Anglia back on the road, but massive drop in power!

[Jonny69]

Yesterday I put my Anglia back on the road after a long battle with blown engines. The car was last on the road at the end of 2009 when I built a very quick 1700 pre-crossflow with twin Webers, but I made the painful mistake of not running it in and going straight out onto the motorway to get to the Retro Rides Gathering in Somerset. 50 miles later my brand new engine was seized solid and I was waiting at the side of the M3 for the AA truck!

It was packing a 145hp pre-crossflow but I've put a standard engine back into it as a stop-gap. Essentially I'm now packing a car with wide Lotus steel wheels, rock hard fully adjustable suspension, close ratio box, a LOT of grip and... 49hp on tap

Bar a few badges and scuffs, it looks pretty much as it did in 2009:



What can I say? I drove for about an hour and a half after the MOT. I hate driving but I felt somehow relaxed and the other road users sort of weren't even there. I went and got my brother so we could share the experience because this car is as part of his life as mine as I've had it for 12 years now.

I built the car to handle predictably with the 145hp motor in it and with the 49hp 1200 it is a completely different animal. I learned a very valuable lesson when my throttle cable snapped once - with only 1/4 throttle you have to remain very committed if you want to drive fast. You need to go into corners with balls and every movement has to be smooth and precise. No hanging the back end out showboating, it's all about the entry and exit. So here I am with the same car and 49hp. It's amazing and I'm sort of tempted to stick with the small engine. Rock solid suspension, deliberately neutral handling, a lot of grip and amazing brakes in a tiny tiny little car. It really is so small by today's standards and compared to the T, which isn't even that big itself. I'm on a high and I'm loving it. I feel like I'm back!

This is the longer story for those who haven't seen me post about the car on here:

I got the car in 2000, ran around in it for a couple of years and then took it off the road for some restoration. The car was pretty rotten underneath and needed sills, floorpans, rear suspension, all the front sheet metalwork, rear corners and a lot more. This is when I moved to my current place, partway through the work:



It was a lot of welding which I completed in about 2006 with a fibreglass flipfront:





I sprayed it red shortly afterwards and put a full original matching interior in:





I'd bought another car in the meantime and was using that as my daily commuter (Ford Pop, in the garage in the pic at the top), so the Anglia sat in the garage for some time and didn't progress due to a lack of time and motivation. I decided to put it into Burnham Autos to do those last finishing jobs and get it on the road, which they did at the end of 2008. The engine I was using was tired and at the end of 2009 I did a full documented engine build and the debut was going to be Retro Rides Gathering. This was the engine I was to kill on the motorway and I seized it solid, basically because I was going too fast and I hadn't run it in. After this, it took me a year before I could face pulling the engine out again and I found it had eaten the bearings in the bottom end:



The crank was damaged, but it could be reground and I decided to have new valve guides put in the head while the well known engine firm ground the crank. The crank came back looking great, but when I sat it in the engine it had over 1mm of end float. To this day I have no idea how they managed that, because grinders only take off hundredths of a millimetre at a time. They replaced the crank and honoured me with a replacement set of bearings, because the new crank was ground to a different size.

In the meantime, the head was still with them. They claimed the valve guides were so worn they would need to get some special ones in and it would be a bit more expensive to do. No big deal, I knew it was pretty worn. However, I was not expecting them to take 6 months to do it and I certainly wasn't expecting them to then run a valve seating tool into it and make a complete mess of one chamber. They claimed this wasn't a ****-up but it looked like someone had loaded up a tool that was way too big and gone chomping into the head with it. To rectify the problem they put larger hardened valve seats in, larger valves and reground everything and didn't charge me extra for it. My ported head on top of a standard one:



Unfortunately, I don't have much confidence in the work they did and all the parts have sat on my bench pretty much untouched since. I did put new cam bearings in the block and bought a new cam kit, leaving the honing to a local engineer who I trusted to do the job. I think the thing that annoyed me most about said engine firm is that I am quite an experienced machinist and I know I'd be able to do the job myself if I had access to a mill. Instead, it cost me £200 and I know the job hasn't been done properly. Putting all that behind me, I decided to get a standard engine as a stop-gap to put the car back on the road, which I brought home in my hotrod that had taken daily duty at that point:



This needed a few things on the car putting back to standard and I put the engine back in the car. I made a mistake though, because the crank bearing was the wrong size and the engine had to come back out AGAIN. Enough was enough, I rolled it back into the garage and didn't touch it until a few weeks ago. I really cracked into it, connected up the exhaust to the 2" system, put the standard throttle linkage on, a bit of fiddling with points, plugs and leads, it fired up and it was ready to go. I got the rest of the car back together and MOTd it yesterday.

Future work:

Well I'm not sure now. I love it with the smaller engine. It's pretty tired and breathing quite heavily but it's an absolute hoot to drive. It's insured as a 1200 and all the other mods declared, free tax and does about 35mpg, so cheap as chips to run. I need to flat and polish the paint because it's been dinged about quite a lot in the garage and the flipfront needs touching up where it has been on and off the car too much. Otherwise, I'm pretty happy with it as it is