My poor little Escort RS2000 has had every right to be feeling a bit neglected for the last few years. I’m not sure why it’s been parked up for so long, but it’s probably something to do with every other shitbox at the MBC demanding my time and, crucially, dollars.
If you’ve been playing along at home, you’ll recall that the Esky dropped its guts big time a handful of years back. One of the two camshaft retaining nuts at the back of the head unwound itself, somehow found its way into the sump and then got picked up by the crankshaft web and slammed into the side of the block. Neatly ventilating the crankcase from the inside out.
Weld her up, said a few of my mates. It’s only a tiny hole! In a way, they were right, but a welded-up block ran against the vibe of what’s a very tidy example of a car that I’ve wanted to own for a long time and have no intentions of ever getting rid of.
So, I dug up a second-hand short motor, had the crank checked, the cylinders bored and then threw new everything at it from the deck down. The massaged head, stupid-big cam and the rest of the stuff from the old engine found their way on to the new bottom-end and, suddenly, I was in business again with a fully rebuilt, balanced, blueprinted little Pinto that goes like a ripper.
So, a few weeks ago, I got tired of looking at the thing sitting in the corner, dusted it off and hit the key. She fired up quick-as and we wobbled out into the traffic to have the driveshaft rebuilt (which I also covered here a couple of issues ago). All was good till the next drive when I started to see the temp gauge getting all excited and heading for the red. Not good.
By the time I got back to the MBC, the needle was still in the o-k-a-y zone, but was clearly not where it should sit on a mild day. So, I grabbed my laser-thermometer thingy and pointed it at the thermostat housing. Eighty-five degrees was the stern reply. Perfect. Ah-ha, so it’s not overheating at all. Who’d have thought a cheesy, electronic gauge built to a Ford budget would begin to play up at the 46-year mark?
Okay, so we’re not running hot, but I don’t know about you, but I can’t live with a temp gauge hovering over the red even if I know it’s telling porkies. I mean, is it consistently lying, or is there a chance that I could learn to trust it and then lose another engine as a result? Nope. Gotta deal with it.
The were two options. The first was to remove the dashboard and have the standard gauge checked and recalibrated. But my suspicion was that it wasn’t just calibration: I reckon the gauge was all over the place based on the day of the week and the alignment of the stars.
Which meant I moved on to option two. And that was to buy a quality aftermarket gauge, mount it somewhere inconspicuous and trust that instead. So that’s what I did.
I’d already installed a VDO oil-pressure gauge years earlier, so I found a temp gauge that formed a pigeon pair and whacked that in next to it, down by the steering column. It’s easy enough to see on the move and I know for damn sure how hot I’m running. Not hot at all, as it turns out, and even when idling on a warmish day, the needle never got beyond 90 degrees. Sorted.
Well, it would have been, but in the manner of old cars, this gave the Escort the opportunity to hit me with one of those domino-effect situations where the fix for one problem becomes the basis of the next. In this case, it was as I was rootling around under the dashboard to run the signal wire from the new sender unit to the gauge, one hand brushed the brake-light switch. And – you guessed it – the bastard switch fell to pieces there and then.
Actually, the switch itself is okay, but the plastic outer that forms the mounting thread appears to be in about a million bits and hiding in the Esky’s plush carpet. I think it’ll be okay, though, because there’s enough thread left to ditch a spacer and return the switch to its correct orientation against the brake pedal’s shaft.
And there I was, wondering why I hadn’t driven the RS2000 much lately …
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Charge pipe
Actually, the recent nice weather has got me off my backside and given me the chance to complete a few little jobs I’d been putting off. And one of those was a leak somewhere in the exhaust system of the Footscray Ferrari.
Now, when I first got the Charger running with its new, super-dooper Hemi six installed, I took it round to a local exhaust shop and asked for a basic system that would shut it up a bit and make it legal. Thing is, the bloke who ran the shop turned out to be a Charger nut who insisted on doing things the old-fashioned, proper way. That meant building the two-and-a-half-inch system in sections and flanging each one so it could be simply unbolted and removed easily if I ever needed to.
