998 mk2

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I have been removing the surface rust and priming this new bonnet everywhere and now it is ready for painting.
I removed the rust with a rotating Siliciumcarbide wheel on a drill, I then applied rust converter and when that had dried I painted it with hamerite rust primer and finished with a regular red spray primer. Inside the bonnet structure I used compressed air to get as much dirt and paint and rust flakes out and then sprayed with red primer. I have also decided to get it professionally painted in the hope that it will stay rust free for a long time.

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the last week or so the car has been running fine but wouldn't sustain 60mph but would briefly go as quickly as you wanted but then cut out and die. I suspected the mechanical fuel pump which is rather old and was just about the order a new one when I remembered that I had cleaned the carburettor a couple of years ago when it was clogged with dirt in the float bowl and at that time I had put a small inline fuel filter on the car. This filter was totally clogged I hardly could blow air through it so I changed it and this fixed the problem

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the bonnet is back from the painters and fitted and it looks really nice. I wish the whole car looked this good

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yet an other rear subframe mounting change on this car. those cheap ebay ones seem to fail more often than I am used to. anyway, I have run out of mk2 rear subframe mounts and we are going on vacation the day after tomorrow so I fixed a mount temporary like this.

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We are in sweeden on holliday which is nice and we are driving in two cars due to all the kids we have, me in the 75 and her in this metro. On the motorway up here i looked at the speedo and we were doing 90mph so i called my girlfriend on the walkie and asked what rpm she was doing and she answered 4750. Maybe we should slow down a bit:-) the car did 30mpg fully loaded on the way up here which i think is ok

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so I have been reading a book called the SU carburetor high-performance manual by des hammill and its very good so I wanted to try some of the things mentioned in there and make a new needle to use in this car, so started fiddling with it and noticed that the jet did not move up and down along with the mixture adjustment screw so I had to start by taking the carb appart and free a seized jet.

an other thing I wanted to do was to clean out the rust and loose kit from the roof gutter and rustproof, paint and re-kit the gutter.

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we went to Sweden for our summer holiday and we met this guy in the first picture

here is a picture of my trying to make a new needle suitable to run the carburettor with out spring and oil.
I did achieve this, but since it will be my girlfriends car I don't think it will be practical for her to drive a car with the carburettor set up that way because it will use more fuel, and I felt it was more difficult to get it started when it was warm.
also, sadly I don't have rolling road or a transportable lambda or co measuring device so I cant measure if I have actually hit the mark with this new needle so I set the carb back the way it was when I had it on a rolling road so that I am sure not to burn any valves. But I will bring this setup along if I go to a rolling road again with this car to have it checked.

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so I have been doing a bit of playing around with the idea of have the nitrogen side of hydragas elements recharged as described other places and now I have begun. I have found a par of spare rear hydragas cans and fitted valves to one of them. welding them so that they hold the pressure is not as easy as you might think time will tell just how good my welds hold pressure.

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look what I bought from ralph! stainless hand brake brackets and individualizing valves. its going to be part of my slowly developing rear subframe upgrade and renovation.

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took out the brake servo and took i apart, cleaned and re-greased it (also the bit you cannot see in the picture), put it back together and put it back in the car. Those three under dash bolts are not positioned in an easily reachable position. And annoyingly I still don't think it boost as much as it should.