Skoda Rally Blog

After Sunday’s bad news, I thought it was best to carry on getting the car into a ready-to-rally state; regardless of whether I do WRGB or not, I still need the Skoda up and running.  Having ordered the oil seal to fit the new front cover yesterday on eBay, with typical non-Skoda-dealer efficiency they turned up this morning while I was at work.  Once I got home, I thought I may as well fit it and see if the new pump and pressure relief valve were really doing the trick as Jim had foreseen, or if there was still a problem. As you can see here, 2mm isn’t much difference, but it’s different enough.

2mm, all the difference in the world.

Here’s where the  seal needed to fit – in the shiny cover, around the crankshaft.

The last piece of the puzzle?

Fitting oil seals is generally easy enough, and this one was no exception; I had it in place in a couple of minutes, then refitted the crank pulley and bolt, and put the engine back in place by tightening the engine mount bolts.  Once the alternator belt was back in place and the engine was refilled with oil, it was pretty much ready to go, aside from one thing.  When checking all the bearings it wasn’t possible to oil them on reassembly (as all the oil fell out, believe me, I tried), so I thought it would be best to prime the engine via the oil pump before running it.  This meant making up a tool to drive the pump (a long rod with a slotted end and a guide round it to stop it falling off), and then it was a simple case of removing the oil pump drive from the top of the new oil pump cover and driving it with a drill, which worked for about 10 seconds.

I then had a frustrating hour’s wait to charge the battery drill up, and then tried again.  And it worked a treat – got oil pressure up on the engine in about 10 seconds, so I put the drive back in, and then it was time to fire up.  The engine fired up straight away, so I went for a drive; doing the same drive as I did before when the problem happened, and lo and behold, got home and no oil pressure problems – indeed, even with the car ticking over at 500rpm it was fine, whereas all the engines I’ve had before have flickered on and off at this point.  The car is fixed, just needs mapping, which I will be doing on Saturday.  Dammit.