Practically Classics Forum

Loving this

Today's mission? Apparently largely based around the eviction of zip ties.

While most areas seemed a good deal drier than yesterday, there was still standing water in a couple of places, so I added a fan to the equation to get a bit of air circulation going inside the cabin. Even within an hour this had made a huge difference.



It appears that the general answer to where water is getting in after the rain last night is simply "everywhere." So I suspect that a full new seal set for everything may well wind up being on the cards.

Next up was investigating the wobbly and lopsided front bumper. This was particularly noticeable as it bounced quite impressively when the car was idling.



While it was bolted in place on the nearside (albeit not very tight), the offside was making do with a zip tie. Not ideal, even though the bumper really doesn't weigh anything as it's just a bit of plastic. Bolts were replaced after a little bit of letterbox surgery via the indicator hole in the front panel, and a secure and more or less straight bumper is now in place.



Much better.

On the subject of ousting zip ties, I also found my eye drawn to this mess in the engine bay.



Which after five minutes finding a couple of appropriate nuts and bolts was replaced with this far more appropriate looking washer bottle from the box of bits that came with the car.



I don't actually have an electrical feed for the pump at the moment, but it should work fine off the manual pump as it stands. It doesn't leap out at you as soon as the bonnet is opened now at least.

Interesting to see that this doesn't look to be a modern replacement as it does still say made in DDR on it so may well be from A Trabant - though with a 1989 date code, not from THIS Trabant.



In the boot I found the cool air intake duct for the heater which lives between the air blend box and the front panel so that was refitted.



I'm probably going to discover that this overwhelms the blend flaps in the heater when at speed and is something that most people fit during the summer and remove at winter which is why it was in the boot!

Engine bay looks a bit better I think now.





Really is crying out for a good clean though. Especially down in the bottom of the inner wings and such there's about 1/2" of greasy mud.

This really is a strangely proportioned little car in profile.



Based on the rear overhang and such, it really looks like there should be about a foot of additional body behind the front doors that someone has just chopped out, and that the doors would be a good bit longer (which admittedly would make entry and egress a good bit easier, it's a bit of a squeeze through the door if you've got long legs).

While digging around under the seats yesterday getting the carpets out something which surfaced was the lid for the fuse box I've just remembered so I'll need to get that put back in place next time I'm out at the car.

I was made aware earlier this evening that there should be a jacket fitted around the engine cowling to provide some additional sound deadening. Armed with the knowledge that it existed and after a brief web search an idea what it looked like I went and had a rummage in the boot again.

Sure enough this turned up.



Which I'll set about figuring how to fit tomorrow. Hopefully it will be reasonably self explanatory once I'm actually looking at it and the engine.

I don't imagine it can really make a huge difference, but equally I doubt they would have fitted it if it wasn't deemed worthwhile.

Fairly short on time today, and that didn't really coincide with when the weather wasn't being awful aside for about half an hour, so nothing major to report today.

I did however find time to refit the jacket over the engine cowling. It's pretty obvious how it fits in place when you're looking at it along with the car.





We're missing a couple of clips but it's not going anywhere. I'll replace those when I get a chance. One of the bolts holding the air cleaner to the top of the engine was missing it turned out, but that was just an M4 bolt so I was able to just grab a random one out of the drawer of random fasteners in the garage and replace that at least.

I do remain unconvinced of the efficacy of this little bit of fabric in suppressing any perceptible amount of noise, but we'll see I guess!

While I was moving things around, one of the HT leads came off in my hand when I touched it as it wasn't screwed into the clip at the coil end. Have to wonder if that's ever been making a good contact.

On the nearside inner wing there's a pair of wires leading into the engine bay along with the main vehicle loom which have just been chopped off.



I'll need to investigate this in more detail, but I do wonder if these might originally have run to the windscreen washer pump - the wiper control fitted here is of the type which is set up for an electric screen wash pump so I assume there would have been power to it from somewhere originally.

Should be a new set of tyres going on tomorrow, and I'll hopefully also get the tools I need to get the floor cleaned up ready for some paint.

Are any of those wires live?

Dick wrote: Sun Dec 10, 2023 7:24 pm Are any of those wires live?

