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May 2006

If you read the trackday reports then you will see that before the Curborough trackday the car suffered from a few "problems", well I will go through them now and give the proper solutions...

Just as reminder here is what happened... On the way there the car kept stuttering and the fuel pump died on the A1 about two miles from my destination - I had no choice but to call the RAC, after an hour or so (quite good considering it was a bank holiday weekend) they picked me up and brought the Tiger home. Bearing in mind I was going to Curborough on Tuesday it was important to get it working.

I then obtained a new fuel pump from Tiger and fitted it, the next day I took it for a test run and it failed with the same fault. It turned out to be a broken wire in the loom which I have now replaced, after another test drive I brought the car back into the garage and the clutch cable retaining pin snapped off the pedal, after repairing this it was now 19:30 Monday evening.

I then noticed that the mounting plate for the throttle cables had virtually snapped so this had to be repaired. Finally at 21:30 the car was back in one piece and hopefully working...

Sorry no pictures though...

Fuel Pump

After replacing my "faulty" fuel pump the car got taken out for a test drive on Sunday morning (I had to drop an item off to a work collegue), it managed the journey down without incident but then failed on the way back, fortunately before I got on the dual carriageway. At this point I realised it had to be electrical. After calling home and getting someone to come out with my BMW (as it has a tow hitch) and being towed home I set to work.

The fuel pump power is actually in two pieces which are joined around the back of the fuel tank between the tank and the chassis, this connection had corroded and now was intermittently failing it took about 30 minutes to strip out the load tray located the offending wire and replace with a fully watersealed connector. That done as it was raining very hard the car got left until the next day before being taken for a test run. but the fault was now cured.

Clutch Cable

The clutch cable was a complete suprise. My Car is fitted with the original floor mounted pedals and not the Sierra kit fitted to most Cats. On these pedals the clutch cable to attached to the pedal via a screw thread which is welded to the bottom of the pedal.

After six years and countless gear changes this had obviously stressed the bolt and it eventually snapped. I suppose looking back it was very lucky that it chose to break at that moment and not halfway to Curborough the next morning.

The only way to repair it (as I can't weld) was to grind the stub off the pedal and then drill and countersink a spare M6 machine screw to give me a clutch linkage back - although it sounds simple it actually took over an hour to get the pedal ready and another 30 minutes to refit the pedal to the cable and pivots so it worked again. I will probably need to check this over in a few weeks to ensure the linkage is holding up correctly.

Throttle Cables

The throttle cables are mounted on an aluminium bracket sitting on one of the chassis rails, although this bracket is made of 2mm plate it had actually fractured along a bend so only about 1/2" of metal remained, although it was fairly easy to repair the plate (I used a section of angle ali that was spare in the garage) to do this I had to remove the throttle cables so I could do the repair work. It took me ages to rethread the splayed ends of the cables through the casings and into the linkage at the carbs.