My Nephew Jake said it was a racing car, though not a Ferrari. He has a battery powered Ferrari 430 sit in thing. Everyone's car is "good but not a 'rarrri" now

FYI, I just looked at the picture on the first page. The house just by where you picked it up is the birth place of comic legend Ronnie Barker.

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Me and my girlfriend have just laughed at this alot...
Awesome read mate...

Tom.

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Thomas - Black 6 rollin' on black 15's...
197bhp - 155.8bhp/135.4ft-lb atw

Just for the purposes of posterity, the button on the steering column is apparently something to do with the ultrasonics, so I'd leave it in if you're planning on keeping the alarm.



In saying that, I'm not even sure this car *has* an alarm. Oh well. Nothing to nick out of it anyway except from a dirty pair of latex gloves.

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Steering column button disables the ultrasonics in case you leave a dog in the car but still wan't to lock it (or more likely the f*cking ultrasonics are broken and always go off for no reason )

Good read

Maybe you could also fashion a small credit card holder on the wing, and and have the pin written down the side in bright 'racing' decals! have that, temperamental memory!!

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Rallye-R

Nurburgring article

Boooo, strut brace is here but no bolts yet so I can't have a play with that.

I have at least finally invested in a decent ½" Teng socket set from Screwfix, the crappy one I've got at the moment will be useless at sorting big siezed bolts on the suspension, so had to bite the bullet there. Also got some torx bits.

Clumsily, I just ordered an oil cooler kit off eBay. I think that's all the major purchases done for the car really which is excellent, as much as it's dull I do have a mortgage to pay.

Although I don't have any of the suspension components yet I might have a bash at dismantling then rebuilding the suspension tonight just to get an idea of what's involved.

Watch this space...

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Is there a prize for "Most Random Fact Added to An Excellent and Funny Thread"?
There is.. and this wins
EDIT- subscribed!

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New Forum same high quality intellectual debate!
Team Zimmer™

The spring things are for balancing the braking force on the rear wheels iirc. I belive its a very common problem for them to seize up on the 306 and my MOT tested commented that mines the first one which he has seen to be working
The sliders on the rear calipers allow you to remove the pads without having to undo the two bolts.
Nice project

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Goldie the track car.

2 spring things are part of the brake compensator, and they always seize up.

Torsion bars, undo the torx end (chances are it'll round off so use a impact driver), then remove the offset washer which will be rusted to the arm and be a c*nt to remove. Undo the nut on the other end. Then the fun comes actually trying to remove the bar. You can use a slide hammer which may work, make up a puller of sorts which again may work, or most likely smash the trailing arm off and then put it in a press to push the bar out.

As for the brakes, you don't need to dismantle the caliper at all! Just remove the metal bar at the bottom and the springs (the metal bar usually requires a fair bit of hammering with a punch to get it moving, copper grease it when you reassemble) then the pads just lift out and you can then remove the disc. When you refit you need to wind the piston back in, it won't just push back.

HTH

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Seat Leon Cupra FR / 306 GTI6 / Breaking 205 GTI6 / Caterham 7 / Mercedes Sprinter 311CDI LWB

Sold: Fisher Fury - Laguna DCI Estate - P1 306 XSI - E30 BMW 325i Baur Convertible - Daihatsu Fourtack - Suzuki GSXR600 - 205 Rallye

The offset washer sits in a groove in the trailing arm to lock the torsion bar up tight. So you have to move it up into the center of the hole to get it out, to enable you to actually get the bars out. They always rust badly into the groove.

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Seat Leon Cupra FR / 306 GTI6 / Breaking 205 GTI6 / Caterham 7 / Mercedes Sprinter 311CDI LWB

Sold: Fisher Fury - Laguna DCI Estate - P1 306 XSI - E30 BMW 325i Baur Convertible - Daihatsu Fourtack - Suzuki GSXR600 - 205 Rallye

Right, calipers have had about five coats of Hammerite now, so they're looking smooth and nice enough. Bit of an improvement methinks. Before:



And after:



Far from perfect but should stop them getting caked in crap again any time soon. Wheels back on and all looks very nice:



At some point I'll probably pick up some spare calipers and refurb them properly, but alas time and skill are not on my side right now. Does anyone know how you go about removing the entire caliper from the car? It seems to have a steel brake line going into it, I'm only used to brakes with rubber hoses attaching them.

