Driving a 1954 Austin-Healey 100/4 from Peking to Paris in the June 2019 ERA Rally.

Friday 15 December 2017

0033 Fuel tanks, sumps and heat shield

7th - 15th December 2017
We continue to add stuff back onto Gidget - Is she getting too heavy ?

✋ Before I start on the blog itself, an unashamed plea for your help !  On this blog you can leave Comments, or you can even become a Follower.  While it is great to see how many people are
reading (and hopefully enjoying) this blog 👀, what makes it so much easier to keep writing and
documenting it all is when we see people posting comments of support 👋 (or otherwise !!) and even becoming an official "Follower" of the blog.  (Just click on the "Post a Comment" section that appears below each post, and follow the prompts.) The only thing that keeps us going (well, maybe not the only thing, but YKWIM) is that we know people are out there cheering us on, and the best way you can do that is to post comments or become a Follower.  Then we become even more enthusiastic ourselves !  So please come on in and join us officially as we proceed on this epic adventure !  TIA.  😊

Wednesday 6 December 2017

0032 Fuel tanks, doors and springs.

28th November - 7th December
Lots of things happening

Works replica tank system
While Andrew continues to work mainly on the body panels, he also worked this week on the additional auxillary fuel tank that we will need.   For those of you who have been reading on here from the start, you will remember that our original idea was to have the additional fuel tank on the side of the main one, with the spare wheel located on the opposite side, similar to the works replica rally cars.  While this is a good arrangement, Ashton and I agreed that it wasn't ideal for us, because with the weight of the spare wheel (22.5 kg in our case) plus the weight of an extra 8 gallons of fuel (27 kg), that would be
Roskill/Cooper tank system
approximately 50 kg hanging out behind the rear axle - Not including the 41 kg weight of the original 12 gallons of fuel.  So instead of this side by side arrangement, we have moved everything forwards, with the spare wheel now up in the centre of the boot, protruding through into the passenger area slightly, but positioned right over the rear axle.  This has then enabled us to design and locate our extra 8 gal tank wherever we want, and the further forward we move this 27 kg the better.  So our design ideas all came together and Andrew has now constructed a basically triangular cross section fuel tank that, by extending the full 1 metre width of the boot space can therefore have its front to back depth minimised, so that the weight is as far forward as possible.  And today Andrew produced his solution.