Which is more than I can say for the dope operating it!

Knowing absolutely nothing about the mill and having not read the manual – so I still don’t know what all the levers do – I had a crack at drilling some holes as a test piece for the ROV sensor attachment points in a gash piece of channel. The digital readout (DRO) was a bit of a revelation once I understood how it worked. There’s an option for ‘absolute’ or ‘accumulative’ measurements. It was set to ‘accumulative’ when I turned it on and it was only after watching a ‘This Old Tony‘ YouTube video that I was alerted to the ‘absolute’ function which saved me having to zero everything all the time. Anyway, the test piece demonstrated that there was a snag with the drawing, so I put my experiment to one side and elected to make holes in some of the parts for real. In my enthusiasm, I forgot to change the drill bit and now 66 of the holes are too big and will need bushing.

Sometimes I wonder why I even get up in the morning because I’m almost certain to add to my catalogue of disasters – though they’re mostly recoverable – and create twice the work. Some 8 x 1mm tube will sort the problem out.

And so, having got the neoprene ‘O’ rings, I started to assemble the MS head. What a blinkin’ game that was! I hadn’t got quite the right setup, but even with the factory tools, I’m not sure it would have been the easiest of tasks. I shall have to compress the springs in stages: the first to align the slots in the valve with the locking collar, and the second, to further compress the springs in order to get the camshaft through the castings. I don’t see how you can confidently do it any other way. Of course, the manual, with cheerful indifference to the amateur mechanic, says that reassembly is the reverse of the disassembly process. That much would be obvious to most.

Some of the tappets didn’t quite screw far enough into the valve stems – over time, the accumulation of carbon deposits would most likely be to blame. Also, the threads on one or two of the tappets looked a bit suspect, but running a die down them would solve the problem. Ha! They’re 28tpi – an unusual size and one not in my collection. Fortunately, the interweb came up trumps but I’ve no way of telling what type of thread it is – BSF, UNF, AF etc – so I’ll either get lucky or have to file them by hand,

A visitor to the workshop was this Fisher Fury, a car completely new to me. I understand that this is one of the early examples; the firm having changed hands several times over the years.

A Lancia twin cam makes the car suitable for properly bad behaviour.

Talking of which, Leon is upgrading his Coventry Climax A7 with a hairy cam. That’ll step out a bit lively.