all their spares, but now that option has also faded in to history.
2) Spax have been a good choice ever since (although Terry is on the wrong Forum as he is apparently looking for dampers to fit a Bristol ?)
3) Spax did have a poor quality problem back in the last century, but have long since turned that around. This has been somewhat offset by a seeming lack of knowledge about their own part numbers. I find one needs to be quite persistent to persuade them to look at their records properly.
4) Both the original Armstrong and substitute Koni and Spax dampers all suffer from over extension. As pointed out this results in too much droop on the suspension resulting in binding on the rear driveshafts as the U.J. angularity limits are exceeded and, less noticed, but just as serious, binding on the front track rods as they foul the lower wishbone chassis pick up points.

This point was addressed a good few years ago and Brian Eacott got them to produce a shorter stroke damper for the rear of the Ace and Aceca which cured the driveshaft problem. Not long after I got them to produce a shorter stroke damper for the front and this cures the track rod binding problem.
So the part numbers you need are:

Rear G623EA
Front G9442AS

For what my opinion is worth I don't think you should fit any of the dampers that have the original longer stroke. I think that the hammering which results from the drive shaft U.J.s binding is implicated in the failure of the taper and key way drive in the hub. As far as the track rods binding on the front is concerned I don't think it would ever lock the steering, but it is hardly a beneficial feature: Both these idiosyncrasies have annoying consequences - when jacking the car up for maintenance you cannot turn the rear wheels and if the steering is stiff you cannot be sure what the cause is.
Barrie

Dan,
You are a mine of information. I can endorse your advice regarding use of the compatible clutch release arm with the 5 bolt, or 6 bolt block. Unless you look very carefully they appear to be identical.
Do not ask how I know, suffice to say that I became well practiced at removing and replacing the gearbox and bellhousing.....
Barrie

Paul,
So pleased to see the most famous of the 2 Litre saloons starting a new life.
The pictures of the car at Rest and Be Thankful are very evocative, especially the one at the top hairpin and the one at the start with, I believe, Raymond Baxter in the Irvine flying jacket.
I suppose it would be most unlikely that the car did not receive the best available engine. It will be interesting to see what is revealed when you get it apart. In any event best wishes for an enjoyable journey and some good fun at the end of a lot of hard work. By the bye it doesn't look as though your lifestyle is going to make a long term restoration project quite straightforward
Barrie

G,
Not only the best looking machine there, but amazingly the lowest
B

Jonas,
I think the wheel arch front inner panels on '22 were located by a mixture of self tapping screws together with 2 BA nuts and bolts. However the panels were missing altogether when AE 22 was recovered so I cannot be sure.
The LHD cars were more 'fussy' in layout in the footbox, battery and steering box area. Having to accommodate the hydraulic master cylinders close to the battery does make it all a bit cramped and that is the case with both the early and later battery mounting
Barrie