Practically Classics Forum

I've got a spare steel pipe I got from the orange car I broke so there's no need to roll around in the mud (for once) but I need to inspect it to see if it's any good, much of the underside of that car was rust and I imagine the pipe won't be much better. It will certainly be easier to get a replacement made, even a pair if need be, as I shan't have to dismantle the car to do it.

Agreed on the repair rather than replace with those vents, if the design was good enough at production then it's good enough for me. I now know the light cluster on the driver's side is letting water in and that is equally easy to resolve with some extra sealant. After that the boot should be leak free and I should be able to put the interior back in.

Tonight I took delivery of the other two badges for the alloys, a good matching driver's door card to replace my damaged one (another part of my brother's old 216) and a pair of brand new full sills for the future as these old Rovers have a reputation and they're a difficult panel to get hold of.

This morning I thought I'd quickly change the door card and see if I could find out why my central locking made noises but had to be operated manually on the driver's side of the car. Simple, right? Getting the old card off was fairly straightforward, a few screws and a bit of jiggling and off it came mostly no bother. The entire top edge of the card has just disintegrated, much worse than I expected it to be once I saw it properly off the car. Also explains why the side window demister vent has never worked this side, which can be very frustrating first thing when you can't see out of your window at a roundabout.


The wooden trim on the new door card was darker than my trim so I had to swap those over. That's really easy, you just push on the metal clips - three on the large section, two hidden behind the demister vent - to remove and push the new ones in. Again, you can see how little structure is left in the top of this trim.


On the replacement card some of the funny plastic clips were damaged and one was missing while the ones on the original card were, generally, in better shape so I swapped the ones over I needed.


Stripped the old card of all useful components before it went in the bin. You never know when or if you'll need electric window packs and spare grab handles.


Before refitting the central locking mechanism was investigated and we suspect it's stripped the teeth of an internal cog or similar because it does nothing at all beyond making noises, no attempt was made at repair because I don't have the spares and it works manually so there's no real bother. It was a nightmare to refit. I've done plenty of door cards over the years but I've never had one put up such a fight as this one. Nothing wanted to line up and when you lined one bit up another bit would pop out. The top edge was almost impossible to seat correctly no matter which order you fitted it and the door mirror interior trim panel. I might as well not bothered swapping the good bottom clip-pegs things over because they were intent on not staying in the holes, falling out, moving... urgh. It's on, at any rate, and the mystery jingle seems to have been resolved.


The last job I did was resealing the rear light cluster. I checked this when I got home and the water ingress is now limited to one spot which I'm struggling to understand. I had thought the water was only getting in between the seal and the bodywork, which it now isn't, but on inspection it appears to be getting through the two pieces of metal that the light cluster bolt goes through and I can't really figure out how so I don't know what to seal up to stop it. I'm wondering if it's blown a seam just enough to let the water drain through the panel gap as normal but then drip into the car.


In good water leak news, the passenger side light cluster isn't leaking and the vents have remained absolutely bone dry even after driving through puddles.

If it's something like the solonoid, I'd be tempted to use an aftermarket one. That's what I did on the 115SLD I used to use as a stratospheric mileage commuter car, before I ended up shortening it by a foot and a half up the backside of a Merc.

Even if it's not "Original" it keeps it going until you can get an original

Not that fussed about originality on the Rover so long as things work. You can still get the bit I likely need from Rimmers and even though I've been happy so far with the quality of parts, they do charge £Rimmers for everything which I'm not so much. We shall see, I can live with it for now because I have a key that works in the door lock.

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Good progress happened on the Princess today. I'm determined to get her out of the workshop this weekend which meant getting the front end sorted out and weatherproof, which primer and filler obviously isn't. Got the filler to an acceptable level of finish if not perfect (I will go back and sort that out) and was happy with how this was going until I got to the top bit of the front wing I hadn't stripped the paint back on where the worst of the micro-blistering was in the bad paint.


Well, if I get it removed it's a bit more bodge out of the car. The very top corner has a much better fill of fibreglass to remedy a very common rot spot. I've left that alone for now but I will be going back to weld a patch in there. If it weren't for the scarcity of wings I'd just replace this one given how much work it will have had. So, what was hiding under that massive chunk of filler? Not a lot really, looks like it's been scraped along something in the dim and distant past. The rear wing this side has been stripped down and found free of damage so at the worst this bit of scrape on the front wing will be on the doors for some distance.


