James' Rallye

[Atterz]

Bit of an update with a few more pictures (Which will no doubt exceed my photobucket bandwith)!

First, i decided that i was sick of the constant clunk clunk of nakkered Pbushes and Droplinks, so went to the scrapyard and purchased 2 wishbones for £10. I then removed all of the bushes, cleaned and painted them and put Powerflex Pbushes on with Standard balljoints and Front bushes.

At the same time i also purchased some of the Rose jointed drop links from Ebay and stuck them on as well, i still (after about 4 months) havent played around with them as per Phil's guide!

Shafted wishbones from the scrapyard.


Goodies


Goodies fitted to wishbones and painted ready for going back on


Now i dont have any pictures of them fitted because i seem to forget when i start working on the car to get the camera out! However it really sorted out the handling of the car and i was quite happy with it!

However, some AVO coilovers popped up for sale and i had to have them as i felt the ride was really crashy and unpredicatable with the Spax springs on the car. Turns out that the orignal bumpstops hadnt been cut down and it was therefore resting on them near permenantly!

Again like an idiot i have no pictures of the coilovers, but i cleared off all of the surface corrsion, painted them up with new to mounts bearings (smeared in Moly grease) and refitted them, much improvement and im much happier now that i have reduced the damper rates. Much more manageable on the roads!

This all takes us up until the present day (well yesterday). I finally cleaned the car and gave it another coat of wax (Banana Armour - Dodo juice. Works a treat on Red cars after machine polishing). I cleaned up the rest of the interior, removing the rear seat belts and generally sorting it out, and also decided to paint the towing eye yellow to match the wheels/callipers etc.

Finally topped this off by cleaning the MAP etc as mentioned before and reset the ECU, happy days!

Here goes (pardon the quality of my phones camera!!)

























Thank you for reading and sorry for the excessive amount of pictures!!

So itâ??s finally time for and update and god is it hard remembering everything that has happened!

Just after new year I paid a visit up to Manchester where both me and James (JammaPic) had a play around with the suspension on my car. I had recently replaced the front tyres from illegal T1Sâ??s to Falken ZE912s and had noticed that the car was under steering like crazy, especially under wet conditions (spinning the inside wheel up as well when putting power down on tight corners). This was odd as it hadnâ??t happened with the previous tyres!

Upon investigation it turned out that the front was about 10mm higher than the rear, ie a reverse rake and this had been causing me no end of bother! I imagine the reason it become more apparent was the increased height now due to the increased tread depth on the tyres. Whilst we had the wheels off we also took the time to adjust the rose jointed drop links in order to level out the ARB. All in all a good day working on the car and it improved the handling no end!

Fast forward a couple of months and it snowed, well the Falken tyres didnâ??t handle the conditions too well, however it helped me determine that finally my ABS had been fixed after nearly failing the MOT because of lack of a bulb in the dash . All I did was clean CV grease off the sensors and all was fine and dandy. Finally I fitted some new track rod ends because I determined them to be the cause of a knock that I get when turning the wheel when just moving off from stationary. This later appears to be caused by the UV joint that is very close to the exhaust manifold as having sprayed this up very very liberally with grease it appears to of stopped. Having fitted the TREs I went down the garage and had the track set parallel for the tiny sum of 5 quid!

Pictures â??










A random picture of the Rallye slaving the DT to get it moved around the back of the house.


I then progressed onto thinking about stiffening the engine mounts due to a sloppy gear change, especially after full throttle or rapid removal of my foot from the throttle making it hard to get into gear. So I decided using the cheap pattern part mount I found in my shed and some liquid rubber than I have obtained I decide to fill it:-


I still havenâ??t got round to fitting it yet but letâ??s hope it makes a difference and makes it last longer than 5 minutes! Iâ??ve marked it with red to indicate the direction of the larger rubber buffers that everyone says to turn 90 degrees.

Then it was time for the Curborough PSCUK meet and what a fantastic day it was, the weather was a bit wet but all in all it was great to meet some new people and having spent a lot of the day going around the track in a 205 Rally car with a 250Hp Mi16 engine and Marks Rallye I plucked up the courage to get on track myself. It was a great experience and I can hand on heart say that slippy conditions and my inexperience around a track highlighted my need to learn to drive all over again! It was great fun. Below are pictures of the day before, having fitted my new yellow and black badge (which im still not 100% sure about) and a few of me on the small sprint track itself. The blessing in disguise was the bad weather as the tyres were barely scrubbed!