Wednesday 20 July 2011

Recession bites deep

So there I was doing the shopping at Tescos when I noticed large amounts of Sunflower oil on special offer at £1 per litre.

Cheaper than diesel.....

And the Deltaparts van has seen better days, but still plods along so I bought a trolley full of the stuff and tipped it into the fuel tank. Apart from it now smelling like the chimney round the back of the local takeaway it goes great!
High in Polyunsaturated fats you know, very healthy....

Saturday 2 July 2011

July Snapshot

To start with I would like to say thankyou to the people who tell me they enjoy reading this blog, i'm glad I'm not talking to myself. :-)
Apologies too to all who don't get mentioned here, sometimes we get snowed under and I quite often don't get chance to photograph and write up everything.
Also it's good to see more customers from the South of England this year, I know the time spent and the cost of petrol is a killer, but we aren't far from the M1 and have always got a good stock of Jaffa cakes.


Secondly I have some bad news and it's about our Fiat Coupe.

We lent it to a customer


and he decided to clean and polish it.


This kind of behaviour will not be tolerated, I mean, we were supposed to be going for the street-sleeper Rat-look! All those years of muck and er, patina gone down the drain. Dammit, now I'm sorely tempted to bring it in the workshop and do some cutting out of rust and bodywork (now I can see it), I've already got some better rear light cups sprayed up and a carbon fibre bonnet made for it....





This maybe of interest to someone, probably of no use whatsoever, but nonetheless interesting.....






It is a four cylinder, Lampredi based, block with piston oil squirters, no balancer shafts, and a total CC of 1700. The crank seems to be cast and is 5kg lighter than an integrale item which fits too. The bore and stroke are both smaller, although the bore could be machined out to make a square engine if needed (although down on torque, it would rev very well), a 16v head fits and it is already bored & tapped for M12 bolts/studs.
Piston height, rod length and gudgeon pin are different to integrale and as I mentioned earlier probably of no use, the only possible one I could think of is if you race in a series where a turbocharged 1700 - 1800 cc is the maximum allowed. If you want it it's yours for what I paid for it - with my inquisitive nature I just couldn't resist opening it up it to find out what it was all about!






No Sooner had we got Steve's engine built, fitted and fired up, but Gabriel brought his 8v in for a thorough suspension overhaul and some other jobs. Nice timing! I really enjoy building engines and it is even better when on occasion we get to fit them and get them mapped too, to follow the job through from start to finish is most satisfying and ensures 100% customer satisfaction.

Gabriel took the Coupe and treated his wife to a weekend touring the Yorkshire Dales while we treated his car to a full set of coilovers, Poly bushes, complete oil changes and a few other bits and pieces.

The uprated rear anti-roll bars were back from heat treatment and powder coating, one immediately went to Erik in Norway for his track and competition Evo:














Also now in stock are the rear lateral suspension arms, I decided to go for bright Zinc plate for a finish as they are very exposed on the car and pick up stone chips quite easily - you (or we) can then paint or powder coat them any colour you wish.

A couple of pics of Steves Evo1, they didn't make many in 'Giallo Ferrari', it is a very slightly lighter shade of yellow compared to the Evo2 'Ginestra' which I must say I do prefer as it looks less sickly golden. It has just had a full engine build, massive brakes and coilover suspension fitted, he is now running it in.







The sharp eyed Brits reading this will have noted the 'N' plate, it's a strange one this as it is older than an Evo 2, but the plate suggests it is newer - this causes some discussion and raised eyebrows at MOT time as the cut off point for CAT equipped cars is before this registration pre-fix here in the UK (it doesn't and shouldn't have a Cat) - it was originally imported from Italy where it had work done on it by an outfit called 'Carboni Tuning' and did have originally a strange looking aftermarket 'Home-made' ECU and other various bits of odd wiring, hidden switches, relays, fuses and something weird bolted to the fuel filter. Sadly Carboni didn't seem interested in any communication so most of it was taken off many years ago by someone else who couldn't work it out when it started to malfunction.





This is one of the many things which makes these cars interesting to work on, the aformentioned 8v of Gabriels had been factory fitted with a full pleated(?) grey leather interior and small bucket style seats bearing what looked like the Maserati crown on them, all this (and more) was specced by the original first owner, it would be great to reunite original owners with their cars, I bet there would be some smiles and great tales to tell.


Recommended listening here:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfeyUGZt8nk

Bonkers, but Swede Mason has got some talent. ;-)

If you think that is bad don't try Cyriaks 'Cows, cows, cows'.....





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About Me

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Welcome to the Deltaparts Blog, here you will find, well, anything which is on my mind I guess, but mainly things to do with the Lancia Delta integrale and in particular anything to do with my business, Deltaparts. It will be a bit irregular as it's not every day (or even week) that something worth mentioning happens. I would like to try and make it interesting - at least to some people anyhow, but also hopefully accessible and readable for the average 'man on the street' so I won't bore you with loads of large words, bombastic overblown sentences or technical jargon. I will describe on here how lots of the parts that we sell came about as there isn't room on the website ( www.deltaparts.co.uk ) to explain. I hope you enjoy reading it as I do writing it, when something becomes a chore you know it's time to stop doing it....