Well it's been a while since i saw the car in the flesh... and it still looks solid and serious. Even more serious now i have to consider possible costs involved with bringing the car back life. After an extensive walk around session with the rust hammer and looking at the melted wiring in the engine bay, and also pushing my finger through the offside rear wheel arch... (hey it's far enough away from anything MOT fail-able so it can wait...)
I am looking at a new rear brake caliper to get it rolling freely once more... unfortunately the rea
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Ok, after a brief interlude that included a first child a house move and having no broadband at home for 2 months... I'm back
More to the point the Tipo has had it's appointment with the cam mechanic booked for next friday. So all i have to do is get all the bearings and belts delivered and find a set of bolts for the cam cover and the bolts for crank>steering pump wheel as they didn't come with the car.
when you bid 99p for a stainless steel exhaust you don't really have high expectations... but it turns out no-one else was interested... got mine even cheaper than Tipomike. Although the manifold he won looked really good.
the only downside... is that postage is going to cost 15x more than the exhaust did.
ok, so in preparation for the day that i return to the car in West Cumbria (2hr drive) I am collecting the bits that'll be needed/desired for the car to function as normal.
OK after combining the opinions of two people much more familiar with the engine than myself. I have concluded that the EFI thing is getting binned. and the balancer is getting refurbished... for safety/longevity reasons. it makes no sense skimping on these items if you are going to keep the smoothness of the engine.
A couple of points don't seem to want to dissapear from my thoughts...
The first thing
When i picked the Tipo up and spoke to Sumplug (Andy) he was thinking of getting rid of the fume recycling system completely. He said that it diluted the mixture and caused the Lambda sensor to get confused and then the engine management tried to compensate... and things just got lumpy from then on... So the question is... is he right?. I have seen in the workshop manuals that the system is thermally activated in that once the engine gets to running te
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The nearside rear lock is stuck as i have mentioned previously. I have so far bought two and then for some reason or other they haven't worked out. The first bizarrely having silver paint in the mechanism... and the second one which pisses me off the most, was bought new but while being prepared for transportation was dropped and damaged (T_T) before shipping.
both times the sellers have been great, and given full refunds without prompting... but i just want the lock really
Got my hands on the Fiat workshop manuals for the tipo's they only cover the pre-93 models on the whole... but considering that most of the changes were cosmetic they remain really useful for all the models.
Well I knew it had to be too good to be true... I had a look at the rust i had seen the day i bought the car... but this time i was armed!
ok after a bit of time pulling off the old chipguard and attacking it with a stell scraper and wire brush attachment on a leccy screwdriver... I uncovered this.
down side is that it'll need some welding done to pass any kind of MOT, but the upside is that I can work on the electrics from outside the car.
30-11-2007 20:40 