Haven't had the opportunity to check yet. Most likely a switched live and a ground. Brown I believe is generally the colour used for ground for vehicles from this sort of era from that area.

That cost me a car stereo learning that lesson back in 2002.

We made it four days into ownership before I rage quit on the mishmash of budget tyres on the Trabant. Wouldn't have been quite as bad if the two matching tyres were actually on the same axle, but the tendency for it to attempt to rotate clockwise every time you so much as looked at any surface water wasn't going to be something I would put up with. Three tyres had varying degrees of perishing from minor to major present anyway, so time for a new matched set.





Fancy disk brake upgrades, which work very nicely indeed. Nice to have given there's no engine braking available to help with slowing down.



Though we did discover that the wheel from a later car is also something that's part of this as the dish is fractionally different and if you put the older wheels on the front the spokes foul on the caliper.

Noticeable that we have a very, very oily looking gearbox there. Will definitely need to check that the level is correct ASAP, then see if I can figure out where the oil is escaping. Given where it seems to be mostly concentrated I'm tempted to point at the speedometer drive initially. I reckon top up then go after the whole general area with the pressure washer and some degreaser is probably going to be the starting point though as there's no chance of figuring out where it's coming from just now as there's a 1/8" thick coating of slime over the whole thing pretty much.



While the gearbox is very oily, the suspension spring it's very obvious is very much the opposite...I have to wonder when that was last greased.

Same looks to be the case for the rear spring too.



A couple of folks have warned me that the rear suspension trailing arms are quite prone to rust issues so are worth checking. There is a bit of rust on them here but nothing scary. A good wire brush, some Vactan and protection going forward to prevent them degrading further should be fine.



My choice of tyres will surprise absolutely nobody if they've followed my motoring nonsense for more than five minutes.



Uniroyal RainExpert 3s in this case.

Car already feels are more positive, and most noticeably actually brakes in a straight line now - it always pulled slightly but noticeably to the right under braking before the tyres were changed.

As usual the guys there took quite an interest, including the manager of the place who seemed quite taken with it.

Had a few minutes spare when I got back so have continued just picking away at obvious simple to sort things.

There was a random lamp holder floating around down by the fuse box with a ground still attached to it. On a hunch (after I confirmed the lamp in it worked), I went looking for a home for that. Turns out it had been pulled out of the back of the rear window heater switch - so that now lights up again as the designers intended.



Those switches could both do with being dismantled, cleaned and having fresh grease applied to the moving parts as they are really, really stiff to operate just now. Plus the caps could really do with a good clean. The red circular thing to the left of the hazard switch which looks like a push button is actually the tell tale for the hazards, as the number of contacts in the switch didn't leave space for an integrated light in the switch itself. This also now works having cleaned the contacts.

Investigation of the two random chopped wires I found in the engine bay a day or two back revealed exactly as I had expected that they were for the windscreen washers. One is an ignition switched live (which was just floating around uninsulated in the engine bay, nice) and the other is a ground that's switched by the washer contact in the windscreen wiper switch. I'll get that wired up properly again when I have a chance - for now I've ensured that the live wire isn't given an opportunity to find a ground.



Yes I probably should have used electrical tape, but I had that to hand and the two wires are individually wrapped before being overwrapped so it'll be fine. It's not as though I'll be leaving it like that for years and it's far better than it was.

The heater hose that goes into the air blend box is quite a loose fit and you can feel a pretty large amount of hot air escaping around it if left to its own devices. I suspect this may well have been far more snug when it was new, but now it obviously needs some help to make a good seal, so a hose clip was added to that join.



Did refitting the jacket around the engine cowling make any difference to the noise levels? I can't say I really notice anything - but in the same breath the felt underlay from under the carpets is currently in the spare room until I get to the bottom of the plethora of water ingress issues so that's not a fair comparison really. From outside there doesn't seem to be a really noticeable difference though as far as I can tell.

Was out and about after this doing a variety of errands today and definitely am still enjoying the car. The gear shift is so, so much better now it's been greased which really makes a huge difference to how enjoyable the car is to drive.



