It’s been almost 10 years to the month that the restoration was completed. Due to other issues NNF 10H hasn’t be in use for almost 18 months and it has just had the occasional starting. A plan had been hatched to head off to the Le Mans Classic in 2027 with John and Martin, who had helped install the IRS. This was a good excuse for a planning meeting and an opportunity for Martin to see the fully restored E-Type. But first I needed to ensure it would make it to the meeting venue!
It had been in the back of my mind to get the car properly tuned as I had felt it had never been running brilliantly since the restoration was completed, even though it had been through the hands of several E-Type specialist garages. I mentioned this to John who made some enquiries with his motorsport contacts and the advice was to take it to Ray West of West Tuning at Thruxton race circuit. It was reassuring that Ray is clearly in demand as it was over 4 weeks before he had any availability to fit my car in.
The first task was to give the car a full service. In fact the first task was just to get it running! The battery had been on a CTEK trickle charger however one or more of the cells had failed in the time it had been laid up. The delay while a new, replacement PC1200T ODYSSEY Battery 12V arrived was use to buy all the servicing items; high temp grease, grease gun, spark plugs, coolant, oil filter and the various engine and transmission oils. I kept with the Odyssey battery as it has a high cracking output.
I could tell things weren’t going to go smoothly – as soon as it arrive the new battery was fitted and the car fired up to bring it out into the open to work on. Well it would have fired up had the fuel pump still been working. I had previously upgrade the internals to electronic actuation and my assumption was the circuit board had failed. I had acquired and renovated a spare pump during the restoration but couldn’t find it anywhere! The only option would be to buy a new one although all the suppliers only had them on back order. Back to plan A …. and after an extensive search I managed to find the spare pump, which had been hiding in plain sight!
The cooling system was given a good flushing out by opening the radiator and engine drain taps and placing a running hosepipe in the radiator filler until the water coming out of the drain taps was clear. The only other issue I had was being able to grease the outer UJs for the rear half shafts as I couldn’t get the gun on the grease nipple. I think I need to swap them to angled nipples.
The final task was to tune the car before taking it off to the tuner! I managed to get a fairly good base setting and then tweaked this to improve the running but all I achieved was to make things a whole lot worse. I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong.
To make matters worse one of the cooling fans failed while tuning. I’d also acquired spare cooling fans during the restoration so set about rebuilding a new cooling fan asap. However the trip down to Thruxton was early the following morning so I just had to get the fans fitted (untested) and into a state of tune that would at least get me there. So at 9:30pm the night before I called it a day – it was in a shocking state of tune with the revs just rising when the clutch was depressed. The only way to reduce the revs was to use the brakes to slow the car down while in gear.
As John kindly mentioned when we rendezvoused early in the morning en route to Thruxton, at least I’d set a very low bar for Ray to improve on! The car was put on the rolling road to give Ray an idea of what he was playing with. I’d not had the car on a rolling road before so it was somewhat unnerving having the engine rev’ed up to the red line.
The gas analyser was giving lambda reading of around 1.2 (lean) at low revs but 1.0 (Stoichiometric) higher up the rev range. After some deliberation and reviewing the SU carburettors needle graphs, Ray decided we needed to swap over from UM to UK needles to correct the mixture at low revs. Fortunately Burlen Fuels who manufacturer the needles were only 14 miles away in Salisbury so we were able to collect new needles and resume after lunch.
Time was pressing on when Ray noticed the jet in the rear carburettor had dropped which implied something was wrong internally with the jet bearing and jet assembly. It was decided to leave the car with him to investigate. The outcome the following day was the jet bearing had both cracked, therefore allowing the jet to fall, and was worn. It was more oval than round and would need to be replaced. This would necessitate replacing the jet bearings in the other two carburettors so they are all in an identical condition.