SOS - Broken down in Whitby

[44DHR]

Well done Hugo and Heuer for showing how we as an E Type community can assist each other !
A good result all round and hopefully of benefit to others planning an extended trip.
Regards,
Dave

[Heuer]

Unfortunately most of the advice was done by email although I did ask David Busby to post in the thread I started for the benefit of others. He was about to give up and have the car transported back to Dover which would have been a miserable return trip by truck. I suggested he contact John at Meadowfield Garage in Whitby on the Monday morning to see if he would be able to assist:
http://www.webart.co.uk/clients/meadowfieldsgarage/

Not heard any more from him although he is returning to Dover today, hopefully under his own steam. If he emails me on his return I will post how the saga unfolded.

[Hugo]

I occurred to me (correctly as it turned out) that he might not be reading the Forum posts, so I texted him with some suggestions that I had posted on here earlier. He texted me back on Monday afternoon to say he was back on the road - he had found a local garage "like Steptoe's yard" that found a 7/8" seal on the shelf & fitted it. He didn't try my recipe for olive oil though, which was a disappoinntment, as I reckon it would have got him mobile straight away & I was curious to see if it worked.

[Heuer]

Yes, that was probably the Classic Car specialist I pointed him towards although the owner may not be overly impressed with the Steptoe description It is only a couple of miles from where he was staying.

Not sure you should be sating your curiosity on the effectiveness of olive oil on someone stranded with a 400 mile trip on front of them though. If it failed the repair costs would have brought a smile to the face of any garage owner. "So you used olive oil in the hydraulics (sharp intake of breath through clenched teeth) eh? It will need a complete new system - hoses, pipes, slave, master, bottle. All contaminated you see. Ah, so you went on a Forum did you - bloody amateurs!"

Maybe the trick would work in extremis but best to suggest it from experience rather than speculation IMHO.

[Hugo]

I am! (talking from experience). Works very nicely. Olive oil is not going to hurt anything, is it. Another thing I discovered on the same topic - I had a coach with a hydraulic throttle some years ago. I was running it on silicone brake fluid, and it started leaking. As a stop-gap I topped it up with 'normal' brake fluid. Eventually the silicone fluid leaked out and was replaced by the bog-standard stuff I was pouring in. And the leak stopped completely. I ran that vehicle for many more years and never did change the seals.

[paydase]

I am! (talking from experience). Works very nicely. Olive oil is not going to hurt anything, is it. Another thing I discovered on the same topic - I had a coach with a hydraulic throttle some years ago. I was running it on silicone brake fluid, and it started leaking. As a stop-gap I topped it up with 'normal' brake fluid. Eventually the silicone fluid leaked out and was replaced by the bog-standard stuff I was pouring in. And the leak stopped completely. I ran that vehicle for many more years and never did change the seals.

I have Dot5 in my circuit, so good to know (dunno if it's a joke, though )

[DavidBusby]

As the guy who actually broke down in Whitby last week I would like to thank all the people that offered help over the slave cylinder problem.
Having driven the car for over 100 miles from Northumberland to Whitby without a clutch and with a Tremac 5 speed gearbox that just froze whatever revs were applied to try and change gear, it was an horrendous drive. I can confirm that a series 1 E-type can be started on the battery in third gear with a little patience and it makes roundabouts and traffic lights a bit of fun. The story was made even worse by having the handbrake fail on the outward journey from Dover (prior to the slave cylinder failure) so the 100 miles without the clutch was also made without a handbrake! I had just had new Coopercraft Brakes fitted and surprisingly one of the handbrake pads apparently fell out or disintegrated.
I will just say that my E-type is very well maintained and no expense is spared on keeping it in tip top condition and these two problems could not have been foreseen.
However, the problems didn't stop once I had got into the hotel car park in Whitby. I booked the RAC to collect the car first thing on the Monday morning and they failed to turn up. The hotel had no mobile signal unless you climbed a grass bank in the car park and held the mobile phone high. The RAC, in my opinion, provided a very poor service and left me waiting on the grass bank from 9am until they finally arrived at around 12.15pm and if I tried to call them the phone just rang for over 35 minutes before it was answered.
In the end, the only way I could get them to come out was to tell them to cancel the call out to a local garage in Whitby and to change it to them recovering the car all the way back to Dover - That seemed to do the trick but I found their service badly lacking and will never use them again.
In the end, the man who owned the local garage in Whitby was extremely friendly and helpful and changed the seal and we were off after about 2 hours.
The car is booked in tomorrow for new engine and gearbox mountings, slave cylinder and handbrake pads.
Thanks again for all those helpful suggestions.

