As Lane said , for safety, best to replace the crush cage . Shift coupler: The red urethane will fail and best to use a German rubber type. Steering wheel to dash alignment : There are two 1/4" locator pins fused to the axle beam and depending the orientation you have the box clamp will put the steering shaft at a slightly different upward angle. To fix your steering wheel to dash alignment you can first remove the tie rods from the pitman arm then remove the steering box and remove two 1/4 pins off from the axle beam with a chisel, this will let you move the steering box a bit to slide to align the steering wheel to the dash and the difference on horizontal placement can be made up by readjusting the tie rods . After you replace the steering box and tie rods and are satisfied with everything you'll need to tack weld the clamp on the outer edge so if needed it can be removed at a later time. You will also need a front end alignment.
"Good afternoon (UK) and morning (USA) all. Hope you're enjoying your weekend."
You're missing a few countries there. You might be surprised at how many countries are represented on this site. 
Keep your posts coming - they are interesting and informative.
Seconding Alan Merklin's advice: you MUST align the steering box to the steering shaft. It doesn't have to be perfect, but 5 degrees out is too much.
Ah well, I thought it was a bit too far out of true. From my ‘following the kit car scene at a distance’ over the last 30 odd years in the UK (it was the GP Spyder RSK that first ignited my passion for replicas), this kind of Heath Robinson, laissez faire attitude to doing things the right way seemed, to me at least, to hold back the industry for years. Not that it was necessarily deliberate, but that at the time no-one showed them the right way. A bit like the danger and lack of track/ car safety in Grand Prix in the 60s and70s was simply “part of the risk of competing”. And this was a ‘98 ‘factory built’ Chesil! I’m sure they thought as long as the body looked pretty everything else could be ‘good enough’. Or in this case, “the steering rag is rubber so it can flex a bit, that’s what it’s designed to do”..
I guess I’ll add relocating the steering box to the long to-do list. Seeing as I’m changing the tire diameter (increasing the tire height), I’ll need to adjust the ride height, and this will be a good time to sort the (leaking) steering box and reposition it on the beam before I get the tracking sorted!
Thanks one and all for your help as always.
I wouldn't put that on the "kit car scene." Fiberglass specials were invented in the UK. Lotus, Turner, TVR and numerous others (along with a few FRP aficionados in the states) pretty much invented a technology from scratch.
I'd put that down to shoddy workmanship on Chesil's part.
@dlearl476 you’re right, I apologise to the likes of Lotus, TVR etc. I was tired when I wrote that last night and was more referring to the high number of ultra small, single garage operations that popped up in the UK in the 70s and 80s trying to follow in their footsteps to produce a fibreglass- bodied car based on some kind of Spridget, Beetle or Metro chassis, usually with unbelievably ugly body designs and ill-thought out engineering. Lots of one-hit wonders without a hit.
I’ll stop now and extract foot from mouth!
I remember traveling to the UK in the 1980's and seeing all sorts of kit cars zipping about. As Martin mentioned above, some of them were really cool looking and had some good design under the covers, too, like a few home-built Lancia Stratos. Then, OTOH, there were a LOT that were pure abominations that not only would I never sit in one, It was just plain hard to look at them (like a Leige) where the best complement you could give was "What the hell were they thinking?"
Oh, and many thanks @Alan Merklin for the advice on moving the steering box.
Big thumbs up!
Oh dear, here we go again..
Removing the steering box to strip/clean/adjust, I thought I'd check how stiff the remainder of the steering setup is. With the right wheel being off the car, I went to the left side (against the garage wall - it's a fairly small garage) to pull the wheel left and right to check for any resistance. All the balljoints etc seem to be ok - not too stiff, all things considered. That's the good news..
Within the left (nearside for the UK) wheel arch - this is what a Chesil looks like inside the wheelarch, although I'm running a remote oil cooler which is non-standard.
Looking towards the front:
Looking towards the rear:
I spot this at the back of the wheel arch..
On closer inspection:
For some reason I can't fathom, one is worn down to the braid at a point where it doesn't rub against anything. Ah well, looks like new hoses are in order - to run from the oil filter at the back of the left rear wing all the way to the front.
Sometime, ignorance is bliss. But then Sod's Law would mean this hose would give way whilst driving. But unlike the last one it wouldn't signal to me with a huge plume of smoke, it would just dump the oil and either ruin the engine or the back tyre would slide out on a corner.
At least my wrist is out of plaster now so I've got one and a half hands to start mechanicing again :-)
Attachments
Images (4)
One of our other members lost an oil line that was in a similar location. His tire was rubbing the line because of low air pressure causing the tire to bulge more. During spirited driving the sidewall flexed more which caused it to rub. Eventually the hose developed a leak. Luckily his fuel pump was wired in such a way that when he lost oil pressure the fuel pump shut off.
Hi @Robert M I can see why that would happen. I've got 195/55/15s and for sure they are wide for 'standard' wheel arches, hence me wanting to swap them for narrower tyres. You'll see from elsewhere on this thread I have a problem with the brake hoses rubbing on the tyres at full lock. However, in this case, the wheel is nowhere near the hose - it's a very odd puzzle I can't figure out, unless something like a flint was thrown up and sliced the rubber. More likely the P-clips fixing the hose to the body broke and the hose fell loose and rubbed on either the body or the tyre - this has obviously been fixed at some point.
@Martin's Eleven (UK)- You say those are oil lines running to a front mounted cooler? Have you considered relocating the cooler to the back left fenderwell?
I didn’t realize those cooler lines were in the front wheel well. The member I was referencing had his oil filter and lines in the left wheel well.
I suspect you’re right that the line came loose from its mount and rubbed a bit before being fixed.
Those look too small to be oil lines.
