Re: Zel's Fleet Blog...Lada, Citroen, Mercedes, Sinclair & AC Model 70
Posted: Thu May 09, 2019 11:28 pm
I had a spare hour (ish) this afternoon so made another pass at the "clean the secondary pulley game" on the Invacar.
A metre of threaded rod was all of £1.85 from Toolstation. That, a couple of bolts and a few washers allowed me to create this potentially lethal contraption out of my poor innocent workbench and even more horribly abused (yet apparently indestructible) power drill.
It's actually infinitely less terrifying than it looks courtesy of the pulley (as you would expect) being really insanely well balanced. It wobbles a bit at around 500rpm, but then smooths out totally up to the free running speed of the drill. What is scary is that *stopping* from that speed takes the best part of a minute thanks to the rotational inertia involved...
I only did that once though, more out of curiousity as to how well balanced stuff was, while being ready to leg it at a moment's notice.
For reference this is the pulley surface we started with following my first pass at cleaning it with the polycarbide mop on the grinder last week.
An hour or so of working at it with a combination of a chisel (ooooh...sparks!) and several grades of Emery cloth resulted in the surface looking like this.
While there's still a lot of visible tarnish there the pulleys surface is now smooth to the touch across the full running surface. Whether this will help things or not I will hopefully find out tomorrow. It's hard to express quite how much smoother that pulley face feels than it looks in the photo.
Realistically, this is as good as the pulley surface is going to get without being able to throw it onto an actual lathe with a suitable cutter to reface the running surfaces properly. It just ain't going to get any better in my hands...so if it still eats belts I'll probably need to get a machine shop involved.
The last thing I did before packing up this evening was throw (not literally of course) a load of filler at the bodywork.
The area behind the nearside wheelarch should benefit a lot from this (remember, there was a huge crack there). I'll hit it with the sander and some paint tomorrow (or another coat of filler if needed - I'm going for presentable from twenty paces here) to tidy things up a bit. Obviously will be a fair amount more needed, but it's the first time I've used this exact stuff so I wanted to start simple. Plus to be brutally honest I'm more interested in driving this car right now than making it pretty...
A metre of threaded rod was all of £1.85 from Toolstation. That, a couple of bolts and a few washers allowed me to create this potentially lethal contraption out of my poor innocent workbench and even more horribly abused (yet apparently indestructible) power drill.
It's actually infinitely less terrifying than it looks courtesy of the pulley (as you would expect) being really insanely well balanced. It wobbles a bit at around 500rpm, but then smooths out totally up to the free running speed of the drill. What is scary is that *stopping* from that speed takes the best part of a minute thanks to the rotational inertia involved...
I only did that once though, more out of curiousity as to how well balanced stuff was, while being ready to leg it at a moment's notice.
For reference this is the pulley surface we started with following my first pass at cleaning it with the polycarbide mop on the grinder last week.
An hour or so of working at it with a combination of a chisel (ooooh...sparks!) and several grades of Emery cloth resulted in the surface looking like this.
While there's still a lot of visible tarnish there the pulleys surface is now smooth to the touch across the full running surface. Whether this will help things or not I will hopefully find out tomorrow. It's hard to express quite how much smoother that pulley face feels than it looks in the photo.
Realistically, this is as good as the pulley surface is going to get without being able to throw it onto an actual lathe with a suitable cutter to reface the running surfaces properly. It just ain't going to get any better in my hands...so if it still eats belts I'll probably need to get a machine shop involved.
The last thing I did before packing up this evening was throw (not literally of course) a load of filler at the bodywork.
The area behind the nearside wheelarch should benefit a lot from this (remember, there was a huge crack there). I'll hit it with the sander and some paint tomorrow (or another coat of filler if needed - I'm going for presentable from twenty paces here) to tidy things up a bit. Obviously will be a fair amount more needed, but it's the first time I've used this exact stuff so I wanted to start simple. Plus to be brutally honest I'm more interested in driving this car right now than making it pretty...