[Hugo]

Never rains but it pours, innit! Just for reference, a modern synchromesh gearbox will offer resistance to the lever commensurate with how much rotating force is applied to the synchro hub. In other words, the greater the mis-match between the speed of the synchro hub (driven by the back wheels) and the speed of the mainshaft gear it is aiming for (driven by the engine), the more 'solid' the lever will feel. Once you match the engine revs precisely to the output shaft revs, it will just drop into gear, clutch or no clutch, just as it will when everything is at rest. Having said that, it is extremely tricky to get the revs just right, or anywhere near right on a lively six cylinder, without a clutch. It's easy on an old crash gearbox because they have very coarse dog-teeth for engagement, and if the revs are anywhere near right it will snick into gear, but synchro hubs have very fine teeth so there's not much room for error. I'm not in any way faulting you for not being able to pull it off, but for the record I am just saying it is mehcanically perfectly possible.
When I took my motorcycle test a hundred years ago on an old hand-gearchange BSA, the clutch cable had seized solid overnight. I had to drive all the way to the test centre with no clutch, leaning across the tank & changing gear with my left hand while juggling the throttle with my right. To get it going I had to get it idling in neutral, then run alongside till I could drop it into first gear at about 5 mph! I thought I was going to have to take my test like that, but, mercifully, by the time I came out of the waiting room, the Holts penetrating oil I had poured down the cable had done its work. Ah, them was the days! Clutch seals? Pah!

[paydase]

David,
Surprised that the starter was strong enough to crank and start your car in third gear, second already looked to me challenging!
Also roundabouts and traffic lights in third...
Anyway, good to know you made it. Next time don't forget olive oil

[Hugo]

Agreed. I meant to say the same. 2nd would be better, & still give you a reasonable turn of speed. Just an afterthought, if you were to memorise the road speeds at tickover in the various gears, you might stand a better chance of getting up through the gears without a clutch. So if it idles at 20mph in 3rd gear, take it up to that speed in 2nd, drop the revs to idle & it might drop into 3rd. The theory is probably better than the practice howevere!

[DavidBusby]

Guys, I used to race moto-cross so do know just a little bit about changing gears without a clutch!
I would just say try it on a new Tremac 5 speeder!
Seems that you have all overlooked the fact that the car has a 5 speed gearbox so 3rd gear is a lower ratio than on a standard gearbox so no, it was not better to crank it over and start in 2nd gear unless you are going to be driving on slow country roads and not a stretch of dual carriageway.

[Hugo]

I had not overlooked it - but the lower 3rd gear in a 5 spd is still pretty damn high! I would have thought it would shake the exhaust to bits and put excessive strain on the crank. Starting a car in gear without a clutch is a stressful procedure (for the car I mean!), and the higher the gear, the greater the stresses. Still, it seemed to work for our correspondent.

[Hugo]

Guys, I used to race moto-cross so do know just a little bit about changing gears without a clutch!

Would that be with a crash box? I thought about fitting a Quaife non-synchro box to my little Rover 200 Vi runabout (which is a stunning little car by the way), but it's a lot of money just so I can have fun with gear changes.

[DavidBusby]

What a shame that what started as a request for help in locating a clutch slave cylinder or local garage in Whitby that could help get an E-type back on the road has turned out to be such a critical backlash on driving capabilities from people that just weren't there to know what they are talking about! ENOUGH SAID - SUBJECT CLOSED!.

[Hugo]

I don't think anybody was being critical of anybody's driving abilities. I certainly wasn't, as I made clear.

[Hugo]

I don't think anybody was being critical of anyone's driving abilities. I certainly wasn't, as I made clear. I was just explaining the mechanical principles at work.