Today's Activity

Went over to the car today to work on the brake reservoirs, but every time I go at the moment, I run the car, just to keep the engine turning over and the oil circulating. (The brakes don't work at the moment, so I can only idle the car.  I'll get back to the brakes later.

The last couple of weeks, since I first got the engine running, the engine has fired after a few turns, but today it took a while longer than usual.  It was turning but not firing, and I was starting to think I would need to use some quick start again.  However, finally it started firing on individual cylinders, and eventually ran fully.  As usual, I kept the choke out until the temperature was up to "normal", then when I pushed the choke fully in, it settled down to idle at about 1500rpm.

Around running the engine, I was getting off the bottom brake reservoir.  This one has been more difficult to remove than the top one, because it's in a more restricted location - you can get a bit of an idea from the photo.

(You can also see how bad the level sensor in this reservoir was from the next photo - the float (cork-like thing) on the end of the thin rod is supposed to be enclosed inside a metal tube - the top of the tube had completely corroded away so the bottom part had fallen off into the reservoir).

The other problem I had with this reservoir was that the hose clamp on the outlet from the reservoir was completely corroded so I couldn't turn the screw to release the clamp to remove the hose from the reservoir.  In the end I hacksawed the head off the clamp screw and removed it that way.  Because of the restricted space, I couldn't get a full stroke of the hacksaw, so it took longer than I expected to saw the head off, but once I'd done it, the hose pulled off the nipple easily.

I also removed one of the cover plates under the back seat to check the access to the back brakes (located inboard on the e-Type).  I had to remove the back seat belts in order to get a cover off the transmission tunnel so that I could get at the last of the 8 screws holding the brake cover plate on (some things are not straight forward on this car!!).  Once the plate was off, I found that I can easily get at the brake bleed nipple, and it has free rotation, so, it will hopefully be easy to bleed the back brakes.

So, on my next visit to the car next week, I'll aim to fit the new bottom brake reservoir, then start on the process of bleeding and setting them up.