One of the first items on the to do list to investigate on the car was the lack of any action from the brake light on the dash. Lifting the float out of the fluid reservoir however brought the light on correctly.
As this car has single circuit brakes I am considering this warning light to be a very safety critical component. Especially given that the reservoir is a metal one so there's no way to check the level without taking the cap off and peering into it. So the odds of spotting a level drop in passing is slim to none. If there's a suitable master cylinder for it a dual circuit conversion is something I would definitely consider as a long term upgrade for peace of mind. Quite simply I Do Not Like single circuit braking systems. Especially on a car as heavy as this, and one which despite the looks is going to be quite happily howling along keeping pace with modern traffic.
One question which springs to mind is whether anyone recognises the colour. It's clearly not original to the car, it was originally a significantly darker shade - which is still visible in a few areas, like the door hinges and under the bonnet.
Sadly as we have no history on the car aside from a couple of 15 year old MOT certificates, I've no idea whether this is a Rover/BMC colour at all and if it is, which one. Tahiti Blue isn't a million miles off but I think is a bit too cyan heavy. I know the purists might not like it, but I do really like the colour and am going to be completely honest with you in that that was something which really did draw me to the car in the first place. Blue and chrome is a particular favourite of mine.
I will be needing some.paint both for inevitable touch ups, but also because the boot lid really needs to be done over from scratch. I don't know quite what the story there is, but there seems to be an absolute tonne of filler on there, and either that or the paint has shrunk as it's cured.
This is an aluminium panel (I think they called the exact alloy Birmabrite) and they're known to be really easy to dent - so I'm guessing they've been dressing it up to cover a dent. Personally I don't mind a few dings here and there on a car this age. My intention with this car is to preserve, maintain but USE it, so getting this sorted in a way that's sensible and not going to start doing nonsense like this again six months down the line will be the order of the day. It won't be babied though. That's a fair ways down the priority list though. I do need to try to figure out how to reassemble the latch for the boot lid though. I *think* I have all the bits of it at least.
Electrical issues are going to be a recurring theme I reckon until I've gone through the car pretty much end to end.
I'm suuuuure those areas aren't going to cause me issues, they're fiiiiine...
Apparently I need to glue the window guide on the driver's window back in place. This dropped out while I was backing into the drive and it just about scared me to death.
While shuffling into the parking space (yes, the steering is just as bloody heavy as I remember from the last one, that really is the one black mark against them) I noted that there was a really obvious buzz/rattle from the exhaust towards the back of the car.
Ah, yes. This won't be helping in that regard.
On the plus side at least the mid and rear sections of the exhaust at a glance look to be stainless. The missing fastener there wasn't hard to replace either. Washer is a bit too big and the bolt is too long but it was just what I had on hand. It doesn't rattle any more though.
Those poor springs could do with a clean and grease though.
A full set of hoses for the cooling system came with the car. This is nice as the ones on there are...well a bit on the crunchy side.
Some have obviously been changed, but a fair few look to be ancient. I can't just do a straight swap of them all yet though as I also need to change the thermostat housing because someone has put one from another model on which means the top hose is coming out pointing in the wrong direction. Sure this is doing wonders for coolant flow.
That hose should be coming straight up off the thermostat housing. I have a new one (and a thermostat) on the way.
A few goodies have already arrived.
A replacement for this very crispy bit of fuel line between the sediment bowl and carb being probably the most safety critical.
Glad to see that the replacement one from Wadham's is made from the good stuff, so this should be properly fit and forget.
The reason I included a new badge is pretty obvious. How hazy and crazed this is really sticks out because it's so prominent on the front of the car. It actually looks worse in person than in the photo.
.
This hasn't actually been swapped yet as I haven't figured out how to get the old one off yet.
One of the other white boxes contained parts needed for another quick and easy improvement.
Before:
After:
If only everything would be that quick and easy!
When the car arrived the fuel gauge was on the non operational items list. Though the gauge itself was clearly getting power as the oil level check function worked and they both derive power from the same source. The switch just selects which of the two sender units the gauge is grounded through.
The sender in the tank is new - and a bit of quite testing revealed that while power was getting to the gauge it wasn't getting to the tank.
