Topic

Thanks Airportable, for the seal of approval

Yeah it's a dirty old $5000 backhoe/loader but when it's going it'll be immensely useful around the farm. The cleanliness inside and out of the engine, putting all the parts in will help it hopefully last years. Though I think I'll keep frying my eggs in a pan



Yes my Volcano is "fair dinkum" the real genuine original thing, other than the FCCKIT. What about that rear "wing", is it original? I don't know, but I like it. It's not a show winner, has a few scrapes and dents, not by my making. I might never fix those, time, and as I have to travel a bit of gravel road before bitumen, as soon as I leave the gate it gathered some dust. All country roads around here so stone chips and bug splatters usually how it may return from a drive. LOL

Those old Fergie are a lovely old "collectable" tractor. I had one but an industrial MF40.

The expression "fair dinkum" isn't used so often as it was. Our younger generation here might wonder what the is that? LOL

A family friend took an early example of a JCB in lieu of a bad dept. After a bit of dent knocking, spanner work & canary yellow paint, me placed a small advert in the local rag (newspaper) & hired it out. It didn’t take long before he found another stuck in a bog & with the help of the first pulled it out, was PAYED to take it away. A lot of washing & paint soon had that earning its keep & that was the first one I ever drove. A third & forth came along, along with the need of a tractor unit & trailer, then a support Land Rover, again the first one I ever drove.
All this with little investment other than initial restoration & paint & after a few years he created a company whose workforce shared in the profits & that made a huge difference to the maintenance bill & the quality of cars in the tidiest plant hire car park your likely to find.
When you are invested in your company you look after your investment. Providing you have retained the sense you were born with.

Hey Cobber, while I was in the shed tonight near the Nightfire Red VVC I thought about your list of "must haves"
I have a paper MGF manual, that came with the Nightfire, Check! Amongst the boxes of engine parts I see the Nightfire has an aluminium throttle body. Is this the 52 mm you mentioned? I didn't measure it yet but it looks like about 52 mm. Here's a few photos of the throttle body.



Also photo of the damaged VVC cylinder head, for interest sake, a piece of the valve imbedded and broken off valve stems. A sorry looking sight. The fellow I bought it from shoulda sorted out the timing belt...!!!



I also found what looks like a cam timing locking tool, in a box.



I paid $950 for the Nightfire, with the smashed engine and $3600 for the Volcano, needing new suspension.



Is there anything else I need to find for fitting of the aluminium throttle body to the Volcano? If it's the correct part.
Better performance for just a bit of swapping over hopefully.

Cobber wrote:

So long as you don’t fall fowl of the supervisor you should be fine!
Yeah I know it’s a lame gag but it had to be done.

That timing belt it the pic is fine, it has at least another 100 yards of driving left it!!!

Yes it had to be done! LOL

I'm going to have nightmares of frayed timing belts and smashed engines after taking a closeup of the cylinder head.

Airportable wrote:

A family friend took an early example of a JCB in lieu of a bad dept. After a bit of dent knocking, spanner work & canary yellow paint, me placed a small advert in the local rag (newspaper) & hired it out. It didn’t take long before he found another stuck in a bog & with the help of the first pulled it out, was PAYED to take it away. A lot of washing & paint soon had that earning its keep & that was the first one I ever drove. A third & forth came along, along with the need of a tractor unit & trailer, then a support Land Rover, again the first one I ever drove.
All this with little investment other than initial restoration & paint & after a few years he created a company whose workforce shared in the profits & that made a huge difference to the maintenance bill & the quality of cars in the tidiest plant hire car park your likely to find.
When you are invested in your company you look after your investment. Providing you have retained the sense you were born with.

Wow, that's a terrific story. Thanks

Nah no special tricks required to fit the 52, just gaskets, you might get away using the old ones, but best to use new.
Of course you will need to check the setting of the TPS position.
Yeah that looks like the correct timing belt tool, if he had it why didn’t he use it to replace the belt?
Did you get both volumes of the manual?

Thanks Cobber.
TPS, is that a mater of doing the reset procedure?
Re the tool. Goodness knows!
I have a green manual with a red MGF on cover. Includes: workshop; engine overhaul; gearbox overhaul.
I also downloaded a PDF manual. I wish the file was created as searchable.

Yeah do the reset procedure as per your manual.
Speaking of which there should be a second volume to that green one with the red f on the cover, it covers the electrical shit.
And that tool looks like the right one.

Ah but if you could dial in your exact requirements & go straight in, you would miss lots of other nuggets hidden in there to entice & pick up on, whilst you are rooting for the right page.
On the electrical manual; depending on how old your car is depends on which pages to use, really early cars were slightly different & it’s worth looking up Dieter web site for early diagrams & if you use both the circuit diagrams & the electrical manual in conjunction fault finding & connector recognition is improved.
Read all the info at the start of the electrical manual first.
M

Thanks Airportable, Cobber, again for your info.

Regarding manuals, an index and or a searchable term function for me is such a useful thing, timesaving operation for any and all of my equipment repairs, which is a lot, farm and recreation. I rarely have anyone else fix these. Soo much to do here, the quicker I can get to knowledge the better. Index, searchable is a relatively small part of putting together a manual with little time yet has an exponential time benefit for the large numbers of people using publications.

I've a few hundred acres to maintain where I haven't yet got on-top of all the tasks of rebuilding some fences burnt from the devastating bushfire 2019. It was a bushfire of more than 60,000 hectares in area. Fifty percent of my property was burned. One area I rebuilt soon after fire, is a creek and causeway fence. Since then I've rebuilt it twice more from two different floods. Burnt trees fallen over along fence lines, immense vegetation regrowth after two years of incredibly high rainfall. Now, forecast of drying, drought and heatwaves, again. I'm preparing for another potential bushfire. The loader/backhoe is going to be immensely useful for that, clearing fire breaks along fences and trails, making new firebreaks. Also, making sure I have a good smooth driveway to drive my MG out of the property, for great fun timeout.

I got a moment to remove the VVC throttle body from the manifold so I could better get callipers in there to measure it. Damnit, it's a 48 mm, yet an aluminium casting. Oh well... No freebie mod. At the moment I can't really justify spending $$$ on a 52 mm.

The new Bosch coil arrived yesterday hopefully I'll get a chance soon to install it.

The 48mm alloy throttle body will still be better than the rubbish plastic one, the placcy one’s have a bad habit of randomly sticking giving you an excessive idle speed when warm.
If you’re not currently experiencing this, it’s probably only a matter of time, I’d wait until the problem does actually manifest itself before swapping it over for the 48mm alloy unit. If you’re not currently experiencing any idling problems, why bother?
But if you get a chance of grabbing yourself a 52mm unit, then you should change it over then.
NB. The are some 55mm units about, don’t bother with these, they’re too much and only set you back…….. I know because I have one somewhere!

Thanks Cobber, with any luck before the plastic body breaks I’ll have a 52 mm waiting to go in. I see a new part is nearly $300. I think I’ll try for a good 2nd hand part eventually.

I installed the new ignition coil this afternoon. The old one looks like it could be as old as the MG, 26 years. I don’t recognise the brand, made in France. Closeup the old part has some cracks in the resin, a way of moisture getting in I suppose. It’s $51 worth of reliability, I hope. Lucky I checked the mounting brackets of the new part for holes alignment with the old part! It would have been impossible to put all the bolts in had I not bent two of the sides a little for a perfect fit. Otherwise I might have scraped my arm a lot more getting those three bolts back in. 😆