SU rebuild

I received the carburettor rebuild kit from Andrew Turner late last week, so some of the weekend was spent the Spitfire. The first job was to remove the carbs and put them in the ultrasonic cleaner for about 20 minutes, using the hottest temperature possible along with a sprinkling of dishwasher powder. This really cleaned them up well and made the rest of the rebuild much easier.

The rebuild kit included new bushes for the throttle spindles, though when I removed the old spindles I found that there was minimal ware in the carb body, instead all the ware was in the throttle spindles.
A few years ago I changed the jet bearing and jet on one of the carbs as it was leaking petrol, but I never got round to replacing the other, but this has also been done now, just as well as the new jet bearing kit has a finer thread, making equal mixture settings on the two carbs much easier.
Also in the kit was new fuel needle valves, which had started to fail, well they are probably 30 odd years old.


That exhaust manifold I fitted a few weeks back has been blowing ever since I fitted it, no surprise really considering the crappy exhaust clamps supplied. So last week I ordered and received some Mikalor exhaust clamps, at less than £2 each they are not much more expensive than those tube crusher "U" clamps and can give a much more universal pressure on the exhaust joint. I got mine from Power Engineering