A couple of days ago, the Square Four came off the bench to be replaced by the FH in order for me to torque down the cylinder head at 270 miles. The Square rolled easily onto the floor as it's great weight dictates with little left to do than fill the oil and fuel tanks.
It had been off the road for something like 4 weeks for a service and one evening I ladled in a gallon of fuel drained from the FH tank. It wasn't until I went to start the engine that I realised the fuel was pouring out of the fuel tap. It had dried out. Choosing the easy solution I soaked it in fuel overnight to see if I could get the cork to swell up again:
This worked a bit but not well enough. The next day found me replacing the cork with a new one and also replacing the two o-rings in the reserve plunger that I made some years ago.
Finally getting the engine started revealed another problem - no oil pressure. I ran it for 10 to 15 seconds or so with no success and shut the engine down. I realised that I would have to bleed the feed to the Morgo oil pump. I don't believe I have drained the tank before - the last time I changed the oil I didn't wash the tank out so the oil lines from tank to engine would never have been drained since I built the engine all those years ago.
Bleeding the pump is very easy as it has a built-in hole for the purpose:
I was pleased to find the timing chest very clean and the sprockets and chain in excellent condition with the tensioner working properly. A few minutes with a screwdriver had oil seeping from the bleed hole and the whole thing sealed up again.
Restarting the engine found the oil pressure leap up to 50 psi immediately. There is a little niggle here however in that normally the oil pressure will rise to 75 psi on startup from cold, but we do have different oil this time. I'm using Motul 20W-50 in place of the old green tin Duckhams lookalike that I used to buy from Halfords.
Secondly the engine is not running very cleanly, misfiring a little. There may be some investigation to do.
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