Dick wrote: ↑Tue Feb 20, 2024 9:23 pm
You're very quiet lately mate, have you been buying more cars/computers/calculators or shiny things????
Been trying to find time to do a proper update, which I finally got put together this evening.
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Okay then...Where on earth were we?
Ah yes, I was running around like a headless chicken trying to get ready for our trip up north to Scotiacon.
One of the annoying features in the Partner was the presence of several rattles from the tailgate. I was pretty sure that at least one of these was coming from one of the number plate lights which was just floating around behind the trim. They were both full of rust as well so evidently had long since ceased to be weather tight.
For the sake of a couple of quid I figured I may as well replace them both. I was expecting a random no-name part, but what turned up actually appeared to be genuine OEM kit which was a nice surprise. I'd have been more picky about ordering something like suspension parts - but for something as trivial as a number plate light I wasn't being picky.
Sorted.
Predictably this made absolutely no difference to the rattly tailgate - but at least the nearside light doesn't fall out every third time you close the boot now so that's something.
The next job I had lined up was getting the cruise control activated. Initially we ran straight into an issue as we couldn't get Diagbox to talk to the car at all. This was pretty quickly traced to being because one of the pins in the OBD connector having made a bid for freedom.
Thankfully I was able to get hold of it with a pair of fine tipped needle nose pliers and get it to click back into place. We then had no problems connecting to the car. Unfortunately we were also unsuccessful in getting the cruise working - though we think we know why. It turns out that there are actually two places that you need to enable it. One is under vehicle options where you need to set the obviously labelled vehicle speed control option to "with vehicle speed control 1 and limiter" (not speed control 2, or the instrument panel goes crazy). The other one we didn't know about at the time is buried somewhere in the engine ECU section and is labelled by some obscure acronym rather than anything obvious. When time permits I'll run it back over to my friend's place and we'll get it back on Diagbox and have another shot at it. It's the first time either of us had worked with the Peugeot side of the software rather than Citroen, so it was a bit of a learning experience for us both. While we were in there we did a global scan for any trouble codes, and unsurprisingly got a couple back for EGR issues. Colour me unsurprised. We'll investigate those at a later date when time is less of a pressing concern - they're obviously nothing too dire given there's no detriment to performance nor check engine light being triggered so I don't mind coming back to that. Thankfully this car is *just* old enough to pre-date having a DPF fitted, so I don't need to worry about stored codes inhibiting regen cycles or anything like that.
Next up was a 350 mile drive north up to Glasgow, which unsurprisingly was dispatched completely without drama, and we made it to our hotel I'm pretty sure in record time.
Will definitely be glad of getting the cruise control working in the future though as the position of the throttle pedal does make your ankle get quite sore after a couple of hours. Other than that though it has shown itself to be a really good long distance mile muncher. Especially when I remembered after about half the journey that I had an armrest I could deploy attached to the side of my seat.
Made a friend in the hotel car park too. I originally spotted another Partner parked a couple of rows away from where I was, and when I came back out to pick up a couple of things a few hours later discovered that it was now parked next to me. Pretty sure that this can't have been coincidence!
Turned out they were both in Escapade trim as well. Kind of hoped I might have crossed paths with the owner over the weekend but sadly never did run into them, at least not as far as I'm aware.
Was a good, if really busy, weekend of madness. All too soon though was time to head back home. Still breaks my brain a little that our event which when I first started attending in 2015 had somewhere around 150 attendees - but we've now filled that stinking great hotel you see a couple of photos ago with somewhere in the region of 1200 people. Which is a problem for the organisers as we're really desperately short on event space with the number of people we're dealing with. However there simply isn't really anywhere bigger for us to move to. There has been some talk about seeing whether the SEC would be willing to work with us (as the hotel has a walkway connecting it to the convention centre), but the general expectation is that the costs involved there would simply be prohibitive. We'll see I guess. We have obviously made a good impression on the hotel though. Our original hotel contract was for 21-23, which obviously ended up being 22-24 (thankfully they allowed us to carry things over from the aborted 2021 event, or that probably would have been the end of it), with the pricing all having been agreed back in 2019 prior to the whole Covid situation really starting to unfold. They've agreed that for the 2025-27 contract that there's no increase in any of the venue fees - which given that we were bracing for a 20-30% increase as that's the norm across the board for venue costs since back then, is extremely welcome news. Definitely shows we're in their good books though.
