Thursday, February 13, 2014

Its been a year, here are a few interesting maintenance items...

The car has been running great, I have over 1500 miles on the rebuild and no problems, barely any oil leaks.  
About 6 months ago things got a little scary when the car started shaking badly whenever I made a right turn, even the slightest of turns.  I managed to get it to the shop before anything serious happened but just barely.  As you may know the GT6 has the rotoflex configuration which was somewhat state of the art at the time, this was certainly better than straight axle for handling.  The rotoflex is essentially a very large heavy duty rubber donut that transfers the power while allowing flex in the suspension.   It seems the source of the vibration and shaking was my right rotoflex, it had failed and now had a break in the rubber. 


This job was too much for me to handle but fortunately Dave at British Motorsports in Campbell CA was able to get the axle off (no easy task given the age of the bolts).  Once on the bench it was pretty obvious where the break happened.  Fortunately rotoflex replacements are easy to find.

 Here is the completed right axle unit, freshly painted and ready to be re-installed.  I had new brakes put on as well, there was a minor leak and the shoe's were a little wet.



 Back on the car now.  I should not that I had the leaf spring replaced as well which greatly increased the stiffness and added an inch or two to the right height in the back.

A side note, it turns out that my bushings had essentially disintegrated and I was riding on metal to metal in the back.  Quality bushings are very hard to come by as many aftermarket parts are not of NOS quality.


And of course I did the other side too just in case.




The second major problem happened about 2 months ago when I was backing my car out of the garage down a ramp and went to put on the brakes, nothing...nada.  Complete brake failure.   I knew i had a slow leak from the master cylinder but once the level got too low the system filled with air and that was it.  I planned to get a rebuild kit but decided it much easier to just get a new master.  The change was pretty simple, it was the preparation that was most of the work.  Brake fluid eats through paint so the main task was to strip, sand, primer and paint under the master where the paint had been ruined

Here is what it looked like when I took out the old master.  Some of you may be wondering why the brake safety valve wasn't working,  Brake systems of this era had a dual reservoir system so that if the front went the back would still work.  There is also a switching mechanism in the silver brake line splitter (see at the top of this photo).  A prior owner had the switch removed and just a bleed valve installed.  That explains why it all failed at once.

I used some paint stripper to get most of this out.  There was some surface rust but nothing serious.  I was not going for a concours quality repair, this is a nice driver but someday I'll have to reshoot the whole engine compartment.


Primed and masked off, ready for paint.



And after two coats it was looking pretty good.  I was fortunate to find my exact paint color in a spray can from TouchupDirect.com, this is color code 54, Saffron yellow. 





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