curved dash

[Awentsbury@aol.com]

Hi John,
Greetings from Birmingham,
I was going to use the Curve dash Olds a few weeks ago , it  ran well on the 
saturday prior to the event but was tight on the Sunday morning  .
I tried to free it up with little effect so I decided to see  what was 
hapening in the gears where the problem was .
I have never looked at the gears and I thought it was worth  finding out what 
state they were in .
I took the body off and after disconecting just about  everything managed to 
get at the gears .
I had to use a puller to pull the gears off the crank shaft ,  the gears had 
been running dry and the dust must have made the shaft go tight ,  now it has 
been off it slides back on and off very easly .
The gears are all in a very good state and all the bushings  seem fine , I 
did not realise how much oil was needed for these gears , it looks  like you 
could half fill the gears with oil up to the crank shaft, at least a  pint of oil.
the reverse gear filler tube was missing so I will have to  make one so it is 
easy to oil it .
As the gears will be fine I thought I should take the head off  to have a 
look at the state of the piston and rings , there is burnt carbon in  the crank 
case , I would think that there must be gas getting past the rings ,  or is 
this carbon to be expected ?
I may also look at doing a conversion on the valves to make it  easier to set 
the clearence`s , What valve clearence do you use  ?
If the clearence is not that critical I may just bend the  arms a bit .
My flywheel meaures 50 inch in circumference , the correct  ones are about 65 
inches , but as i do not have an alternative at the moment i  will just stay 
with this one , some of use are thinking of casting a few correct  flywheels .
All the best ,
Ian Kerr .