Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

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cavalier1990
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Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by cavalier1990 »

Always been a big fan of these motors. Have owned 2 previously, a 2.8 GL, which I sold as I was skint and couldn't run it, and a silver Ghia x injection, which I scrapped as I couldn't get my ass around to doing the repairs it needed, which was a good bit more than this one as it had lay in the Ocean Terminal in Greenock for about 2 + years.

Had this Black Ghia X since 2001 and spent most of it's life in the garage. I do take it the odd drive in the summer months. When I got it I decided to garage it, strip it all down (you know where this is going!) and refurbish it all.

The only welding it required was a couple of repairs on box section at the back of the inner sills, a common spot on these, plus new wings, rear window drains rebuilt (another common spot on these) and some inner wing repairs, but nothing major. Grannies are usually quite well built and I've never seen with one bad rust.

Apart from the welding I also rebuilt the whole front axle, got it sandblasted etc with poly bushes, new ball joints, rebuilt engine, and plenty of new gen ford parts, inc. dizzy, solex 38 EEIT carb, exhaust manifold heat shield, ball joints, bearing, pads, trims, oil pump, brand new ford C3 auto box (I got it in a automotive parts clearance so just stuck it in, old box was ok) rear shoes, interior bits and bobs, both rear lights, both rear wings and many many more parts, most of which I haven't even used yet! I've also got copious amounts of good second hand parts like all the chromes trims, nearly new chrome bumper irons, lights etc. mainly from lucky finds in scrappys and some banger boys I got a lot of good stuff from.

I got brand new rear lights as the reflectors fade and the rubber weather seal perishes, and you can't get the seals anymore. Also managed to get a near new dashboard top section. These are famous for cracking and splitting, and also got a near new steering wheel, which still has all the little cracks in it and is not all worn away. Those still have to be fitted!

Fix for the rear window channels is common on these. The little drain at each corner starts rusting and ends up eating away the channel where the window rubber sits in. you can see the fix I done in the pics below.

An unfortunate problem with this water channel rust, is water starts leaking into the boot and eating the rear wings and spare wheel well away. My rear wings have suffered a bit, especially around the end of the rear wing above lights and the panels that surrounds the rear lights in the boot is pretty rusty, hence new rear wings to be done eventually.

This was repaired several years ago and most of the pics are from then. Don't have any recent ones but will hope to get some soon as going to pull it out garage ready for summer (pfff!) and garage clear out.

Only thing that really needs done is both front wings, bonnet and bootlid plus drivers door needs proper painting.

The engine runs quite well now but a few years back I had this notion to fit a Weber 38 DGAS, as it is supposed to be a better carb than the solex, but it turned into an absolute nightmare, I could not get her running just right, I played about with it for weeks and weeks, ended up buying 2 new carbs at a sobering cost of about nearly 300 each as thought first one was faulty. Lesson learnt, stick with the original parts! I put the new solex I had acquired ages back and away it went.

Ok so here's some pics and will try to get some more soon. The first ten pics are pics of the rot in the rear window drain channels.

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The rubber in the centre of the auto selector was all cracked and worn, so I decided to cut 2 similar sections of an old rubber door mat and replace them !

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One of my mad insulation moments!
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front inner wing repair above headlight.
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Roof view
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Side view
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Engine bay with no V6 - notice the elephant trunk like cavys?
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2nd engine bay shot
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New wing
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Close up of inner wing repairs
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humbucker
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by humbucker »

Great stuff. Any pics of the car as a whole?
cavalier1990
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by cavalier1990 »

humbucker wrote:Great stuff. Any pics of the car as a whole?
I did have a few but lost them on old phone. Should get some soon once cleared out garage and bring it out.
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by James McGrath »

Great stuff. I love pretty much all cars form this era.
cavalier1990 wrote:Should get some soon once cleared out garage and bring it out.
Looking forward to it!
cavalier1990
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by cavalier1990 »

Just remembered had a pic on facebook album.

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Enjoy!
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Lowrider Dave
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by Lowrider Dave »

Very nice!
Lowrider Dave.

Archer 2.0 GLS
cavalier1990
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by cavalier1990 »

lowrider dave wrote:Very nice!
Cheers mate!
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by cavalier1990 »

Decided to do a wee tune up on the old girl tonight. Because it has been laid up so long again usually it gets a bit stale and things needs cleaned out and engine generally run through. Sometimes find idle jets are blocked or get blocked once fuel starts pouring through all the channels again.

