Zel's Eclectic Fleet Blog (Volvo, Rover, Trabant, Invacar & Occasional Distractions)

[Zelandeth]

Busy day today so didn't really have much time for tinkering on the cars - however there was one job which I really wanted to take advantage of the weather for - finishing putting together the paving I've currently got the Xantia parked on. I got one side done a couple of weeks ago but stopped at that point as I was close to death. The big issue is that the ground between where the paving slabs are currently stacked and the driveway has been completely dug up while the bamboo removal was underway and is basically a clay bog at the moment. Currently however it's all frozen solid so far easier to walk over and wheel equipment carrying paving slabs. The *downside* I discovered however was that the slabs were all thoroughly frozen together in the stacks, so freeing those was a bit of a battle.

After an hour or so though I was done, and my temporary (Um...Two years and counting...) overflow parking spaces were looking a little less dodgy.



I need to split a couple of slabs to fill in at the end, but that's something I can do later.

There's going to be some pretty major landscaping work done here at some point in the future so an *actual* driveway extension will probably happen then so this isn't intended to be any way permanent. If we crack a slab or two in the interim I'm really not too bothered - though to be honest those on the nearside of the car have been there for a while now without any issues. The fact that it elevates the car a bit above the grass I like too as it should help with ventilation and reduce the usual tendency for cars to rust so quickly when parked over grass.

Having a tidy space here has suddenly become a little more important as despite me needing another project about as much as I need a hole in the head it looks like another car *might* be arriving here shortly. This is honestly more a case of an automotive refugee in need of a safe harbour though than something that I was looking for so I feel a little less guilty!

The wiring supplies I'd been waiting for arrived today so I should be able to finish wiring in the temperature gauge in the Invacar next time I get a spare hour in the garage.

[Zelandeth]

This afternoon it was far, far too cold for anyone with even the slightest shred of common sense to be outside. So of course I was crawling around on the floor in the garage feeding wiring through the car for the temperature gauge in the Invacar.

Fed it all through the car from the gauge end to ensure I had it looped through all the holes and such it needed to go through and to make sure I had enough slack to work with, then hooked up the engine end and started backwards fastening the wiring properly in place working back towards the gauge. The connections to the sender here have been done using those crimp connectors which also have heat-shrink tubing pre-fitted so hopefully should be reasonably weatherproof.

Routed it along the HT leads then jumped to the main loom that runs under the battery tray.



I really need to get around to fabricating a proper battery bracket (the original form factor of battery is now nearly impossible to get hold of unless you want to pay many hundreds of pounds for one) so I can dispense with the bungee cords. It's absolutely going nowhere, but it looks an awful mess.

I then continued to follow the main front-rear vehicle loom where it vanishes down under the floor.



It is cable tied to the loom where it passes through grommets in the chassis braces under the floor, before popping back up following the handbrake cable and fuel lines as appropriate before rejoining the loom in this corner. I'd have preferred to follow the main loom all the way up there but that would have required removal of the fuel tank to get to...so we took the long way around.



The gauge wiring enters the cabin through the convenient huge wiring grommet just to the left of the handbrake cable.



The pre-existing red wire there is the feed to the fuel pump. I'll be labelling these with cable flags to avoid future confusion...Though the wiring on this thing isn't exactly complex.

Then I spent about half an hour standing on my head finding a clean and tidy way to route it over behind the dash and hooking it up at the gauge end. Once the engine was fired up we almost immediately confirmed the gauge was working - this photo was taken literally about 30 seconds after the engine started.



If ever you needed a demonstration of how much less thermal mass you have to play with on an air cooled engine, there you go.

After running at a fast idle for about 25 minutes while I put things back together and tidied up the gauge had settled here.



Quite curious to see how it behaves under normal driving conditions...As I've said the actual numbers I'm not particularly worried about really unless they're massively out of the correct ball park, I just want to draw up a picture in my head of what's normal for this car, and it's if we suddenly see a departure from that I know I need to investigate something. It will be interesting to see how scary the numbers I see during sustained high speed driving are though, given that's really not what this car was designed for! Between the size of the oil cooler and the fan though I don't think we should have too much trouble really.

After being on the charger overnight the Jag decided that it would actually start today so I was finally able to rearrange the fleet to all be pointing the same direction. The van being the wrong way around was something I'd been meaning to fix for ages.



Please ignore the Audi in the background...That's nothing to do with me! Especially in grey...Nearly as unfashionable a colour as what I've got on the way...

Annoyingly the interior of the Jag is absolutely soaking wet again.



I think I have sorted most of the major sources of water ingress, though there are still some minor ones. Not least the doors - the weather sheet in both of them is wrecked. I've recently got some thick polythene sheet in stock which should be perfect to make replacements out of. Hopefully that will stop most of this problem. I'm currently waiting on the arrival of a new fan for my dehumidifier...though with it being on a slow boat from China summer will probably get here first. At least I had the sense to take the carpets out when I first saw it was getting damp again though so they're not in there to just act as giant sponges like last time.

[Luxobarge]

I wouldn't ever tie a cable to an HT lead - asking for an HT leak sooner or later. OK it's working at the moment, but it's not good practice. Cool gauge though!

[Zelandeth]

I wouldn't ever tie a cable to an HT lead - asking for an HT leak sooner or later. OK it's working at the moment, but it's not good practice. Cool gauge though!

Have had a couple of folks express varied concerns about that. It seemed logical to me at the time given the sensor is essentially attached to the spark plug, but I'll look at rerouting it today. Just a shame there's no quite as tidy alternative!

[Zelandeth]

As a few people on a couple of forums had expressed concerns about my using the HT leads as a convenient thing to tether nearby wiring to so I went and removed 3928236348 cable ties and had a bit of a reshuffle of that whole corner of the engine bay.