In we go...
While this looks horribly complicated at first glance it's actually a lot of very simple circuits just bundled into a fairly tight space - and the bit we're interested in is easily accessible on the side nearest the camera.
59 is the fuel gauge instrument itself. 60 is the changeover switch to select whether you're reading fuel or oil level. 71 is the oil level sender, and 72 is the fuel level sender. It didn't take long to figure out that the primary issue we have here is that the switch is dead. It was also wired up backwards. The switch will need to be replaced (or repaired) in the long term, but for now I've just employed an old fashioned jumper wire to hook the fuel gauge up directly.
This appears to be over-reading a bit if the fuel level reported by the seller is correct. Though that was also the case with my previous car - and I've not checked whether the voltage stabiliser for the fuel and temperature gauges is actually working. If it's feeding in straight system voltage rather than dropping it to the right (10V from memory) level it would indeed read somewhere in the region of 20% high.
I haven't actually had the engine running long enough to see if the temperature gauge works, though I'm pretty sure I have seen it at least come off the stop so most likely does.
A definite appointment lays in the future of this engine with a bunch of degreaser and the pressure washer as it's really quite a slimy mess. On the same note a set of valve cover gaskets is already in stock to hopefully reduce the amount of oil loss. Given I had to change it on the previous car there's also an inlet manifold gasket in stock just in case.
A very obvious error that someone has made was refitting the front indicators and sidelights the wrong way around. The indicators should be at the top. I did look into getting this righted yesterday but it quickly became apparent that this wasn't going to be the ten minute job I'd hoped.
That's an *ideal* connector for an area that's going to get blasted with road spray isn't it?
I guess on the plus side the wires are actually secured rather than just twisted together as under this mass of tape. That all leads back to this mess.
Who needs grommets where wiring passes through metal panels? Seems like overkill to me...Yeah, I'm just going to chop all that mess out and do the line from the lights to the main loom from scratch I think. While I'm at it given that they're fairly inexpensive I think I'm just going to replace all the light fittings while I'm there. Out of the four three of them have major corrosion, are missing their rubber boots and at least one the lamp holder is pretty much being held together by the tape. Just changing them seems like it's going to cause by far the least long term headaches. Plus the sidelights aren't actually the correct type for the car anyway.
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Target today was the cooling system as this replacement part arrived this morning.
The original has seen better days.
That was discovered the day before the car was due to be collected, cue some bodgery to get the system water tight to allow the car to run. A piece of intercooler ducting they had floating around was pressed into service.
By the standards of "get-me-home bodges" this one is actually pretty sturdy. It was properly fluid tight and I've definitely spent a week or two commuting with things held together by willpower far worse than that.
I had been kind of dreading tackling the bottom radiator hose though. Primarily as the bottom hose was utterly welded onto the outlet stub on the radiator. Access to this isn't great as it's buried a long way down in the engine bay (which is really deep on this car) and there's no access from underneath because there's a huge cross member in the way. I was about five minutes from pulling the whole radiator in that case when I eventually managed to get it free.
This one thankfully just came apart without any real protest. So this corner was sorted in a matter of minutes.
The eagle eyed of you might have noticed something amiss with the engine bay in general (aside from the kinked top radiator hose, I have the part inbound to sort that hopefully tomorrow, and the dayglow red HT leads which look madly out of place).
Yes, someone has been meddling with the heater hose routing. That hose vanishing under the air cleaner roughly centre frame should actually be hooked up to a rigid line that runs above the exhaust manifold - which also should have a little heat shield attached to it to protect the distributor. Demonstrated nicely by this photo from my previous 110.
That rigid line, bracket and heat shield are all missing. Which obviously caused a problem for me when I came to fit the new hoses as we had a bit of a gap.
However this is me. So there's a pile of random "stuff" in the back corner of the garage which I deliberately haven't binned because they are things which likely will be useful one day. I went shopping in that corner and soon dug out a bit of metal tubing that was exactly the right diameter.
It is really thin walled but will do fine for now until I can track down something better.
If nothing else I'll paint it black so it blends in a bit better.