Since then, I’ve added both a hot-dog and then a proper muffler to the tail-end section of the system to shut things up a bit, and each time, I’ve had cause to thank the bloke’s foresight, because with a single spanner, I’ve been able to drop the relevant section out of the car to work on. And trust me, it’s much easier to remove a third of the exhaust than try to get a whole car in the vice so I can weld a muffler in place.
But having the system flanged in two places also meant I had a logical first place to start looking for the leak I could both hear and smell. Since I’d recently removed and refitted the rear flanged section, my theory was that the leak was in the front flange where the headers dump into the single system. And whaddayaknow? I was right (for a change).
Not sure how the flange ever loosened (maybe it was never properly tight, I dunno) but when I dropped the bolts out and the gasket fell on the driveway, I could clearly see where it had been blowing. And a further look underneath revealed that the leak was right under the hole in the trans tunnel where the gearstick pokes through. So that’s why I could smell it so strongly at idle. Lord, I love it when the universe explains itself so perfectly.
A close look at the gasket showed that it didn’t seem to be eaten away or physically blown through at any point, so it really was probably just a loose-ish flange. And since it was Saturday and I didn’t know if the exhaust shop was open, I actually considered – just for a second – sliding this one back in, finding a longer spanner and seeing what happened. Then I woke up to myself, and drove to my local Bursons where A: The blokes understand idiots like me; B: Were still open, and; C: Also had the correct gasket on the shelf. So I bought two in case I mullered the first one getting it in place. (And because I had a spare, of course, I didn’t.)
The thing is, the old Charger has been transformed. Because I’d gotten used to the grumble of the leaking flange, the sudden reduction in cabin pressure is music to my ears. The car feels smoother, is definitely quieter, doesn’t try to gas me at the lights and, I swear, also feels faster. Which is saying something, because the old Hemi doesn’t hang around.
It also made me realise that a small fix on a small job can make a huge difference to how a car sounds and feels. And that getting something running the way it should be, even if there’s a million other things wrong with the old crate, is a great recipe for staying in love.
It also makes me wonder how many abandoned projects would be still in play if the owner just fixed one tiny thing at a time, instead of looking at the to-do list and quietly dragging a cover over the car and going back inside to play Warcraft.
So to all the people who keep asking me when I’m gonna paint the VH or when I’m finally going to weld in the last two patches, or whatever, my answer will be that this is a rolling restoration and I’ll get to it when I get to it. Meantime, get out of the way, cos I’m about to go for a drive in the old gal.
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Dawg day afternoon
There’s a reason we tappet-heads all hang out together. Okay, partly it’s because the rest of society isn’t always too interested in what we’re up to, but also because we often manage to keep each other amused.
Here’s what I mean: I got a phone call from a buddy last Wednesday who told me he’d just managed to procure a genuine WWII, seven-cylinder radial engine out of a tank. Would I like to take a peek? I was in the car before he’d hung up.
Now, I dunno about you, but I find military engineering pretty amazing. And military or not, you just can’t ignore the brilliance and sheer well-bugger-me appeal of an air-cooled radial engine. And even though this one was missing a cylinder and had been lying on its back in a paddock since about the time the Third Reich hit the skids, it was still an incredible thing to gaze upon and consider. As in: Just how loud would it have been inside a tin box called an M3 Stuart Tank?
But as we were gawking at 11 litres of aluminium and decay, another pal rolled in with this lovely old FE Holden ute on the back of his truck. Personally, I really dig FE and FC Holdens over pretty much all the early Holdens. Maybe it’s something to do with the scale-model 55 Chevy thing, or maybe it’s because these old girls just had a charm and a look that couldn’t be beat.
Our mate had just dragged the ute back from western NSW, where he’d bought it and a bunch of other old dears from a farm clearing sale. We’re talking an 11-hour trip each way, but I swear, when you saw this FE in the flesh, you just knew it was worth every kilometre.
The tragedy is that the ute wasn’t so sharp on the other side and had clearly been sideswiped by something like a combine harvester, but many, many years ago. Ironically, that’s probably what saved it, because after the shunt it was quietly parked in a corner of the machinery shed and left there. According to the rego label on the quarter glass, that was back in the ’70s.
Back then, of course, the value of the ute would have been a lot less than the cost of repairs it needed, so it continued to sit there until everybody had forgotten all about it. But it was definitely repairable and I hope somebody does just that without wiping out the patina and history.
The things you see, eh?
