Current

With the bike battery being small and light, its capacity is lower than a car's battery. That's why I always connect it to a tickler to keep the charge. The new garage has no current yet, so out I went and bought a photovoltaic module and controller. The sun shining through the large window will allow this setup to keep the battery alive for future blatting.
Cheers.

Collecting

With temperatures of 38°C (100+°F) I'm not driving the seven and I'm not doing any mechanics. I will wait for winter and continue to collect stuff. Recently I was offered to buy pistons with 0.110 overbore. Since you normally only find some with 0.090, I bought them for the old engine block waiting. Next week I shall collect a T9 gearbox, so I can make a complete assembly and swap the engine together with the gearbox.
Cheers.

Stuff for free

A german enthusiast had this gearbox laying around and offered it to me for free. Well, I had to pick it up and he lives some 500km away. This made me a nice trip to northern Germany with the wife and some straps in the trunk. I will keep it as a spare. It is a 4speed from a Ford Taunus/Cortina.
Cheers.

More plans

With an even beefier engine, I will, at some point, want or need a limited slip differential (LSD). Therefore and for reasons of availability, I recently purchased a bespoke Westfield axle housing. This is mated to the Mk2 Ford Escort differential carrier and then bolted to the chassis via metalastic bushes (or Nylon if you prefer). Those housings are quite rare and when one came up for sale, I didn't hesitate. Today it was delivered and there are even oil seals mounted where the drive shafts enter the housing. Now I will have a look for a complete LSD diff and the front housing.
Cheers.

Plans for another engine

For some time now I started to collect engine parts to maybe some day assemble my first ever engine. Latest acquisition is a lightend and balanced flywheel with pressure plate and clutch. That flywheel is out of a Vegantune X-flow and is based on a standard flywheel. Another engine I recently bought came with an even lighter flywheel, but I don't know where it comes from. Both have 110 teeth gear rings. This gives me a choice of two (6kg or 6.6kg). Steel flywheels normally are sub 5kg.
The pressure plate apparently has been balanced as well since it spots some holes in the cover. It weighs around 3.6kg. I don't know if I will use the clutch disc, I may opt for a new one. The Sierra Type 9 gearbox needs a 1" 23spline pattern and I also have a very old (and very light!) four speed box, with a 7/8" 20spline pattern. That pattern is the right one for the clutch disc included with the Vegantune flywheel and pressure plate.
Some more parts to purchase from now to next winter, and maybe then I will assemble a nice, high revving, well balanced and powerfull X-flow.
Cheers.

Valves

Finally found some motivation to drive to that winter cold garage of mine for a short mechanical investigation on that second hand engine I bought. With the inlet and exhaust valves almost touching each other, I was curious about the exact measurements. The inlet is 41.3mm thus being exactly what I have in my engine now and the second biggest.
Available at Burton at the time being:
38.15mm
39.3mm
40.6mm
41.3mm
42.7mm
The exhaust valve is 34.9mm compared to 34.0mm actually in my engine.
Available at Burton at the time being:
31.6mm
34.5mm
34.9mm
36.0mm
36.2mm
So really nothing spectacular to report here. At first sight, the remaining flange between the valves looks quite narrow, but it is always best to unmount the parts when measuring. There is still some possible improvement when preparing the cylinder head of the replacement engine.
Cheers.

Brian Hart oil pump

Once a big name in racing engines, I was happy to discover that my second-(or more)hand engine has a Brian Hart dry sump oil pump. For a small introduction to the man, please refer to this Wiki. For my part, I started to clean that beauty the old-fashioned way with brake-cleaner, emery paper and a toothbrush.
Cheers.