I went on to put some filler on and get it smooth, considerably less filler than had been used! Again this will need refining later but for now I chucked some paint at it. Annoyingly, I ran out of beige and the nearest thing I had available was some white paint. It'll do for now, this is purely a temporary measure. I also removed the passenger side headlight unit and made an attempt to remove the bent driver's side one, thwarted only by access and rounded screw heads. As you can see, the front end has a quick blast of beige all over. I'm going to be fitting a black tube or mesh grille on the front rather than trying to get the original trims to sit as I want them. This will hide the headlights moderately well too and is very easy to achieve and revert at a later date should I want to.


Before I started the next job I decided to investigate the rust that was reappearing on the C pillar. This has been an issue since I bought the car nearly 4 years ago and now it's actually holed next to the rear screen rubber. The rear screen will be coming out this year to repair this properly, for now I removed as much of the rust as I could and later doused it in rust converter. I'll cut out this rust at a later date and eliminate the problem completely.


Then it as time to employ the cake tins. I've been looking forward to this because it seemed like a genuinely easy job. Offer the tin up to the car where I want it to sit and draw around it with a pen, cut out the hole with a combination of tin snips and angle grinder (not too difficult given how large a hole this is) and gently tap the tin into place. It was a very snug fit which made tack welding it into place really easy. The cake tin welded better than the car, not that I was too surprised. After the tin was secured I cut off the rolled lip so I could weld the rest of the bits of metal that meet up. We tried a light in the new cake tin bucket and it fits really, really nicely.


Once I was happy with that I nibbled back the excess metal with a coarse flapwheel until it was flush with the bodywork. This part really surprised me, I was expecting it to be quite difficult in practice and yet it proved as easy in practice as it was in theory. There's a bit more to go which I'll do when I've filled in the gaps I cut for the Viva lights I found too difficult to fit.


I absolutely love how these look on the back of the car, especially the curved shape of the bucket opening. You can see the funny shaped bit I need to fill where I didn't cut the hole for the bucket perfectly, I did expect that might happen given how in-and-out the back panel is, I just have to make a really awkard patch to go in there to solve it.


They do protrude into the boot space more than the original lights. I don't lose functionality of the boot space as the spare wheel can still be got in and out as easily as standard.


Very happy with that, I'm looking forward to doing more on it this week and reporting back on it.

Turns out, British Leyland made some screws that round at the barest glimpse of a screwdriver and yet are hard enough to blunt drill bits. Can you imagine how horrible it was taking an angle grinder to the top two screws holding the driver's side headlight bracket? It was very horrible. Headlight alignment on this side was off due to a bent light bracket and a slightly bent bracket mounting plate. This is all easy to straighten out and gives me the opportunity to refurbish the slightly crusty headlight brackets and bowls which are in need since the adjusters don't work properly. Front end is looking quite empty again now.


I determined to get that rear corner finished on the welding front today. First job was to make up some templates which was very easy for the inboard section and very difficult for the outer corner. I thought I'd kept the piece I cut out of the corner of the wing but I couldn't find it anywhere today so I must have uncharacteristically thrown it away. To get the shapes as close as possible I used the Viva light template I'd made, taped it to the car and drew on the tape to give me the extra I needed to add to fill the hole. Then taped this to some fresh card and cut out new templates. It almost gave me perfect patches, I'm getting much better at this side of things.


The most difficult patch to make was that tiny infill section for the corner of the light bucket where I'd cut the hole slightly too big. This was added after I'd tacked the bigger patches in place.


Everything was then tacked and welded in place ready for filler. The old bumper bracket holes were blanked. For the corner section I tacked it along the straight-ish part of the panel and then bent it in situ to follow the curve of the car. I knew this would be pretty much impossible to do otherwise because the panel tucks in at the bottom while curving around very specifically at the same time. All of this corner is a bit lumpy because of a neighbour reversing into me with his Corsa B, did much more damage to his car than to mine. After I was happy that the panels were sitting as well as I could make them I seam welded it all before dressing back with the flap wheel.


