its a 1980 Reliant Scimitar GTE se6, which has a 3.0l v6 ford essex engine (same as ford granada), automatic transmission, electric windows, and all that usual stuff for this year of car.
we bought it from the guy that sold the ferrari to mike on wheeler dealers, the guy that sold it to us runs a buisness in london in which he hire out classic cars.
anyway, it was advertised as non running, due to a broken distributor driveshaft, which was not true, as we found out, lol.
here she is, this was when we first got her.
as you can see, she looks quite respectable on the outside, normally due to the bodies being fibreglass, their full of cracks and crazing etc, but this one isnt, and is still in its original colour, paprika. As can be seen, the seats need a retrim, and it needs new carpets, these are on order at the moment.
anyway, decided to start this project by looking at the engine first, so pulled the rocker covers off, to have a look in there, to discover a broken rocker, lol.
then turnt the crankshaft, and noticed the rockers werent moving, meaning the camshaft wasnt spinning, the ford v6 essex engine, has a plastic, yes PLASTIC, camshaft drive gear, which as you can guess has a habbit of failing,
so i thought it a good idea to remove the heads and see if there was anything to worry about inside the engine
the only thing i found suspicious, was it looks like one of the valves has kissed a piston, i dont think its enough to worry about, ill change that valve, just to be on the safe side though.
needs a good decoking session in there, lol
so next i removed the timing cover to access the timing gears, and found this, looks like the timing gears kind of exploded, lol
and heres some of the plastic teeth i found in the bottom of the timing cover, lol.
thats all for now, next update soon.
Edited by samsfern, 24 October 2011 - 08:41 PM.
