Post
by 44DHR » Tue Jun 21, 2011 8:38 pm
A little tale about my recent experience in France over the May Bank Holiday and a clutch slave cylinder. Sorry Paul, I had to do this with the French and the Slave cylinder connection.
I took my 1967 Series 1 FHC over to France for the Historic Sprint around Laon in France at the end of May this year. I went with Continental Car Tours and they organised the ferry, hotels and sprint entry very well. It is about 150 miles from Calais and 50 miles into the trip I lost all my clutch fluid and had no clutch. We were driving in a group down on B roads to enjoy the French countryside and it was a very hot day when the group got lost in a small town and we were getting hot in the car repeatedly stopping and starting in the town.
Driving with no clutch is very concerning when you come up to a junction and have to pull the car out of gear - if you can !! To start, I then had to try to find 2nd gear, (again can be difficult) and push the starter button and off we went - whether you want to or not !!! Drove 100 miles like this to the hotel in Laon on Friday night. I took off the Slave cylinder - only two nuts on the Gearbox bellhousing and removed it in the hotel car park.
On Saturday my mates to drove me to the local Carrefour and they had a "Kwikfit type tyre fitting service. The local fitter helped me to blow out the metal piston which had the damaged seal behind. The slave cylinder was the 95mm long unit, rather than the earlier 80mm sort and although only a few years old, the bore was corroded and I think the car had got so hot that the seal had caught on the rough bore as I pushed it down so far in the heat and it bent back to damage the seal.
After we found the internal parts - as the fitter has shot the parts out all around the workshop, when I looked at the tiny seal, the edge was OK, but it had a tiny pinprick of a hole in towards the centre of the seal. On the logic that once installed in the bore the seal wasn't going anywhere, I bought a 2 Euro bicycle puncture repair kit in Carrefour. Back at the hotel, with the seal cleaned up with nail varnish remover, the bicycle patch was applied to the inside of the seal and the whole lot refitted into the cylinder.
First the spring, then the plastic retainer which the seal fits over, then the metal piston that the pushrod bears against. All fitted on Sunday morning and all worked fine !! Did the sprint around the old walled town of Laon on the Sunday and had a great time.
On the way back on the Bank holiday Monday stopped off en route to Calais at Arras for lunch. Again another hot day and slowly the clutch started going again. Limped to Calais and onto the ferry. It is so difficult queued in Bank Holiday traffic at a ferry port with no clutch to safely start the car. Off the ferry at Dover and drove another 150 miles all the way from Dover to Portsmouth and over on the ferry to the Isle of Wight and home. I now know every single traffic light on that route as you have to plan your way through them when you have no clutch. Still at least I wasn't stuck in France awaiting on parts - as calling the ever helpful SNG Barratts back in the UK on the Saturday, their French branch which would open on the Monday, the UK could tell me that they only had the 80mm unit, but not the 95mm unit which would not have left the UK due to the Bank Holiday until Tuesday. I probably would not have got the part until Wednesday at the earliest and then would have had to drive back to try to get a ferry on the Thursday, so extra hotels, ferry fares etc, plus time off work.
We are driving down to Monaco for the Historic next year - I will make sure I take some spare seals as such a small part can cause so much of a problem !! We love our cars !!!!
). The rest is fairly easy to learn lthough on cold tyres it's easy to overcook the first left hander.