Richard Black
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Posts posted by Richard Black
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To the OP - why exactly do you want to upgrade the brakes? Don't they stop the car properly? You normally only need to upgrade brakes when you have upgraded the engine significantly, or if you are going to be racing the car. Otherwise upgrade something that will make a real difference, like suspension.
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All the Estelle engines I've ever run are perfectly happy on regular unleaded. I've had various failures but none of the kind normally associated with unleaded petrol in an unsuitable engine.
In my experience, the 130 is the least reliable engine. Because the land between barrels is a bit narrow and the head is iron, differential thermal expansion causes gasket failure much more often than on the 120 where the land is wider. I've never had a gasket failure on a 135 engine (never had a 136 though I don't see why it would differ much from a 135 in that respect). The 105 engine puts out so little power that it will run forever - which is just as well as it _takes_ forever to get you anywhere.
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I owned 4 Estelles and checked the speedo in all of them on the motorway (the 0.1km markers on UK motorways are pretty accurate and can be used for speed checking on a deserted stretch). I don't recall the figures but the speedos weren't very good. However the rev counter was much better, so I just memorised the correlation between revs in 3rd, 4th and 5th gears and used that to calculate real speed.
Bear in mind that most speedos on European cars over-read slightly by design anyway.
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I wouldn't want to take much more than half a mm off a head, ideally. The stroke on that engine is about 75mm and the compression ratio roughly 10:1, so the height above the piston at TDC will be about 7.5mm. Take 0.7mm off and you've already raised the compression ratio to 11:1. I haven't got a head here to look at but from memory you shouldn't have trouble with waterways, they're considerably deeper than that. I once had a whole 1mm taken off a Skoda 130 head which was badly warped, and although it didn't last very long (the rest of the engine was pretty knackered, frankly) it didn't break any waterways.
But you might be surprised how little needs skimming off. A 'very rough' surface my well have irregularities of well under 0.5mm. I'd take it to a good engineering shop and ask what they reckon, simple as that.
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I'd suggest buying a proper brake spanner the right size for the Felly
Yes!!! Don't go near a brake job without one of those.
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No idea what a garage would charge, but rear brake cylinders are not expensive and are easy to replace - the only hard part (sometimes) is undoing the brake pipe union. I swear by Plus Gas (dismantling lubricant) sprayed on a couple of minutes before you apply the spanner. I think I paid about £10 last time I bought one.
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Speaking from experience - a Favorit strut is the same as a Felicia one except for one tiny detail. The Felicia version has a little support welded on for the ABS sensor cable. So a Felly strut will fit a Fav, while a Fav strut will fit a Felly as long as you bodge something for that cable.
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Well congratulations on swapping the stereo. Notoriously, anything involving audio kit in cars is typically both fiddly and fraught - I speak as someone who's au fait with both mechanics and electronics. (Though as a musician I feel no need for music in a car and consequently have largely avoided car audio in 20-plus years of car ownership.)
Minor issue - just been to Asda, and "Cutie" kept cutting out. When idling, the revs were bouncing up and down, and it cut out twice. Also, whilst reversing into the parking space, it cut out again. Could the battery be on the way out, or does it just need a journey longer than 15 minutes to give it a chance to juice up??That could be caused by various things but NOT the battery, nor its state of charge. As an invariable rule, if the battery is good enough to start the car - any car ever made! - it's more than good enough to run it. Given the work you've just done, I'd hazard a guess you may have disturbed some wiring related to the ignition and introduced an intermittent circuit break somewhere along the line. You'd better assume that 'upside down under the dash' position again and look for wires in danger of spontaneous disconnection.
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after 22 years is still on its original clutch
That says as much about you - i.e. you know how to drive - as about the car!
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Or you could think backwards instead of forwards and get a Skoda Estelle engine prepped up for rallying. Folks used to get 100HP+ out of the 120 lump. This forum will be the place to find one!
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didn't they end up making the later heads out of alloy as well?
Yes, the 135 and 136 engines, which migrated into the Favorit and Felicia, were basically the same bottom end with an 8-port alloy head. My experience with 120, 130 and 135 engines suggests that while the 120 is a nice rugged thing, the 130 reduced the gap between the cylinders (remember that the increase of capacity from 1050 to 1300 was achieved entirely by bore, not stroke) to the point where the differential thermal expansion between head and block made the head gaskets unreliable. The alloy head solved that and I've never had to replace a gasket on a 135 (never owned a 136).