Then it was on to first fill. I had to use more filler than I wanted to because of the imperfect nature of the rear corner. For a first fill it's not bad, the primer is to prevent flash rusting and to let me see where areas need improvement. I want to get this as close to perfect as I can before I put the top coat on. There's still quite a few low spots to build up and the edge of the light bucket needs some refining yet. Promising start, all the same.




I won't be able to work on this tomorrow, instead the earliest I can get to work on this now will be Saturday, when I'll hopefully have a shiny purple paint update.

It has been a very long day. Happily I have met the deadline for getting the Princess' bodywork weatherproof enough for her to go outside ready for the deep clean of the unit next week. The front wing filling went quite well. Took this picture while the beige was still wet.


The back corner took forever to get how I wanted it. There's still more work needed but that can wait. It's smart enough that I wouldn't be ashamed for people to see it in public, I can finesse it more when I've got more time. There just aren't enough paint and filler friendly hours in the day temperature wise at the moment. Again, the paint was still wet when I took this picture.


My arms and back ache something chronic from all that hand sanding and helping Mike re-bush the Rover's rear lower arms. I'm just happy I've got to this point, things are really looking up for the old boat. I may go in tomorrow to see if I can get to the bottom of the running problem or I might just sit at home and drink tea all day.


The Rover next then. What started as a simple spring swap has become a real chore and seen me without a car for nearly a week. Tonight, happily, I got to drive the Rover home. Mike had already been doing what he could and I'd been helping but most of the work is one person stuff so my attention was diverted to the Princess to get her moving along a bit more. You may recall, when we removed the rear suspension we were faced with sheared bolts in the lower arm and we noticed the driver's side trailing arm bush wasn't looking too clever. By 'not too clever' I mean it was utterly, totally, spannered.


The bushes in the trailing arm were no better. There's three bushes per arm and the bolt that goes through for the hub end and the shock absorber had both sheared. Luckily, the inner most bolts both came out without damage and could be reused. This is the state of all six of the bushes that came out of the trailing arm. Normally I would have just replaced the arm, unfortunately I couldn't find anyone with any in stock or that could order a pair in a reasonable timescale so the more arduous task of rebushing was taken.


Mike spent considerable effort getting the old bushes out. I couldn't help as I was tied up with work. He and my brother then gave them a lick of Flame Red to tidy them up. Not having a press or access to one made the job harder than it might have been and cutting out the outer ring of the older bushes slowed things down further.


A bunch of lovely shiny new bushes and bolts later...


Job done! I helped putting these in today. Far easier having two of us to hold the makeshift sockets-and-vice press in place while they were cranked into place. Apparently the bigger trailing arm bushes were much easier to install and they had already been done.


Trailing arm back on the car, lower arm ready to go on, new springs in the strut legs and things looking like this.





Unfortunately, the fixings for the brake shoes couldn't be reused as several of the clips had snapped. We couldn't get the clips separately so a full kit was bought for a tenner.


Then everything was installed back on the car ready for the last little jobs of connecting and bleeding the brakes, putting the outer brake drum on and refitting the wheels. That all went quite smoothly and the car was back on its wheels in no time.


I took about three nanoseconds to swap the good spark plug cover onto the car in place of my slightly broken one. I'm probably going to get one of the stainless/polished kits to spruce the engine up at a later date, for now this will do just fine.


Then it was a case of taking the car for a spin around the block to make sure everything was okay. Handbrake came back good, brakes feel much better for having being bled and topped up and the car handles like it's on rails. Best of all, the comfort isn't compromised that much and I can still drive it like I would normally. What is nice is that the back end now behaves predictably so changing all those bushes was likely very sensible indeed. It was dark and raining so I didn't get a very good picture of the day's results. Suffice to say, I'm really pleased with how the car looks and drives now, just a case of tarting it up a bit from here on in because it's practically a mechanically brand new car at this point.

I wanted to get some better pictures of the car today and needed to bumble off to town to get some stuff. Well I say bumble, the Rover isn't very bumbly anymore, it feels like its traded in the brogues and tweed for loafers and a turtleneck. Managed to forget the front bumper is lower and bumped it on the curb in the parking spot, no harm done happily but something to remember.


