vauxhallviva.com

Great Engineering and I love the heater arrangement.
The best bit about your post is I can see the well taken photos. Keep them coming

Coming along nicely, love it that it's going to be real nice under the bonnet & as is on the outside

Thanks very much for the nice comments fellas

Yeah I am looking forward to seeing the face on my Mot tester when he pops the bonnet up

I'm sure at some point PC Plod will pull me over for a check...

As for the extra advance curve on the dizzy, I can't see any problem with it, I used to drag race my old 3.0 capri & it used to fly if I advanced the ignition as much as I could without it stalling at idle,

Cool.. that's good to know. Its only a little advanced, 8 degrees over the old curve, and only from about 3000 or so. Probably would hardly notice.

More pressing will be if my engine is indeed the low compression spec. Would be well worth finding a cheap standard head gasket and raising the compression back up to 8 or what ever.

Interesting stuff - I had exactly the same repair to do on my Sportshatch door, because of the dual skin in that area I assume.

yeah I was wondering why that inner skin had been cut out as no dents apparent. Then I found some filler in the outside hiding a dent that had been bashed out. The dent is now proudly displayed

Happy update time.. it runs! After chasing around electrical gremlins which ended up in a instrument cluster swap among other things I finished yesterdays efforts by filling the carb with fuel, pulling the choke out and turning the key. Two seconds later and it fired up easily. I'll get a video later. Couldnt run it for long as Id not filled it with coolant yet. I'm so happy. I'll be happier when Ive taken it for a drive and confirmed it has not got any issues like BHG etc.

So going back a few days here's some things that have been finished..

First off.

I finished the wiring and mounted the solenoid, tucked out of the way under the servo..



Then I thought I'd better fit the speedo cable. But it didn't turn. It was seized solid in one spot. I tried so many things to free it up, lots of wd40, plusgas, twisting, wiggling, pulling, pushing etc and finally it freed up but only one half...



Luckily I had a spare cable from when Viva one was swapped over from cable speedo to my home made electronic setup.

But it was really long, made to suit the Mazda rx7 gearbox and how do I shorten the inner down? I tried years ago to grind a new square end and it doesn't work. So I looked it up and the square end is actually squeezed into shape! I made a little form tool from some steel and at 5mm a time I squeezed my new cut down inner into shape...





It worked a treat!..



The sparkplug leads that came with the car are horrible old red Repco branded items. Not a chance they will get fitted...



I priced up leads in NZ and the prices were stupidly high, even at trade. Plus most are coloured blue or red. So Ebay Uk and the nice people at..
http://stores.ebay.co.uk/The-Green-Spar ... 7675.l2563

.. had just what I needed.

7 days later and I had a nice new set of good quality black leads for only 15 squid inc postage!!!




Yesterday was finishing little things and sorting out why instruments didnt work. I found a defective circuit strip thing plus a broken plastic casing on the cluster so I swapped the parts across from a spare..



While I did that Hannah did some other jobs.. like clean the mucky sunvisors..



That is it really.. I'm hoping to do a bit more today and then take it for a drive to check it out. Very excited. It currently sits here waiting..

Nice one!

Clever work on the speedo cable

Cheers.

Question time for the knowledgeable boffin types on here.

My front seats- the hook that latches onto the bar underneath to stop them tipping forwards will only click over the bar if the seat is forwards several notches. If I push the seat back all the way the hook isnt even close to the bar and sits a few inches behind doing nothing. Any ideas. My friend Andre here locally said his GT is the same. Odd? or is this standard?