Return Journey
We spent a coule of days in Perth. Watto did some photo shoots of a staggering P76 collection and some
Morris Minors for his magazine "The BMC Experience".
On Tuesday May 9th we left and headed East, on the long journey home.
First we stopped off at the excellent York Motor museum.
The curator was impressed with DAV (our van) and and asked if we would leave him there for a while on
display!
We had the option of travelling on bitumen all the way from there and going back to Kalgoolie, or seeing
Wave Rock and travelling over a dirt road to Norseman. This would save us around 200km.
Not long after we turned onto the dirt road DAV started running rough again. But we pressed on to Wave
Rock
Finally we arrived in Norseman after dark and checked into a scary looking hotel. Although it did not
look so bad in the morning.
A compression test on DAV showed 30 psi on number 2 and 0 psi on number 4. We had either burnt out two
valves again, or we had a hole in a piston.
I was pretty frustrated at this point. We had checked the timing and mixture multiple times. We were
no longer overheating. Yet we had burnt two valves within about 700km of replacing them. There must
have been a crack in the head.
Enquiries around this small town did not turn up any leads on A-series engined vehicles we could rob
another head from.
I have the top level "Total Care" breakdown cover with the RACV which covers me Australia wide. I made
a call to them and explaned the issues with the car and also that we wanted to take the head off to take
a look. The RACV told me that they needed the RACWA to pronounce the car unfixable within three days
before they would pay to ship the car home. If we attempted to fix the car at that point and failed,
that was fine, we would still have transport home.
Conveniently the RACWA workshop was right across the road from the hotel. The RAC representative was
there in ten minutes. He agreed that it could not be fixed there within three days, so we could use our
breakdown cover. He offered his workshop if we wanted to try and fix it.
We too the RAC man up on this offer and pulled off the head again. Two burnt exhaust valves!! This is
the worst one.
We had three spare valves of the correct size. We pulled out the two dead valves and replaced them with new ones, lapping them in correctly with grinding paste. One vavlve seat was a bit poor, but it would have to do. The head was refitted with a new copper gasket (thanks Minicraft) and we were ready to roll again!
We were still at a loss as to why we were burning valves. I had a theory that the excess blow-by from the engine was going back through the breather below the carb and leaning out the mixture. I plugged the carb port and directed the breather into a coke bottle "catch can".
Our determination had returned and we resolved to keep going, sticking to 80-85kph and avoiding full throttle. The road was now bitumen with a 110kph limit, but there was plenty of space for overtaking and traffic was sparse.
![Image](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v662/bnicho/IMAG1084_zps8063e8dc.jpg)