@edsnova hmm, they're 0.8"/ 20mm OD (I've not checked ID, but googling similar shows an ID of 0.5"/13mm). But they're definitely feeding oil to the cooler.. Which then begs the question, what kind of efficacy will there be if the oil has to go 8 feet forward to the cooler, then 8 feet back to the engine. One could argue that it would give the oil longer to cool down, but the flipside is that the oil may struggle to come back from the cooler if it's thicker? I'm guessing it would depend on what temp the thermostat opens up?
One other question I was going to ask, given this is a 22+ year old conversion so I've no real history of why certain build decisions were made.. As this is a 1904cc build with some kind of hot cam (not sure what yet), does it benefit from both an additional slimline sump for greater capacity AND a full flow oil filter & cooler? I'm betting the answer is "given oil does double duty in terms of lubrication and cooling, then any help in looking after that oil is a good thing". But I'm happy to be corrected if wrong.
So, parking the oil hose for a while, it's back to the steering box alignment..
Of course, some of the problems I'm coming across will not occur with Left Hand Drive models, and vice versa..
First things first, remove steering box, strip it down and inspect. The idea being not to make it perfect, but if it was serviceable then I'd use it and, if not, I'd replace it. It was incredibly greasy/oily on the outside, with leaks coming from most areas. It was also very stiff to turn around the centre mark but easy at either end.
So, a few pics before and after..
As you can see, a bit gooey. In amongst all that (at least 20 years old) decayed grease was one of the two plastic plugs - the old one had obviously perished when a PO was trying to pull it out of the top, so they had just pushed the rest in and stuck a new plug in the hole..
A good clean up and everything seemed to be pretty tight, with no real play in any area.
I reassembled all parts without grease and adjusted it to see how much play (or lack of) was in the system. Actually, it was all pretty good. So I reassembled with lithium grease, tightened everything down and adjusted again. We'll see in time whether the old seals will hold or whether I will need to get new ones.
Now for the real problem. As some of you saw in an earlier post, the box is out of alignment with the steering column. To fix this, as @Alan Merklin said, I would need to chisel off the two locating lugs on the front beam then slide the box further to the right side of the car (to the left in the pics). Problem - if I go any further to the outside of the car then the steering stop arm hits the beam upright. The pictures below show the standard location of the steering box - which gives about 5mm clearance. It looks like I will have to grind that down so I can move the box further to the outside of the car. I don't really want to remove it completely, otherwise there's no limit to 'full lock' which usually means something rubs something else and trouble ensues (ooh, matron!).
Attachments
Images (12)
@Martin's Eleven (UK) posted:@edsnova hmm, they're 0.8"/ 20mm OD (I've not checked ID, but googling similar shows an ID of 0.5"/13mm). But they're definitely feeding oil to the cooler.. Which then begs the question, what kind of efficacy will there be if the oil has to go 8 feet forward to the cooler, then 8 feet back to the engine. One could argue that it would give the oil longer to cool down, but the flipside is that the oil may struggle to come back from the cooler if it's thicker? I'm guessing it would depend on what temp the thermostat opens up?
One other question I was going to ask, given this is a 22+ year old conversion so I've no real history of why certain build decisions were made.. As this is a 1904cc build with some kind of hot cam (not sure what yet), does it benefit from both an additional slimline sump for greater capacity AND a full flow oil filter & cooler? I'm betting the answer is "given oil does double duty in terms of lubrication and cooling, then any help in looking after that oil is a good thing". But I'm happy to be corrected if wrong.
There's zero benefit, IMHO, in having the oil cooler all the way at the front of the car. Mine is positioned along the fram of the car forward of the axles and I've never had an overheating issue. The cooler has a thermal switch activated fan pack.
And yes, you would benefit from having a the motor set up for a full flow oil filter. And I think the majority of us run with an additional slimline sump. Except for the truly mad who run with a dry sump system.
Half-inch ID is probably fine even for the front but as Robert says, "while you're at it," a move to a spot in the rear wheel well might be of benefit.
.
If memory serves, a reason for not having the cooler up front is that a larger than normal oil pump is usually recommended to keep things flowing.
At first glance, it looks like there's not enough room in the rear wheel well for a cooler and fan, but there is, if the right cooler is chosen and it's installed by someone who's done it before.
Your oil lines look to be mounted where Porsche mounted theirs for cars with the exotic four-cam engine (that used a front-mounted cooler). Their cooler had no electric fan, so probably benefited from being up front. But their lines in that location were metal and mounted with clamps that were meant to last a thousand years.
The extended sump was first devised to keep a deeper well of oil around the pump pickup so as not to run dry in hard cornering. The added volume helps a little, but not too much.
What usually happens in discussions like this is that someone who doesn't know much (like me) will toss out some bits he remembers reading and get half of them wrong, which annoys someone more expert than me, who, in turn, will post a follow up to correct the errors.
Wait around here long enough, and the truth will out.
.
OK, so I covered the installation of a complete full flow cooler/filter package a long time ago and the parts that pertain to "where to put the filter" are here:
https://www.speedsterowners.co...-1-mechanical-layout
and here:
https://www.speedsterowners.co...-cooler-installation
There's two more sections up under the Resource/Knowledge section - Check 'em out.
The Photobucket photos are now useless (Damn you, Photobucket!) so I'll add a few pertinent cooler location photos as attachments to this. If you need explanations of the photos, just ask, but it's all in the articles.
Now, on the "We'll see in time whether the old seals will hold or whether I will need to get new ones." Trust me. The old seals leaked and re-using them just guarantees that they'll leak again. There are two circular seals and one big, complicated paper gasket and they all need to be replaced or it's gonna leak again. Get on it now, while it's still easy to do.
Havin' fun yet?
Attachments
Images (5)