Tonight was colour tune night and I was wanting to get to the bottom of a kind of annoying running problem I noticed before and it was that the idle mixture adjuster on either side would generally not respond to adjustment, or only slightly after a lot of turns.

In practice 1/2 a turn should produce a an audible change in engine note. So colour tune on one bank of the V and see where we were, done a best as could adjustment to blue flame colour but still had that feeling it wasn't responding as it should. Same on N/S on V.

So decided to do a little clean out of the fuel filter, reset all the settings, check choke wasn't jamming up anywhere - this actually happened a few weeks ago when I put a new alternator on. The electric choke takes feed from alternator, but hadn't put it on correct pin, so choke wasn't turning off as it should. Check no blockages in float vent etc. etc.

Then as much as I tried to get the engine running smoothly it still didn't seem just right, the idle mixtures weren't responding as I remember them doing. Also noticed when I held revs up above idle, say 2000rpm, the engine note wasn't as good as I'd hoped, almost like an intermittent puut puut misfire ever so often. I could see through the colour tune that there was no spark ignition at exactly this misfire was happening.

This led me to the dizzy, I popped this off, and loandbehold here is what I found. One burnt out rotor arm.

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Luckily I had a replacement and fitted it. I also found a vacuum leak in the air box heater flap mechanism. This was given away by a droning sounds as the engine warmed up. I plugged this temporarily until I can dig out spare air cleaner.
cavalier1990
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by cavalier1990 »

Had a wee play about with this at the weekend. Last month or so it's been running crappy. As I said in earlier post it can get a bit stale lying in a basically damp garage. I took the dizzy off and was little beads of water in it so that kind of thing. Anyway once it starts it can be a bit temperamental but after 5 or so minutes nursing it it will clear and start running quite nice.

I have to run it every weekend just to keep it in the land of the living and had a wee boot along the street and back as well, seems to be pulling quite well and got a nice wheelspin too!
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Robsey
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by Robsey »

I seem to recall that carbs and ignition (leads, rotor and distributor cap) were always problematic on these old Ford battle-cruisers.

Very nice when they are running happy.

As for weather - it never seems to be nice when you can be arsed to work on your cars.
cavalier1990
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by cavalier1990 »

Robsey wrote:I seem to recall that carbs and ignition (leads, rotor and distributor cap) were always problematic on these old Ford battle-cruisers.

Very nice when they are running happy.

As for weather - it never seems to be nice when you can be arsed to work on your cars.
Just as good as injection, almost, when they are right Robsey but left in a cold damp garage does it no good at all. Especially the cap and the carb. Probably full of moisture, which is probably why it takes about ten mins to settle down when I give it a churn over ever week or so, trying my best to do it at least every week. Credit to ford though for build quality, this car has been most of it's life in this garage and has not rusted anywhere, yet when I put my little rover 216 in it, before this Granada, I had to scrap it 6 months later as it had just rotted everywhere.
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Robsey
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by Robsey »

Rover, Austin, and Leyland cars and so on, did not really demonstrate brilliance when it came to build quality.

Bizarrely though it was always said that when BMW bought out much of the Rover empire, the BMW plants produced shoddier Rover products than the non-BMW plants.

It took Vauxhall until about 2003 to build cars that did not rot perfusely
cavalier1990
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by cavalier1990 »

Robsey wrote:Rover, Austin, and Leyland cars and so on, did not really demonstrate brilliance when it came to build quality.

Bizarrely though it was always said that when BMW bought out much of the Rover empire, the BMW plants produced shoddier Rover products than the non-BMW plants.

