A lot more go

Bitsa had been getting hard to start, the MPG's have been abysmal, and performance sluggish.

This sounded like poor timing, so I've advanced the injection timing quite a lot. The result is a lot better - it starts instantly, and goes like stink compared to before. Time will tell if the MPG improves, but I'd be amazed if it doesn't - on the way back from Aber last week at a steady 65mph on the motorway she was barely returning 20mpg.

I'm not sure how the timing had ended up out - it used to start OK, and there was no evidence of slippage with the pump timing bolts.

While I was doing these sort of things, I pulled off the front pulley which had developed the worrying ability to rotate about 30deg relative to the crank, and found to my relief the damage was severe wear to the keyway slot on the pulley, rather than a chunk missing from the crankshaft. It seems the Sherpa crank (my engine was rebuilt with one after the disaster with the original crank) has a fractionally shorter nose bolt than a tdi, and the Tdi bolt I'd fitted had bottomed out in the hole when tightened, rather than gripping the front pulley. I've fitted some extra washers to hold the bolt further out( dead grinder cutting disks proved ideal), which seems to have solved the problem.

I think the next party trick is going to have to be looking at replacing the front brake shoes again - the Mintex shoes that I fitted at easter seem to have glazed, and stopping is getting to be a fraction unsatisfactory. I begin to understand why people pay money for disk brake conversions... (I won't, I'm too tight). That and getting that wretched 3.54 diff stuck in the back, before the engine dies of a diet of motorway speeds and high mileages. (I was going to swap the offending diff in a few weeks ago, but as is often the way with life things didn't work out, and I ended up reinstalling windows for someone on their computer that afternoon instead).