HT leads are now completely clear of anything else.





Really should give them a clean too to get rid of the dust from the bodywork as I'm sure that's just waiting to behave like a sponge first time they get wet.

[Luxobarge]

Much better - nice one! Cheers

[Zelandeth]

Right, it is now official. New project is indeed inbound. It should be arriving on Thursday.

38 years old.

Hasn't had an MOT since 2011.

Currently has a severe misfire to the point of being pretty much un-drivable.

Rare enough that parts availability is going to be a nightmare.

It is also very, very beige.

What's not to like?

[Zelandeth]

Nothing huge to report today. Just took the HT leads back off TPA and gave them a clean and wipe down with some silicone spray to help keep the water off.



While I was at it I made a spacer out of a couple of cable ties to keep the lead to the nearside cylinder and the king lead separate. I'm sure I've got some actual spacers from back in my "grab anything not welded down from an old Saab in the scrap yard" days somewhere in the garage, so it'll be replaced with a proper one one day.



Really do need to actually order a new distributor cap and rotor arm already!

[Dick]

Right, it is now official. New project is indeed inbound. It should be arriving on Thursday.

38 years old.

Hasn't had an MOT since 2011.

Currently has a severe misfire to the point of being pretty much un-drivable.

Rare enough that parts availability is going to be a nightmare.

It is also very, very beige.

What's not to like?

Beige jcb?

[Zelandeth]

Yesterday afternoon I had a bash at sorting out the ball joints which there was some play in, the worst of which was the one between the steering knuckle and the drag link. Didn't take much work to find that!

YouTube Link

It turned out though that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the ball joint...The nut just hadn't been tightened up properly, the clonk was the taper moving against the seat rather than actual play in the joint. I got at least an additional two or three turns on it...Then surprise surprise, there was no play in there any more. Having a closer look revealed that they were all like that with the exception of the one I'd already changed.

Back to today - I wanted to finish up the work on the brakes. This meant making the adjustment to the brake yoke assembly to account for the different rest position on the new master cylinder. The easiest solution to this I'd figured was to drill a new hole in the yoke slightly further back, and slightly further up to provide a little additional mechanical advantage to account for the fact that the new master cylinder has a slightly wider bore (which in theory would make the brakes heavier to operate), though the other reason for moving upward slightly was to ensure that I stay well clear of the original pivot point, the last thing I wanted was to have a drill slip cause damage to that - plus one of my goals with pretty much any of the improvements or modifications I've been doing should all be things which can be reversed in the future should I/any future owners want to. A blob of weld and a bit of paint will be all that's needed to get rid of this hole if someone was so inclined.

Before I could do that though I needed to get the yoke detached from the car (as the support frame is in the way of where I'd be wanting to drill). You don't actually need to remove the steering tie rod, indicator wiring etc - just these two bolts (one of which required a LOT of effort to initially crack off).



With these out there's enough reach on the wiring and flex in the steering tie rod ball joints to rest the yoke against the seat to work on it.



I actually did this the right way for a change, using a centre punch, small pilot drill and progressively drilling out to 8mm (which is pretty much spot on what the original hole was measured at).



Tidying up from doing this and getting ready to reassemble things, I then dropped the pin from the clevis and lost it.

Or rather I *thought* I had dropped the pin and lost it.

Can you see it?



How about now I've turned the flash on?



I wasted the best part of half an hour hunting for that blighter...which I had of course actually put back exactly where I meant to, right next to where I was working.

On the plus side, while crawling around on my hands and knees I *did* find the similar pin which I lost from the gear linkage back when I did the engine swap!



So that's a bonus, I'll get that cleaned up and refitted next time I've got the rear service hatch out.

Now I had fully expected getting things back together to be a pain. Having moved the pin forward in the yoke meant that there was no longer clearance to get it into the hole it needed to go into. Eventually a combination of a bit of levering to flex the yoke to one side and loosening the master cylinder off got it in there. It was a bit of a faff, but I knew that going in. This isn't something that you're going to need to remove all that often (hopefully!) so I'm not too bothered that it's a bit fiddly.

With things reassembled I was rewarded by a much more reasonable feeling brake, and after another thorough bleeding session (turns out there was still a lot of air trapped in the front circuit) and we were rewarded with this amount of travel.

Brakes fully released:



Brakes firmly applied:



That looks (and feels) about perfect to me. I can get about another 3/4" if I really hang on it.

I think we're now at the point where I need to find out if this whole messing around has been a gigantic waste of time or if my brakes still work (I'd not complain if they're better too!).

I need to run a couple of errands tomorrow, if it's not tipping it down with rain I will probably treat that as my test run.

So...What's been done since she was last out?

[] Distributor condenser remotely mounted and remote start switch fitted. Can't 100% remember if that was actually done before or after I started pulling things to bits now!

[] All brakes cleaned, pads de-glazed and adjusted.

[] Offside rear wheel cylinder replaced (due to seized bleed nipple).

[] Split circuit brake master cylinder (Triumph Spitfire) fitted, requiring slight modification of yoke.

[] Rear brake flexible lines replaced.

[] Driver's seat frame bolted to rear runner to stop it wobbling.

[] Got rid of a few kg of flashband from the rear service hatch.

[] Sealed the bungs around both the heater/choke control cables and gear linkage.

[] Cylinder head temperature gauge installed.

[] Front mud guard removed and straightened out (still need to re-fit that).

[] Dayco HP2020 CVT belt fitted.

Aside from a bit of miscellaneous wiring tidying I think that's everything...Hopefully I've not made things worse than they started!

Clear a few bits and pieces out of the way then we should be all set for a test drive tomorrow.



Determined to get this sorted out before I get...sidetracked...by the arrival of another vehicle later in the week.