It took Vauxhall until about 2003 to build cars that did not rot perfusely
Hope that sort of includes my Omega! It's 2002 so hopefully they were getting the hang of it by then. Granada is way better built metal work wise than cavy. I always remember the sort of late 70s to 80s fords were a good bit better than the later 80s /90s fords. I remember this distinctly as I worked in Ford, so seen the rusty ones, plus I owned a Ford Sierra at one point :). All door skins were hanging off and the whole thing was just rotten. Don't know how I kept it going lol!
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by cavalier1990 »

Have stripped both heads off of this as suspect something wrong with valves. Compression was low and when I oiled the cylinder it never budged hence valve suspect leaking.
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by cavalier1990 »

Have finally got round to putting the two heads into my friendly engine builder to have a look at them, he mentioned right away there is defo a problem with the valves they are crooked, and showed me the height difference in the top of the springs meaning inlet valve had sunk, & exhaust one was protruding or both. Looking at the valve seats it looked like the exhaust valves were sitting proud and the inlets were slightly sunk. I did have the hardened valve seats installed about 10 years ago but when the guy I took it too said it was cheaper without a VAT receipt I think he might have been covering his arse due to not being confident in doing the job right or he bodged it!

Either way it has likely failed so will see what the outcome is of the strip down and check by my local engine guy.
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by cavalier1990 »

Before I put head back on I had some work to do on the timing cover area. There was a slight leak at the top left of the timing cover so decided to fix that while heads are off. The heads don't need to come off to do this but while I was there I thought best to nail this one now.

Generally you'd be best to take the sump off before taking this off but I can be done without. You have to take the crank pulley out, take a few of the sump bolts from the front that go into the timing cover and then also remove front fan and shroud to give more space.

It's a bit tricky trying to line up the sump gasket especially where the crank pulley hole is in the timing cover, but carefully approached it can be done.

Whilst I had the cover off I decided to strip the water pump and the stat to clean up the area as it was looking like some of that white fur was building up around the pipes and stuff. I also wanted to change the water pump to the OE ford pump I had as well. Lucky I did as the pump was all furred up with this white gunge, white lumpy stuff.

As you can see here there is some of this gunge about the impeller. The pump was fine, the impellers were solid, no play in the shaft and I never had any issues with cooling. Maybe left for a while it would have started having problems, so better to get this fixed now.

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Gunge built up around stat. The stat is housed into the water pump body and this connects to the casting in the timing cover for the pump.

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Here is the timing cover off. You can see the timing gears for the camshaft.

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I cleaned all the mating faces removing all old gasket and used the vx black sealant for the timing casing. I'd used blue sealant before for timing casing and I think that is generally for water pumps. I used blue silicon on the pump. Also black sealant for the sump sealing.

Something that kind of alarmed me was I happened to notice that there was no oil up into the sump where the lower timing gear is, the oil sits up in there and is distributed by the gear turning. Yet the dipstick shows oil is up to level. However the problem I think is that the original dipstick for this car is a electronic sensor one, and the wires are always broken on them and the little sensor at the end breaks off, you don't want that floating in the sump. So I bought a 2nd hand standard stick, now wondering if it is a slightly longer length giving me a false reading.

If it is then I had a lucky escape from seizing the timing gears up.
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by Robsey »

I do like a good bit of engine stripping.

Much more interesting than bodywork, and more rewarding than electrics.

I have worked on dozens of engines, but never a V6...
Most of my Ford work has been on the CVH in the 90's Escorts and Fiestas.

In a perverse sort of way... it is good to see that Cavaliers aren't the only cars that need a regular dose of care and attention.

I am sure that fur is not good.
Possibly a poor choice of coolant or a weak coolant mix.

Saw lots of white fur many years ago when I used to find aluminium extrusions and strip getting left in damp conditions at a previous engineering job in the sub-basement of an old mill.
(Circa 1985 to 1994).
cavalier1990
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by cavalier1990 »

Robsey wrote:I do like a good bit of engine stripping.

Much more interesting than bodywork, and more rewarding than electrics.

I have worked on dozens of engines, but never a V6...
Most of my Ford work has been on the CVH in the 90's Escorts and Fiestas.

In a perverse sort of way... it is good to see that Cavaliers aren't the only cars that need a regular dose of care and attention.

I am sure that fur is not good.
Possibly a poor choice of coolant or a weak coolant mix.

Saw lots of white fur many years ago when I used to find aluminium extrusions and strip getting left in damp conditions at a previous engineering job in the sub-basement of an old mill.
(Circa 1985 to 1994).
the Cologne V6 is easy peezy to work on, want to do the tappets, same as the old fiesta, couple of bolts and the cover(s) are off and the tappet adjusters are staring at you. Alternator, belts water pump, all easy to get to and adjust, as I said not really much more difficult than the old Valencia ohv on the fiesta.

I've actually had it running with the top of the carb completely off lol, don't ask, it just works!