I took some other pictures but they didn't come out so well. One bonus to the new ride height is that I'm not dazzled so badly by other cars headlights in front or behind me, that's nice because I was expecting that side of things to be worse. When I got home I took some better pictures so this is really just a vanity post. I love this car, this car is best car.









I can now focus on the cosmetic and hopefully I won't get any more big bills. With the weather improving, paintwork is going to be far easier to rectify and I should be able to have some time to get the interior properly cleaned. The seats desperately need a shampoo, they're quite disgusting in places. New number plates are a must, they look a bit scabby, so when I can afford to I'll get some replicas of the original dealer plates run up. I'd like to get the glass tinted a bit darker and I'm trying to think of a good alternative location for the roof aerial so I can weld up the old location and smooth the roof out better. An electric aerial in the rear wing might work as might a hidden one on the underside of the boot lid, there's also the consideration of whether or not to future proof by getting things converted to DAB as I gather analogue FM is going to be turned off in the near future.

vulgalour wrote:analogue FM is going to be turned off in the near future

Have no immediate fears on that score, latest from the radio forum suggests that 2020 is the earliest that the remaining BBC nationals will vanish from lossless, not too drastically compressed radio and the locals will be a couple of years beyond that but there's no need to worry about the equipment as a roof aerial is the best for DAB reception. I fitted a Becker DAB set to the AE92, more for its ability to use CDs, USB sticks, SD/MMC cards and BT via APTX than the radio, but with a simple splitter that amplifies the analogue input to the set and comes with both SMA and DIN (for analogue reception) plugs, it receives FM and DAB perfectly via the car's original roof aerial on the driver's side front corner. I don't get the AM bands so well because the aerial - over a yard long extended - has to be no longer than about a foot for best DAB reception, which is fine even at home, shewn as a dead area on the reception maps but in fact BBC6 comes in loud and clear. And that's surely the only reason anyone would actually tolerate DAB's awfully compressed, hollow sound isn't it? Honestly, I've heard better 96k mp3 recordings as taken from my collection of wax cylinders of Harry Lauder's songs and they're terrible but there was no point in encoding that to flac since the hiss would have been the only part of the spectrum to benefit.
This isn't just a problem with aftermarket DAB sets either, the Golf was shipped with DAB radio among its gadgets and that, although an expensive system by a reputable manufacturer (Siemens), was no better than the Toyota's Becker playing through the same four speakers as fitted to the car for its o/e Philips radio cassette which I'd have left in place were it not for the amount of glove hole space taken up by a couple of dozen tapes.

FM will be around long after even the last of the commercial locals are gone as there are currently new licences being handed out to smaller local providers such as Lionheart, whose output is pretty much like a day long edition of Beat Surrender and at a surprisingly good level.
That Rover looks very fine indeed, IMHO.

Rover should be at Pride of Longbridge, all being well, and convoying with my brother and his Lemans green MG ZT. I quite like the original Rover head unit, it sounds right for the car and goes loud enough for my tastes without distortion. Knowing that we're looking at a date of 2020 for the big stations - and I rarely listen to those in the car - and later for the smaller commercial ones - which I listen to more frequently in the car as they're better suited usually - means I'll just leave things as they are since it all works perfectly fine. Top advice.

Princess now outside in the daylight for the first time in many, many months. Not too shabby really. On this side there's really just that front wing to repair so I can relocate the centre bar properly.


We used the inners that fell out of the Rover's old trailing arm bushes to wedge between the upper arm and bumpstop to make the suspension a bit more level. That made towing the Princess out of the unit much, much easier and the 38psi in the dead tyres made pushing it the last yard or three a doddle. Not too shabby really, all things considered.


In the harsh half-light of afternoon it does look tolerably okay. I'm quite pleased.


Here she is with the rest of the fleet. Chompy's Daihatsu Applause, my daily Rover and the bundled up 6TL.



The reason for going outside is so the unit can be deep cleaned and sorted out. Chompy and I will try and get to the bottom of the not-starting problem the Princess developed before going into the unit and see if we can get her running reliably again. Then, she'll go in under her own power to have a job done and come out under her own power so we don't hog all the space in the unit for so long again. I doubt any of the work that needs doing now is going to spiral out of control like the floor repairs did and the biggest bit of welding needed is the one outer sill replacement.