1st August 2015
Today, it was determined I'd get started on sorting out the clutch. Mike foolishly offered to help and my brother appeared too so we had a good pool of knowledge and tools and whatnot to get it done. Shouldn't be too much of a bother really, access to the gearbox and everything looked fairly good and I had all the parts I should need so we cracked on with it, optimistic we'd be all done before the sun went down. I mean really, how hard can it be?
Before we get into that, I had been doing some work on the front wing Joe supplied. I wasn't going to take it as I thought the one on the car was much the same, but after spending a bit of time with the dolly kit and flapwheel I think it's worth doing up and swapping onto the car. Both wings have this sort of warty rust bubbles.
Liberal application of the flapwheel makes short work of it. The steel is in reasonable condition. There are other methods to clean up rust but I'm going with one that has always worked for me and lasted for a long time. Clean everything back where you find the rust until you've got shiny metal. Some areas are trickier than others. You'll need to go a bit further than this, but this is how it starts. Be sure to chase the rust spiders back because otherwise they'll just emerge again when you repaint.
There's a small hole in the return lip. I will probably give this a quick blob of welding to fix it properly. However, Rover fitted a rubber U channel trim to the lip that would hide this well. I'm not sure if the trim is supposed to prevent or cause rust.
Some areas cleaned back to shiny metal and discoloured blackness where the rust was.
After everything was cleaned up, including the dent I dressed out on the top of the wing, it was all treated with Jenolite brand rust converter and left until tomorrow when I hope to have time to clean this up and get some fresh paint on (NB: I still haven't, but I will)
A couple of days ago I made a start cleaning the engine bay but didn't have much patience for the job so let it be at this. Tidier, but not as good as I want it to be yet.
So, onto the clutch job then. First up was to remove the battery and air filter again. Then the starter motor came off which in hindsight probably wasn't necessary.
Gearbox is pretty oily and grimy, it looks like it has had a spill or come back through the vent or something in the past and never been cleaned up. It's all fairly old oil.
With the car up on stands, Mike and I set to removing things like the front partial undertray and disconnecting the gear selector rods and all that stuff. It should have been a simple matter to disconnect the lower arms. The inner bolts (two each side) were almost impossible to shift but did eventually relent. The castle nuts on the lower balljoints, however, were a different matter entirely. Now, it is possible (NB: it was possible, communal brain fog on that one) we didn't need to disturb these and could have done the job leaving them in place. Unfortunately by the time we realised this we had also discovered both nuts, split pins and bolt threads were just collections of rust and attempts to remove any of these items just made matters worse. We wasted a lot of time on this part of the job.
Unfortunately we had to resort to cutting through the threads and removing the arms. Since you can't just get the ball joint and have it pressed into old arms, a new pair had to be ordered which won't arrive until Monday now. Really disappointing but at least there's the reassurance of nice new parts going on.
While the passenger side hub came off nice and easily when we got to removing the driveshafts, the driver's side needed a little help. The wheel nuts this side were also done up so tight the rattle gun struggled to shift them.
One driveshaft out and another derp moment - it was one of those days - when we realised neither of us had remembered to drain the gearbox oil. There's supposed to be two litres in there, at best 1.5 litres came out and it had a distinctly burnt smell and look to it.
With the driveshafts out we found the passenger side one was nibbled and leaking and the driver's side one was deformed so we'll have to get a pair of those ordered, it was by now too late in the day to place an order for them so it has to be done tomorrow. Yet more expense that I hadn't expected. Removing the gearbox was a chore too, finding all the bolts wasn't too bad but then getting access to some of them was annoying, like this one. You couldn't put the ratchet directly on the socket because it was too close to the casing and you couldn't use a spanner or similar because the bolts had been overtightened, just like pretty much every bolt we'd encountered.
Eventually we got the old clutch out. There was quite a bit of meat still left on it and it all looked fairly new apart from the release bearing which looked quite old and was a different manufacturer to the rest of the clutch. The friction plate had also been installed the wrong way around. This may explain the issues I was having. There was also signs of hot spots. I had been expecting a paper thin clutch with shiny rivets, not this.
We were quite puzzled by this to be fair, it looks like someone had taken the time to change the clutch in the car but had done it wrong which in turn had led to the symptoms of a dead clutch. While my brother and I cleaned as much of the oil as we could off the gearbox - I like to clean things when I get them off the car, helps me see where I've been and makes things look nicer - Mike quietly got on and reinstalled the clutch.
Then we called it quits. We'd spent way too long on this, mainly because we were fighting bolts that were on so tight they were bending the breaker bar and we were all pretty fed up with it. Tomorrow I'll be going in with Mike to get the gearbox back on and do any other small jobs I can find (and there's still plenty of those) just to make sure the car's time inside the unit isn't wasted. I'll go in again on Monday to fit the new parts, providing they arrive and are correct.
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