Restoration: D750 Ford—Part 29
The latest updates on the D750 restoration
After finishing Part 28 last month, I said that maybe if the brake booster came back from the repairers on time, we may have been looking at taking the trip to the testing station in Part 29, which would have been included in this issue.
As last month’s instalment went off to the printers, we were all in high spirits at D Series Ford restoration HQ. The brake booster was away at CRD Automotive with master mechanic Colin Dunn, who in the past has usually been able to fix just about anything that’s had other repairers flummoxed.
My restoration buddy Murray Firth had just finished doing a superb job of fabricating a new exhaust manifold, for which we already had a genuine D Series gasket. Both Murray’s creation and the inlet manifold were already at Machine Part Welding Ltd in Penrose.
Since their business was in the middle of moving the workshop, they did warn me that this could delay things a tad. Their brief was to weld up some tabs on the cast iron inlet manifold and to surface both parts of the manifold unit, which, although wasn’t a big job in the scheme of things, would’ve been a bit tricky to set up.
The ‘Motorcraft’ carburettor had previously been to the surgeon for a makeover, although, I had to make a couple of gaskets that weren’t available off the shelf. To top that all off, the signwriter, Keith Ellis, had found a spare hour or two in which to come over to measure up and to discuss colours, etc.
While he was at it, I asked him to draft some signage for my little 1993 Daihatsu tipper for him to place when he came to do the D signage. With all of this in place and the better part of a month to do it, what could possibly go wrong?
Week 1 came and went, while I felt slightly smug about the way things had finally started to progress after several previous months of one thing after another going wrong. I have to admit that I hardly spent a moment working on the D, preferring to catch up on a load of other jobs that had been waiting in the wings for yonks.
A part of Week 2 was spent putting some plywood cladding on one of the truck ports where I envisage the D will live when it’s finished. It’s the same place where it had waited for a couple of years before its restoration could begin.
By the time Week 3 had come around, I was starting to get a bit nervous, as so far, absolutely nothing had happened, so I busied myself with writing this instalment and filling it with the usual excuses for yet another month of non-performance.
We’d hit a major snag where the brake booster was concerned, with Colin being unable to source some seals, and it was becoming blatantly apparent that we may even have to find a TK Bedford booster or whatever in order to ever get the truck running again.
When I phoned Keith to check if he had made any progress with the signwriting, there was a deathly silence at the other end. We both obviously place quite different connotations on the sentence "there’s no urgency with this one". When I made the comment, I meant that two or three weeks would be okay.
I also phoned Machine Part Welding to see how they were coming along with the manifold. They apologised and said they were running a little bit behind schedule due to moving premises.
Things were looking grim, and I found myself sinking into despair, thinking of what else could go wrong, so I continued writing the story as if we were still almost going backwards.
Here we were with the one restoration that looked like it’d be a relative doddle (FYI to the younger generation, he means straightforward – Ed) but turned into something that would test my mettle at every possible turn since the beginning. I could almost have cried. Well, not quite.
After a good night’s sleep and only a few days to go before the magazine’s deadline, a brighter day dawned when my cell phone rang, and Machine Part Welding said I’d better come and collect my manifold. Things were looking up, as now I could at least get the truck going, even if I couldn’t stop it until the brake booster was sorted.
The joy of getting my manifold back in time was further heightened when I saw the bill that was about half of what I’d imagined it would be. I didn’t waste any time in getting it back to the workshop in order to start assembling the unit and get the old truck running again. As it turned out, there’d be a twofold advantage in having a truck moving again that had been glued to one spot for several months.
The first of these was that it could now be turned around (that is if the handbrake still worked) so the truck could be photographed from a different angle at long last and secondly, because it could be placed to one side of the covered area, it would allow parking space for the previous restoration, the FGK Morris, which has had to be stored elsewhere over the past few months.
I’d like to say that the fitting of the manifold went smoothly but that’d be a lie. It only took a couple of hours working by myself to fit everything to the engine, but when I fired it up, the damn thing ran like a dog with three legs.
Finally, when Murray came back from his lunch break, I asked him to place his hand over the throat of the carby, which seemed to do the trick. While I wasn’t happy with the situation, at least we had somewhere to start; we obviously had a vacuum leak somewhere, so off came the inlet manifold.
Naturally, that all sounds easy when explained in a few words, but everyone knows that’s not the way it works most of the time. Without putting you to sleep with all the details, the upshot of it was that I hadn’t been able to tighten the carburettor/spacer/governor assembly when fitting it all to the manifold while it was still on the truck.
On the second attempt, I was able to fit the unit to the manifold while it was off the truck, thus being able to apply an even purchase on the spanner. While that second method made it more difficult to get the manifold onto the engine, this time round the truck ran a whole lot better. We still have a bit of tuning to do but at least it’s running again.
Oh, I almost forgot. Signwriter Keith phoned to say that he’d been able to get a wriggle on and that he was coming out to place the signwriting. Things were starting to move along.
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