It's hard to really convey in photos how tiny the thing is compared to most cars. You can zap around mini roundabouts which you basically just drive over in other cars with ease. It's a little over a foot longer than a classic Mini, and the vast majority of that is behind the rear wheels, if that gives a sense of scale folks are more likely to be able to picture.

I still need to finish getting back used to reversing a left hand drive car though, that always takes me by far the longest of anything to get back into the swing of when I get back into one.

Think this is a record for the shortest time between me getting a car and getting a message from someone saying "Was this you?" relating to a post somewhere.



Yep, that will have been me.

Noticed another item for my shopping list today in the form of a steering rack gaiter.



Not much else going on today aside from a decent amount of driving around locally.

I did give the dash a (very) quick wipe over though, and have got the shelf underneath back into shape again. It had basically collapsed because several of the trim clips that hold it up had vanished.



They definitely haven't been replaced with a random selection of screws. I'll put the proper clips in once I have some to hand - all the ones I currently have are too big.

Car definitely feels a lot better for the new tyres. Really has changed the feel of the steering completely, and it's definitely less bouncy than it was - a bit anyway.

A great improvement

Probably the single biggest headache (I'm aware of at the moment!) with the Trabant is the water ingress. The doors are clearly playing a fair part in that based on the damp spots.



I'm sure the seals themselves have a part to play there as they're basically totally solid chunks of plastic which may have at some point been rubber. I'm sure as a result that they're really not doing much useful.

My eye was also drawn to the fact that there's no drip shield behind the door card.



It sounds as though there may actually not have been anything in there, and admittedly the door card itself was bone dry when I took it off.

Trim clips...I have a grand total of three present for each front door out of...eighteen it looks like. So I'll really need to try to find some that fit! It would be nice to have door cards that don't flap around every time you close the doors.

On the driver's side front wing top the rubber infill strip on the panel join had lifted near the front in a couple of places.



As you could see this from the driver's seat it was disproportionately bugging my OCD.

Thankfully with some careful prodding with a flat blade screwdriver I was able to get the infill strip back into its groove and to sit flat again.



It's a tiny detail at the end of the day, but they all add up eventually.

On a similar note is this rear light surround which I'll need to find a replacement for. if I had the broken off bit I could probably glue it back together, but sadly I don't.



I've also had a look at the very loose latching of the boot lid. On that one I'm scratching my head a little as the striker plate is adjusted as far down as it can be, but there's still a good 3/4" of slack when the bootlid is latched. I do wonder if this is just down to the seal itself degrading rather than there being anything wrong with the latch - as it all looks fine.

Did find a pair of number plate surrounds in the boot while rummaging around which obviously date from the car's previous life in Germany.



I'm really not a fan of fussy things like this on cars so they'll probably just be carefully stored to be handed on to the next owner with the car when it's eventually moved on rather than put back on the car by me. Interesting to see though.

The whole "this will only be here for a month or three and I'll not be spending any money on it" thing isn't going very well. This evening I put a €300-ish order through to Trabantwelt for the following.

[] Correct HLP68 gearbox oil.
[] Replacement for the missing bonnet badge.
[] Radio blanking plate for the dash.
[] Steering rack gaiter.
[] Fog light switch.
[] Sachsenring emblem key chain.
[] Air filter to carb hose (one on the car is badly perished).
[] Full replacement window and door seal set.

The last item being about €200 of that. However that is literally a replacement for every exterior seal on the car. Doors, door windows, rear windows, front and rear windscreens and bootlid seals. The lot. I think just ordering a complete new seal set is the sensible way to go. They all seem to be in a poor way one way or another so in terms of minimising long term hassle it's going to be money well spent

The rear windscreen needs to come out to deal with the rust in the surround. Not having to try to get the screen out without worrying about damaging the seal is probably worth that money in reduced hassle alone.

Let's see what the random number generator in Customs comes up with when that arrives...hopefully less than the last bit order I put in from abroad when a $300 parcel from the US managed to cost me £300 by the time I'd actually got my hands on it!

What was the exchange rate for the $... good luck with getting stuff delivered.. most of my suppliers don't ship to Europe and when they do its vat and funding the magic money forest in charges..