Mind you, gasket life in Estelles wasn't helped by their propensity to overheat. I never quite understood why they were so keen to do it - I had problems of that nature with all of mine, except that one that got crumped after only a few weeks. Perhaps it was just a bit of everything - complicated cooling system with lots of hoses, hotspotting in the 5-port head causing local boiling, poor water pump placement.... I've blamed all of those on various occasions but never though any of them could be a the sole cause.
there is such a thing as a linered cast iron blockThose were generally pretty rare, though something in the back of my mind tells me Jaguar used them at one time. But apart from anything else, I'd expect an iron liner in an iron block to rust solid after a few years and make replacement a complete nightmare. It's usually hard enough shifting the liners out of an alloy block. Anybody any experience?
And anyway I'm glad enough that the Skoda lump was alloy. It made it a one-man job to get in and out (and I'm no Charles Atlas). Even the smallest iron lumps are beyond all but the most muscly, realistically, without lifting tackle.
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A good friend, Mike, used to live in South Herts and run an MGB. He used to cop a lot of the same attitude you describe. On one memorable occasion in Kings Langley some guy went as far as to get out of his car and give Mike grief - Mike (who was a meaty so-and-so and well capable of looking after himself) calmly looked up at the guy and said 'Just 'cos I'm wearing a suit and driving a vintage motor doesn't make me a pushover, and just 'cos you're thick and ugly and live in a s***-hole doesn't make you hard.' Given I was practically convulsed with laughter in the passenger seat, it was surprising how fast the guy got back in his car and vanished.
He also had a nice line in irony. One time we were overtaken, pointlessly and noisily, by something really pokey, Cosworth Sierra or Audi Quattro of whatever (this would have been the early 90s). Mike commented (to no one in particular since the other driver obviously couldn't hear), 'Congratulations! You have just overtaken me using nothing other than your wits, your skill, and a MUCH more powerful car.' I think of that in a philosophical way every time someone does that to me!
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A friend and I have just finished building a kent engine for his classic racing Anglia. Original 45bhp on 1.2 now with bored and stroked block to just under 2.0ltr siames block offset valves roller rockers and lightened pushrods steel crank and rods etc... engine was dyno'd at 224 bhp.
That's quite a feat on a Kent, respect is due! A mate of mine had one up to about 150HP and that was pretty wild in a Mk 2 Escort.
But nothing happens till 4500 all the way up to 8000 rpmThis is always the drawback and the reason why you need a steel crank (cos a cast iron one will fall apart at 8k, innit). But it does make the point that one of the easiest ways to 'uprate' the power of any engine is to rev the bejasus off it. You wouldn't believe some of the cars I've burned off at the lights in my completely standard 1.3 Favorit just by dint of changing gear later than the other guy.
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Yes, could easily be the ignition switch, or it could possibly be something that did for the turn indicators in my Fav - a broken solder joint on the circuit board that carries the relays. The board is a pig to get out (you have to stand on your head in the passenger footwell and negotiate your arm into an unnatural angle to undo screws) but reflowing all the solder joints takes little enough time if you're used to soldering.
Have you got any kind of test meter? That's your best friend in this kind of situation.
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Got the old clutch cable off by letting the headlight bulb dangle in the engine bay.
Ha ha, that's brilliant! One to remember for night-time emergencies.
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I cant remember offhand where my mechanic jacks the car
Probably somewhere unsuitable. Many of them seem to. The live axle of my Fav, for instance, even has a sticker on it warning against using it as a jacking point, but the last tyre place I went to cheerfully stuck the jack under there. And to be fair it did no damage. I usually stick my trolley jack under the lower strut mounting, front and rear - gets the wheel off the road quickly and you can be sure it's load-bearing. Once the car is up at the front, axle stands go under the rear mounting bush for the suspension arm-wing-thingy (sorry, it's too late at night for correct terminology). Again, guaranteed load-bearing, and a suitable shape for the top of an axle stand. Can't remember where I support the back of the car, I almost never seem to need to jack it up.