This side of things went pretty smoothly. The other side of the engine bay however was an absolute fight and ended up taking well over an hour of cursing.
The lower heater hose (you can just see it between the rear crankcase breather and the blower motor) runs down to a fitting attached to the rear of the inlet manifold and then carries on to a fitting roughly halfway along the underside of the inlet manifold.
This caused a lot of swearing. Because whoever assembled it clearly put the hose clamps on *before* attaching the fitting to the rear of the manifold. Then they rounded off the bolt that holds the bracket on. I just about managed to get the top one off and changed after a lot of faffing around.
The bottom one however was having none of it, the hose clamp was totally seized up. Plus you couldn't get a screwdriver properly on to it because it's directly behind the throttle linkage.
Eventually I managed to cram on a metric ring spanner that was one size too small onto the bolt and got the bracket off, so I could pull the whole lot off and attack the hose clip off the car.
This probably would have been easier if I'd taken the intake duct off but I was being stubbornly lazy and refusing to do that. Despite it probably being all of about five minutes work.
These were definitely past due for replacement.
You can pretty clearly see why I really didn't want to drive the car anywhere before I changed them.
The package with the thermostat housing in should be here tomorrow which will let me get the top hose changed as well, getting rid of the kink in that. I think that will get us to a point where I can actually go for a test drive without worrying that the cooling system is going to spectacularly fail at any moment.
The last thing I checked today was the voltage stabiliser on the dash - and confirmed that it is doing absolutely nothing. So that would explain why the fuel gauge is reading ~20% too high. The temperature gauge will be doing the same. New one ordered.
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Spot the difference.
That is the reason the top radiator hose was horribly kinked.
Much better.
I think pulling it apart to change the thermostat anyway was probably a wise call.
The jiggle pin both is installed so it's not at the highest point and was also blocked solid with rusty slime.
I have run the car up to temperature (confirming the gauge does work), and *think* I've got most of the air out. There are no proper bleed points on this system so it's a bit of a faff.
There is however zero flow through the heater core. The linkage to it though is bent (most likely because the valve is jammed) so I'll need to sort that as well. The valve isn't actually that expensive so I'm not going to waste too much time on it if it won't free up without undue levels of violence. I'm expecting the core itself to be absolutely chock full of mud like the last one.
There is no bypass on this heater setup so when the valve is closed the system is just dead headed - with a lot of thes being occasional use cars which are rarely out aside from in the summer it's not surprising that the heaters tend to sludge up. That and we forget how much coolant technology has improved in the last 50 years (when people even bothered to use antifreeze at all - see also why my previous 110 had a huge crack in the side of the block). The whole system will absolutely be getting thoroughly flushed anyway, but I'm really wanting to get the car back to a point where I can take it for a proper test drive with a reasonable level of confidence that it's not going to explode in a giant cloud of steam at the side of the road. I reckoned that driving it with the hoses as they were was just asking for pain.
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The paintwork on the car is generally not bad. The one exception is the bootlid where there have plainly been lashings of filler involved. Given how easily these panels pick up dents I'm guessing that someone has gone rather overboard trying to get it totally smooth. They've used so much that as it's cured it's shrunk, and the paint has split as a result. This panel is definitely going to need stripping back and repainting no matter what we do or it will always be the thing that draws your eye.
I didn't realise quite how MUCH filler was involved though until I looked closer at it today with a view to reattaching the latch. At which point I was briefly confused by the fact that the pin didn't seem to be long enough - that's because there's probably about 1/4" of filler in the way!
So to get this fitted I basically had to cut a hole in the filler for the handle.
It'll need to be sorted properly longer term, but at least it latches closed now. I know these are finicky to get adjusted right anyway.
I ran out of patience with not having done a proper test drive today, in spite of it being way too hot for me. Wasn't a long one but I did go for a ten or so minute bumble just around the neighborhood. Definitely have a few things that need some attention.
[] Steering.
There's a good 1/4 turn of slack in the at the straight ahead position - which given with how heavy and vague it is in these cars to start with feels quite unnerving. Especially when you're straightening up after a junction - you end up having to go past where you're aiming for then about half a turn back on yourself. I'll need to borrow a helper to investigate where that play is - there are something like eight ball joints in the system so *plenty* of opportunity for play to creep in, and the steering box may well need adjusting itself.