I think that fur is just due to lying for so long doing nothing, glad I got on top of it though. I remember the CVH, I worked on tons of those, easy to work on, enjoyed doing a head gasket for instance, so easy. nothing much to do to them other than keep the oil topped up or the tappets would clatter.

So next job is clean up the block mating faces, and plop the heads back on, get it running. Going to give the carb a wee clean out, this is the achilles heel of the grannie, the idle jets gum up when not used for a while. I'd came up with an idea of using those little tooth/gum cleaners to clean in the ports of the carb, usually a blast of WD does the trick but I don't think this removes stuck on gunk from the wall edges.

Will post up vid of it running when I get round to final stages.

Can't wait to drive her again.
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by cavalier1990 »

So a bit of an update on where we are with this and the story is a lot of work and not much further forward unfortunately.

Once I put the refurbished heads on and got it running there was a noticeable difference in the running of the engine however I still could not get it to tick over correctly. Now despite this sounding like bad news I wasn't totally surprised because I had suspected that perhaps the rings were shot as well. It was a bit difficult to tell since having leaking valves would mask any bust/worn rings somewhat.

However when I now seal test the engine with some oil down the bores, the pressure goes up a bit, indicating that the rings are perhaps past it Before I had valves done the pressure would not raise so I knew it was a valve problem, or in hindsight, partially a valve problem.

I've really not had any luck with this engine, it's had money after money chucked at it only for the problem to move around the engine. I did rebuild it about 13 years ago, i couldn't get the carb sorted until I rebuilt the original car and then that fixed it, but at about the same time, for some reason unbeknown to me, the engine mechanics started going south.

I need to doubly confirm the rings are shot and I am going to do that by taking off the valve gear so that the valves are all shut on side and then test the compression. The readings I get are 100psi, and 125 psi with squirt of oil. Reading should be about 180psi and we are not getting that. All roads now lead to something wrong with pistons/bore/rings.

The reason I am taking the valves out of the equation is just in case there was any problem with the cam or valve gear itself, the valves are fine now, but the cam gear may have a fault. However the problem seems to be on each cylinder, leading me to think it is general wear.

When I think long and hard back to the rebuild there is something that pops up in my head that I may have fitted hardened rings, I remember the packing saying it was hardened rings, but at the time you trust the supplier who I did trust, I don't know if you get soft rings, medium and hardened or what it actually means and how it affects the running in practice. Maybe hardened rings are for re-honed bores or a new block, not sure. Nor do I know if the bores are maybe worn too I think in all honest I am going to have to haul the block out. Not a big problem it's just more work and likely more expense, but I need to get this correct once and for all.

It's not going to be done any time soon, I reckon it should be out by Easter time and i should have it stripped and sent to get checked and back in for the summer. Wish me luck!
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by Robsey »

Oh joy!!

And I thought cavaliers were needy cars.

Probably time for a rebore, bigger rings and new crank shells etc.

Seeing as you asked - Good luck.
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by Mk3alan »

Oh dear! Still sounds miles better than watching telly!
Good luck!

Alan
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by cavalier1990 »

Robsey wrote:Oh joy!!

And I thought cavaliers were needy cars.

Probably time for a rebore, bigger rings and new crank shells etc.

Seeing as you asked - Good luck.
Lol what I was thinking as I typed here, one thing after another, but really well worth it when it is all running good will be a proper cruising bus!
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by cavalier1990 »

Mk3alan wrote:Oh dear! Still sounds miles better than watching telly!
Good luck!

Alan
True I won't shed a tear for missing any Eastenders lol!
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by cavalier1990 »

Recently cleaning out garage and over car as new garage rroof was fitted, so there was a lot of wood bits all over it. I had the wiper arms up to clean along scuttle, now wiper arms aren't on so i think you know where this is going. Bam down came wiper arm and put a nice spider web crack on the screen.

Damn damn and double damn! So long and short of it was i got a guy near redcar with a few breaking and went and got the screen. Now all i need to do is fit it.
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Re: Ford Granada MK2 Ghia X

Post by Mk3alan »

It all happens in a split second! Worth more than a double damn me thinks.
Is it a bonded screen? I successfully stuck one in years ago using a neutral cure silicone sealant (black)
Certainly was ok up to its sale a few years later!

Alan
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