The blister on my thumb from sanding down the calipers is close to rupturing.

Had a quick drive to make sure all was working, they're okay but I definitely need to bleed the brakes out this week, the air/water mixture that seems to be filling the hydraulics doesn't exactly seem to be meeting the 5.1 standard.

Everything under the car is completely horrible and covered in rust, so I'm really dreading playing with the suspension this week. If anyone wants to come over and do it all for me, I'll happily provide you a cup of tea.

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The missus is out at Pizza Express - sounds like an excuse for some carage. Gear linkages and strut bolts also arrived (cheers Swampy and Miles(?)).

It's important at this point that you nearly schoolboy and fit the strut brace first, which would be sitting right where you need to get in order to do the linkages. Realise just in time, move along. So these linkages:

What a monsterous pain in the ass they are. New ones - brilliant. Well machined, easy to fit. Old ones - rotting old European tat. The two smaller ones were bad enough, but managed to get those out by ramming a 10mm (of course) spanner underneath them to pop them off.

But holy mumma, that long one. One end has nothing to lever against, the other end has very little access. Not only that, but if you're lucky there'll be a big alarming bang at one point. We'll leave that be, and hope for the best.

Eventually I managed to remove the nearside end by grabbing it with an adjustable spanner and twisting it off. I then unscrewed the rod and after generally swearing and bleeding a lot managed to loop the end of a ring spanner over the other end and pull it back on itself until it popped off, allowing my arm to scrape further along something sharp.

Eventually got the little shitters on, so thought I'd check how the stick felt now.

Oh good, it's flopped over backwards and just wobbles around like a p*ssed-up tramp. Ideal. Let's have a look at that.

Turns out the always-harmless bang that came from the gearbox was simply some kind of thing, that another thing goes into. I had to remove one end of the linkage then dick around a bit, but managed to get it in without any bother. Have another go with the stick, all now seems fine. Not as much of an improvement as I'd have hoped if I'm honest.

Not really sure why I took a picture, but still - it's something shiny.



I've devised a new scale for measuring these jobs - it's called the BS, or the Ballache Scale. To estimate it, you multiply its [D]ifficulty on a scale of 1-10 by its [C]ost, also on a scale of 1-10. Multiply that by the amount of [T]ime taken for the job in hours, and you've got its BS value. Ideally a job would be Simplicity 1, Cost 1 and Time 1, giving you a BS of 1, which is as good as they get. An engine swap, for another example would be cost 6 maybe, simplicity 8 and time maybe 8 - so that'd be a BS of 384. I'll reserve fitting superchargers and turbos for the 10's.

So for the linkages I'd say difficulty 3, cost 2 and about an hour's work. That's a BS of 6. Not bad going at all.

Next for the strut brace, simple simple job except for the holes not quite lining up on the OMP brace, but then that's just par for the course when it comes to aftermarket parts. Because of this you'll never be entirely sure whether you're tightening the bolts or simply cutting a new thread - either way it's going in so let's not lose too much sleep there.



All done - C3, D1, T1 = BS of 3. Let's take the car for a quick drive to see how it goes.

Holy cow, now that's what I call understeer.

Nearly managed to spin on a roundabout, which is always excellent. Massive understeer which then caught and sent me back the other way, just managed to steer it back on course. Yes the roads are pretty wet today and my tyres are only budgets but still, fresh pants all round. To be fair to the car I've never had it in the proper wet yet and it's still on the standard suspension, so we'll reserve judgement for now. However if my new suspension isn't on before Oulton Park in a couple of weeks I'll be taking that brace back off.

Tomorrow I should be eventually getting a new clutch cable after the couriers ECP use "couldn't find my house" so decided it best to just not say anything and wait five days for me to call them up, despite ECP having both my home and mobile phone numbers.

There's only room for one idiot round here.

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Gear linkage is a b*tch to do, it should tighten it up a little with the new one, though tbh the box didn’t feel a whole world of different to any low mile model I’ve driven. That said, the gap between driving one with 100k less and that one is a good few years.

Check the roof seal. The roof was definitely fine when I had it, I’m sure it rained hard while I was in Germany and Helen was using it as a daily drive. Maybe a seal or perhaps not correctly closed?

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