[] Brakes.
There's a buuuuunch of dead travel, so the pedal is basically here before you get meaningful retardation of your forward momentum.
Which in a car this heavy is moderately unnerving. The brakes DO actually seem to work reasonably well, the pedal travel is just far too long before anything happens.
I know there has been a bunch of work done on the brakes in the not too distant past, so may even be they just need properly bleeding and adjusting. One of the rears is definitely dragging a tiny bit as well.
[] Throttle pedal.
Conversely this needs a little *more* free play in. It doesn't quite return fully to idle sometimes at the moment and the lack of any deadzone makes it really twitchy and makes pulling away smoothly without ending up with way more revs than you need or kangarooing quite difficult. I'm sure with practice you can master it, but you shouldn't need to!
[] Speedometer.
The cable and/or the trip/odometer gear train need cleaning and lubricating as it currently bounces and wobbles around comically.
Rear suspension is distinctly creaky from somewhere. Not really a problem as such but will be investigated and remedied as necessary. I know the springs are terribly dry so that may be all it is. At least it does seem to *have* at least some semblance of rear suspension unlike the last one where it was all but solid.
All in all, it currently drives like I think a lot of people assume cars from this era were all like. Kinda awkward, vague and under braked. To be honest I probably would have expected it to be pretty much like this if I hadn't already owned one that was despite being very worn out, was pretty well set up.
I'm not 100% sure we don't have some head gasket issues. There seems to be a lot of gurgling that you can feel through the top hose and top of the radiator, though given how much of a pain it can be to get the last bits of air out of the system on these I'm not going to raise too many red flags there until it's been fully cycled a few times. Not worried either way as it's not a huge job, and at some point I'd want to pull the head anyway to deal with what is commonly known as That O-ring.
It sits between the head and water pump housing. The pump studs apparently like to snap for a passtime when disturbed so pulling the head is usually considered to be the safer option. It's certainly masses less hassle than dealing with snapped studs in the front of the block.
I would like to change the inlet manifold gasket as a precaution - and because I do appear to have a drip from somewhere towards the back of the engine there. Stripping that off the head, cleaning the surfaces up etc would be a thousand times easier with the head not attached to the car. Particularly as the rear of the mating surface on the head is a fluffing long way away from you when you're trying to remove goodness knows how old gasket and I remember my back really didn't enjoy it last time round.
I'll get everything needed to pull the head in stock anyway then it's there if I decide to go down that road. I'd rather have it on the shelf and not need it than the other way about.
Oh, and the horn doesn't work. The relay clicks but no sound. I've added it to the list.
This may all come across as sounding really negative, but it really really isn't. I knew this was a car that hadn't been in regular use for a long time so there was absolutely going to be a bunch of fettling involved before it was ready to be chucked into day to day service. Nothing I've found here scares me. Once these things are all sorted I reckon we'll have a nice driving car. These will always be a bit heavy in the steering department, and aren't the sort of car you chuck round corners and roundabouts like the Trabant. However they shouldn't feel actively wayward and the brakes when set up properly are every bit as good as anything made up to the point where ABS and such started to become the norm.
On the plus side, the gearbox is far quieter than on my last one, and we seem to have working syncromesh on the three gears we should have (haven't tried overdrive yet, but the seller has indicated it does and I've no reason to believe otherwise). Clutch while I think could do with a tweak adjustment wise is smooth. There are orders of magnitude less squeaks, creaks and rattles from the car in general than the last one. The engine pulls well and smoothly and save for wanting the valve clearances set sounds healthy. Oh, and yes without the silencer on the intake it does indeed sound as epic as I remember when you crack the throttle open. On the subject of sound, the exhaust on this one is definitely louder than the last one was. Not that I'm going to be one to complain about straight six noises! The car seems to track straight and aside from the fact that the steering wheel isn't straight, the car itself seems to track nice and straight.
I reckon with a bit of elbow grease and patience it will be a nice driving car. At least I do feel that I've got something resembling a to do list now rather than a bunch of question marks and that makes my brain happier.