Despite there having been some absolutely torrential rainfall while I was away I was glad to find that the interior of the Trabant (except the boot, but I knew to expect that) was still bone dry. Given how horrendously badly the thing leaked when I got the car I'll take that as a win.
The boot was one area that I'd yet to really attempt to address. At the very least I wanted to get the saturated carpets out to be dried and cleaned and to allow me to protect the metal work from further rust. So for the first time since I got the car I actually emptied the boot of spares, rubbish and things that actually belong in the car like the spare wheel. As expected it was both soaking wet and pretty manky.
As with the carpets in the cabin, these all just pull out once you figure out exactly what direction you need to pull the right bits in the right order. Story underneath looked pretty much identical to in the cabin itself.
Though it was noted that there was one spot in the offside rear corner where the boot floor has been holed by rust.
I'll need to run by my usual garage to check whether this is going to be an MOT issue. My gut feeling is no, as I think it's well clear of any prescribed areas (nearest one I think is the offside shock mount which is about 60-70cm away). It will obviously be fixed longer term either way, but would be nice to know whether I need to be worrying about this urgently as the MOT will need to be done in the next few weeks. Most of the damage there is actually in the rear panel rather than the floor itself, and things actually seem solid immediately around the affected area so the repair needed will hopefully be pretty localised. The underside around there is spotless - Virtually all of the meaningful rust I've seen on this car has been from the inside of the cabin due to chronic water ingress problems having been ignored rather than addressed promptly.
In the meantime the boot floor was drowned in Vactan to help halt any further rust.
The actual boot floor carpet was small enough that I was able to just chuck it in the washing machine. It's cleaned up pretty well considering the state it was in to start with.
The side trims are too bulky to fit in, plus are moulded to the shape of the wheel arches so I wouldn't want to risk putting those through the wash anyway. They'll be attacked with the pressure washer at some point before being refitted to hopefully get the worst of the grime out.
Did have a little bit of near drama with the Trabant last week though. I noticed a very slight rotational rubbing noise coming from somewhere when driving slowly, like a brake shoe dragging very slightly. In itself not really a worrying noise, but I deemed it worthy of immediate investigation simply because it was a NEW noise. I'm very much one of the sort of people whose approach is to investigate something at the earliest opportunity rather than just turn the radio up. Turns out this was a smart move. This hub nut was holding on by about half a thread. That could have got "exciting" if I hadn't gone looking.
Said nut should be done up to an eye watering 196NM. My torque wrench doesn't go that high - so I went with "bloody tight" and also bent over the opposite side of that locking washer to ensure that there's absolutely no chance of it backing off again in the future. The other side hadn't worked loose, but it also got locked in place. Taking a closer look at the photos of the front hubs I took when the tyres were being changed I looked to see whether the retaining nuts there had been staked to secure them, and sure enough the answer was a resounding no. So that was the next thing I went and did.
I'd rather see a castle nut and split pin setup, but it is what it is. Given that I know pretty much the entire rear suspension has been apart recently I fully intend to get under the car and now check every single fastener that I can see for tightness, as loose bolts seem to absolutely be a running theme with this car, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of them aren't the fault of the car itself.
Cars are cooperative things which always reward us for narrowly averting disaster aren't they? Oh, wait...No they're the other thing.
I noticed a ticking noise when returning home the day after the discovery and re-securing of the hub nuts. It was only under load, sounding kind of like an exhaust manifold leak. However listening in the engine bay revealed it to be sounding like it was nowhere near the exhaust (even though I did discover that the clamp holding the front exhaust onto the heat exchanger was barely finger tight). Leading me to suspect a head gasket may have failed. Removing the rear cowl panel made me rather more sure of this diagnosis given the amount of oily slime that had dribbled down the back of cylinder number 1, suggesting it had been weeping for quite a while before actually letting go entirely.
Less than ten minutes later we had all the cowling off and could see what we were dealing with better. Hey look, there is actually an engine in there!
Definite signs of weeping from around the one cylinder head visible. Four nuts later the head was off. Last time I had the head off a vehicle with a head gasket failure I failed to really find any smoking gun for the cause of the problems - so it was kind of nice to be left in no doubt what was going on here.
