Westfield Repairs

Repairs

Registration

Road & Track Road Test

Accident

Rebuild

Weights

Gallery

North American Westfield Registry

Fuel Gauge – The fuel gauge in this car never worked properly. With a full tank of gas it registered a little above empty, and the needle wouldn’t budge until just before the last drop of gas hit the carburetors. In the Road & Track article, the person then distributing Westfields in the US blamed this behavior on a faulty VDO sender, so one day I decided to look at that item to see if I could fix it. After removal I hooked up the sender to my multi-meter and then moved the float through its range of motion. Hmm… The resistance changed with the movement of the float. Guess it’s not the sender -- must be some other part of the system. I then reattached the sender to its wiring harness and again moved the float with my hand. The fuel gauge dutifully tracked this movement by smoothly moving from empty to full. What the…?

Since the problem didn’t seem to be electrical, I then consulted my trusty build manual to see if I was missing something and I noticed that the instructions were very explicit with regard to how the sensor should be positioned in the tank. I looked at the diagram and realized that was not how the top of the sender was oriented on my car, so I took a closer look and then did the old epiphany head slap. That bonehead! The gentleman who originally installed the sensor did so at 45 degrees from the proper orientation and so when the very wide float tried to rise with the fuel level, it instead hit the side of the tank and stopped. Consequently it always showed nearly empty despite the level in the tank. Now that it is correctly positioned, it works just fine. Chalk one up for following the directions. (never thought that I would write those words)

CV Joints – Seattle had a brutal winter in 2001. For the two months leading up to the holidays, it seemed to rain every day. Every single day. Every single @#*$ing day! Consequently the Westfield saw very little action. Christmas Eve, however, was gorgeous. There wasn’t a cloud in sight and all the black ice (sunny, but rather cold!) made driving at 25 mph quite a bit of fun. I took the car out that morning for a coffee run and after finishing some of Tully’s finest I slipped and slid my way back to the car and prepared to go home. As I engaged the clutch, I heard the unmistakable click, click of a bad CV joint. Doh!

I disassembled the CV joints looking for obvious signs of damage, but they looked fine. My guess is that the grease had just begun to pack out and since I had left the car sitting in 30 degree weather for an hour, the clearances had loosened up just enough to allow the clicking. This meant that I began to hear the tell tale sound of a failing CV joint before any real damage was done. I repacked the CV joints with fresh grease, reinstalled them and now everything is fine.

Starter – The Pacific Northwest Historic Races are always a blast. They don’t have the same turnout as the Monterey Historic Races, but the crowds are much smaller and the whole attitude is more laid back – probably a much closer approximation to the atmosphere that existed when these cars were originally raced. On Saturday I met up with the president of the local Lotus Club and asked about joining. I wasn’t sure how they would treat a Westfield, but he said that they were happy to take my money. He added that if I brought the car on Sunday I could park in the corral and join them for the parade laps. Cool!

The next morning I went out to the garage to start up the Westfield for the drive to SIR but when I turned the key, only the starter spun, not the engine. Uh oh… The starter looked very easy to access, so I grabbed some wrenches and removed it for a closer look. It turned out that the pinion spring had broken into a bunch of little pieces and spread itself throughout the bellhousing. Since the inertia starter is known for premature disengagement (boy there a lot of good jokes there…) I felt this was a good opportunity to exorcise another bit of Lucas engineering from the x-flow and replace the inertia starter with a proper, modern unit. So I gave the good folks at Dave Bean Engineering a call and ordered their bolt-in gear reduction starter. The bolt-in part of their description was accurate, but the positive cable post only had about 1/8” of clearance from the sump. I took the pragmatic view and decided that the starter would only rotate and ground the starter against the sump if there was an even bigger problem, so I coated the expose post with liquid electrician’s tape just to be safe and put it in place.

The new starter worked great…for one month, and then it died. Dave Bean cross-shipped a new one without any hassles (I do love these guys) and the new one has been in place without a problem ever since.

Alternator – So there I am at 5:45am on my way to work when all of a sudden the alternator light turns on. Since I was only about 5 miles from the office, I decided to press on rather than stop on the side of a busy freeway. About 1 mile later my left foot started to become very warm…and wet. Huh? Suddenly the little light bulb in my head went off and I realized my leg was drenched in coolant. I quickly looked at the temperature gauge and saw that it was pegged at full hot despite the fact that I was driving 70 mph in 45 degree weather. Oh crap...

I pulled over to the side of the freeway, pop the hood, and discovered that not only was the water pump belt missing, but the composite alternator pulley required to keep it in place had decided it had enough of this life and blew itself to bits!

Finding a replacement alternator was a bit of a chore, since I had no idea where the original came from. The mounting bracket had been modified to accept the unmarked unit, so it was clearly not the standard xflow item. Fortunately there is a little British car new & used parts place by my house and they determined that an alternator from a later MGB would fit. They were close. The bracket ears were about 1/16” of an inch too close together, so the good folks at VRM graciously machined the bracket for me at no cost while I looked at the amazing vintage race cars that were in there shop waiting to leave for the Monterey Historic Races.