I never use sills to jack any car unless I have to and the car is obviously nearly new - I grew up with cars that were held together by rust!
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Failing the above suggestions, the bushes are in the catalogue of some shock-absorber suppliers so your local motor factor _should_ be able to get them. Mine did.
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I've used 'Seek'n'Seal' (from Comma) on several more or less rusty old motors, windscreens and sunroofs, over the years. It's ever so cheap (£5 tin treats at least a dozen cars and it seems to have indifferent shelf life), ever so easy to apply and works well.
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Trouble with selling that kind of car is that it's much more fun to do the mods than just buy them. I'd love to do a project like that, but buy one? No way! Even though, if you reckon your time is worth anything at all, it could easily cost the best part of 13 biguns by the time you're done. But then I'd also want to drive the thing when I was done. Did you clock the mileage quoted for that? 13600 in 10 years? Someone's left it on the drive for months at a stretch, looks like.
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Like Hawkeracing said, a bike-engined car ain't likely to be a road-going proposition. Looked into this one time with a mate, and we soon enough realised that the bike engines rely on monster revs to get the power: the torque at everyday revs is nothing that remarkable, TBH. Now a 'Blade engine will put out well over 100BHP, but it does it at screaming revs and it won't sit there for all that long without blowing up. Most motorbikes spend most of their life cruising waaaaay below the red line (I know all the showoff bikers boast about riding their machines at 180mph every weekend but if that's true, how come in 21 years I've had a driving licence I've never seen a single bike doing anywhere near that speed?), putting out realistically 30 or 40BHP with just momentary peaks of 100+BHP when overtaking, popping a wheelie or whatever.
Put a bike engine in a car and race it by all means, but you'll be doing a fair bit of engine-out maintenance!
Ive seen a Fiat 126 with a Fireblade engineHoly c***! There surely can't have been much original 126 running gear left?
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ok, send me a ferrari dash and i'll do it
Good call, dude. OK, I'll just get some of the local lively lads to sort me a Fezza - any other bits you want while we're at it?
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since when has wrong mounting points or something not fitting ever stopped me
RIGHT! I want to see photos of that car with an ASTON MARTIN dash fitted! Failing that, cos to be fair I know AM's don't lie in every scrappie, I'll settle for a Ferrari dash.....
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No, it's not worth spending any money - unless, I suppose, you think you're likely to sit with the engine off and the electrics on for a long time, or are in the habit of forgetting to turn the lights off when you park at night! An 063 battery in good condition will give you ages on the starter with a Favorit, even in the cold. If it takes more than a couple of cranks to start (injection or carburettor model), it's simply a sign that you need to do some maintenance anyway!
I even used to drive a 1700 diesel with an 063 battery in it - that's probably twice the cranking requirement of a Favorit. Still managed OK, and on one occasion when a fuel line died I was able to drive the car a few tens of yards on the starter to get it off the highway.
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150 miles on a tank? That's 15mpg! You're looking for something badly, horribly wrong there. Like, as someone already said, big-time petrol leak - though you'd probably have smelled that by now. Those clearances may not be ideal (I can't remember for sure either) but they're good enough to get you running sensibly, so that's not it. Nor the air filter, unless it's completely fallen apart and blocked the throttle body or something. Fuel pump? Possible, though unlikely, I'd say. In theory it could be one, or even two cylinders not firing but it would be dog-rough if that were happening. Probably wouldn't even start, anyway.
Most likely, I suppose, is that for some reason the injection system is squirting far too much fuel in, so you're effectively running on full choke all the time. I've never fixed an injection system - anyone any specific suggestions?
Hot Valve Clearance
in Skoda Favorit, Skoda Felicia, Skoda Fun and Skoda Forman
Posted · Edited by Richard Black
Tonny, the reason they specify valve clearance for cold only is that you can only set them once! So _either_ hot _or_ cold will get them set for you (in any car) and either way you'll just have to leave them where they are.
I can't think why incorrectly set valves could cause mayo. They could cause loss of power, getting rapidly worse as the valve seats burn away, but mayo is usually a symptom of head gasket failure unless it's just due to the car driving mostly short distances in a cold climate (so not in your case then!) or possibly a failed core plug