Yep, think we found our leak.
New gaskets are less than £5 each and it's the work of a few minutes to change them so hardly the end of the world. The bore looks to be in good shape too which is nice. Yes there are some signs of wear as you'd expect from an engine with some hours on it, but there's nothing here which concerns me.
Slightly irked with the parts situation though. I specifically ordered a pair of gaskets from a UK based supplier on Wednesday afternoon "because it would be quicker than ordering from Germany." Yeah...have the parts been dispatched yet? Nope. Would they likely be here from my usual supplier in Germany by now? Yep. You just can't win sometimes. Wish I'd just paid the £10 extra and ordered from my usual supplier.
Once the new gaskets (eventually) arrive I'll give the engine a good clean before putting the cowling back on. I don't imagine the gunge on there will actually make much difference to cooling, but it's only going to attract dust and such over time so getting rid of it can only be a good thing.
I'd expected the fan shroud to basically just be a tin box to capture the air from the fan and divert it through 90 degrees towards the engine. However - and this probably shouldn't have surprised me by this point - it turns out to be quite a bit more involved than that.
There's a baffle that completely separates the air flow to the heads and the jugs, with it split between the two heads to ensure the bulk of the air goes where the bulk of the heat is. The cowling at the lower edges is formed to ensure that as much cooling as possible as close to the exhaust ports as possible. Sure just a tin box would have been "good enough" for such a basic car, but no. They clearly did actually put a decent amount of thought into optimising the cooling arrangements.
That's about as far as I can really go with this though until the new gaskets arrive. Has to be said though, the idea of being able to change head gaskets, even on an air cooled engine, in less than half an hour with four tools (10mm, 17mm sockets, a ratchet and a scraper) still breaks my brain just a little bit.
The Rover has actually had its temporary return fuel line plumbed in now. If that proves to be successful over a couple of test runs I'll see about putting it together in a slightly more tidy manner which can endure until I have the time and inclination to pull the tank and replace the combined gauge sender/pickup assembly. Not messing about with that, it's just getting replaced. The gauge sender is dead, and given that this fastens to the bottom of the tank which makes it a right faff to get at I don't want to be going in there twice. However given the amount of messing about involved, I have to admit that it's something that may find itself put off for a while. Just need to sort out a less shonky power supply feed to the pump then I think we can look at taking it out for another test run. Oh, except for the fact that someone parked a Trabant in the way then partly dismantled the engine. Oops.
Said Rover then put itself thoroughly in my bad books - even though it was entirely my own fault.
Apparently back when I plumbed in the fuel pump, filter etc I failed to notice that the hose clip on the outlet side of the fuel filter had bound up on itself rather than tighten on the hose properly. This didn't cause any issues for several months of sitting there, until I guess I disturbed things just enough when messing around with the return side of things on the other side of the engine bay. At some point between me working on the car and the following morning, the join started to leak. First I knew of this was when I woke up the following morning to the thought of "Wait...Why do I smell petrol?" Yep, it had started leaking at some point during the night and dumped an unknown but not insubstantial amount of fuel on the driveway - which drains towards the front of the house. The result being that the entire house ended up absolutely stinking of raw fuel. Cleaning things up as best I could and having all the windows open for two days has mostly got rid of the smell everywhere except for the utility room (which I don't quite understand as that's the furthest possible point from the area in question). Absolutely fuming with myself for missing something like that. Anything on the fuel system should have been double and triple checked. If that had started leaking while driving the fuel would have been sprayed straight over the nearside exhaust manifold by the fan. I need to do better in future. Does also demonstrate one of the downsides of having the pickup coming out of the bottom of the tank (which is itself mounted quite high up in the body), in that even a tiny leak can end up dumping a lot of fuel simply through gravity. Kind of makes me want to add an additional solenoid controlled valve on the tank outlet to also be fed via the inertia switch for the fuel pump, as even with the pump off if anything happens in an accident that's severe enough to sever a fuel line in the engine bay even if the pump stops it's going to keep dumping fuel at a fair old rate anyway.
I know everyone makes mistakes sometimes, but I'm still (and will be for quite some time) annoyed with myself for that one.
how many miles did you do since you bought it??