NZ division of the Dr Alex Moulton Appreciation Society - Rover ‘Metro’ 114 GTI

[philibusmo]

As some shiters might be aware, I have been in New Zealand for the past 4 or 5 months and have been blezzing around in Jon’s Citroen Visa GTI which is a vast amount of fun in a tiny, French package.

 

Unfortunately it does have a couple of draw backs. It's not very big and very noisy so not ideal for long distance travel. The other minor issue is probably best explained in photographic form:

 

Here it is with the fuel injection system playing up at Jon’s house.

Refusing to start in a car park in central Tauranga.

Pissing it's coolant on the floor in the carpark of New World.

Snapped throttle cable next to a field in the arse end of nowhere.

Flooding it's cylinders and cutting out in Pak N Save carpark.

It was fairly clear that I needed something much bigger and more reliable. After extensive research; trawling Trademe, FaceBook groups and local car fairs I decided that the best possible car for me was a Metro with a K Series that hasn't received a Warrant Of Fitness for over a year and is being sold by a scrap yard.

 

Isn't it glorious:

Originally sold in Japan, this Metro carries no Metro badging and is officially a 114 GTI 16v. It's in a rather attractive shade of blue-green and has done just 97,000km - I suspect because it has been mostly broken. It is actually in superb condition, the interior seems to be near mint and top spec with even such luxuries as electric windows, air conditioning and an FM radio/Cassette. Bodywork is excellent with just a small crack at the lower edge of the front splitter, rot is non-existant. The 1.4 K seems healthy enough with no obvious signs of the constantly impending OMFGHGF, the gearbox is a gearbox and the brakes seem to brake. The only tiny issues are that the remaining life of the clutch can probably best be measured in inches and the suspension seems unusually hard for Hydragas sprung CLASS.

 

Unperturbed, I have found possibly the only clutch kit in the country and have permission from work to use their workshop next weekend to replace it. I also took it for its WOF this morning.

Things didn't start well when it was left running on the left and spaffed all its coolant out of the expansion tank onto the workshop floor. It turns out that the electric fan doesn't work. I had warned the tester about the clutch but hadn't yet realised it’s cooling system issues. Probably best I fix that soon and use the compression tester at work to make sure it hasn't done any damage. However at the end of the test it turned out to have failed, but only on a couple of points. The rear brakes are imbalanced so they’ll be getting a strip and clean. The more worrying issue is that the front suspension is too solid to pass and is lookong a bit low. By this age the suspension front to back will be interconnected so I'm wondering if there is a slow leak which is more evident at the front due to the extra weight there. I certainly haven't noticed any green puddles of Hydragas fluid and have found a localish company with a pump so I'm not worried about pumping it up, I'm just hoping that a displacer isn’t dead.

 

Thank you for taking the time to read about my latest poorly thought out purchase. I’ll leave you with this parting shot of two tiny hot hatches ready to terrorise all the V8 Holden's and Turbo'd Skylines in the Bay of Plenty area.

[STUNO]

I guess you will be visiting Jon soon!

[philibusmo]

I will! Once the Metro is going, the Visa will be returning to Jon.

 

In other good news, I've just found that K Series head gaskets are in the clearance section at Repco. I feel I should buy all 8 of them pre-emptively.

[STUNO]

The Rover looks lovely, it puts the whole Jap. Imports system in focus. A spare head gasket or two could be useful but these K's don't seem so troublesome here for some reason.

[HMC]

Top NZ chod buyaging! I think your right about the suspension - all these interconnected metros drop thier nose first when there is a leak.

[Petrolize]

Great stuff! Metro looks tidy from the outside at least, manual gearbox too. How much was it?

[philibusmo]

$1350 which seemed about right considering the condition. I worked on sorting the brakes this afternoon, and now there is no brakes at all as the rear brake cylinder popped apart and let air into the system.

[Petrolize]

Not bad, I paid that for an overheating VW Golf, and the Metro looks far nicer anyway. Might be able to see you soon

[philibusmo]

If you head over tomorrow then you can be involved in all the fun of bleeding brakes!

[Guest Lord Sward]

Unusual that the front suspension is solid.  Have you put grease through the upper wishbone nipples and made sure the external dampers aren't turned up too far?

 

These things always spew their coolant out if left to run; its usually not the head gasket but a combination of poor air-flow, a restricted little hose that runs along from the top of the rad and a failed fuse on the cooling fan.  This MY should be of the original K-series block, that is to say closed deck and with the lovely aluminium inlet manifold.  They're not known for HGF unlike 100-series blocks.

[Guest Lord Sward]

Oh, and top purchasing.  Gis a few pictures of the air-con installation please?

[Alexg]

Nice one, Metro GTIs are a hoot.

[saucedoctor]

R6 GiT FTW.

[M'coli]

Top purchase! Get some fluid in the suspension, it might be low enough to be on the bumpstops.

[Guest Lord Sward]

It'd probably be sat on its bumps stops if it wasn't for the external dampers.  Which by the way, my close and personal friend Moulton described as 'muffling' the brilliance of the interconnected wonder spring  I'll not even mention what he thought of the anti-roll bars.  

[vulgalour]

We can take U out of Autoshite but we can't take the Autoshite out of you.

[unclecalzone]

I'm rather jealous, no uk metros gtis came fitted with air con. You've got a very rare car there indeed, in the uk that would fetch big bucks. Ones in decent standard condition are fetch upwards of 2/3k. And yes please pics of the AC setup, I've been meddling with gtis for longer than I care to remember and have never seen even a picture of the air con setup under the bonnet

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Eddie Honda]

Get some fluid in the suspension, it might be low enough to be on the bumpstops.

Get some fluid out of the suspension, it will need moar gaz.

[M'coli]

[Zantimisfit]

Am I right in thinking the Metro name was only kept for the UK market when the car was 'Roverised' in 1990? Certainly in France it was called the Rover 100 from the beginning of the K Series models, and I assume it was the same, at least in the rest of Europe. Maybe thats why no Metro badges on this one???

[Lacquer Peel]

[philibusmo]

Today the brakes were bled which was incredibly exciting, as I'm sure you can imagine. Now as requested is some engine bay shots to show how the aircon is set up:

The air con compressor is somewhere down here between the inner wing and the engine, the pipework snakes it's ay down here but I can't really see down there fully from above. Let's hope it never goes wrong.

 

In other news, the radiator fans rum fine when the air con is on but doesn't run the the engine gets hot, which leads me to think that the temperature sender in the radiator is kippered. Good job it's pretty much utterly inaccessible.

[Dick Longbridge]

The 'Metro' is a peach, but the Visa wins me over. What a gem. I guess the fact it's a reliable as Axl Rose on a good day is less than ideal though, and the 114 should at least be an improvement upon that. Are there many J imports in NZ, then?

[Petrolize]

I saw this in the flesh today and can confirm it's lovely and tidy, nicely spec'd and original aswell.

Is the Mazda Capella in the background the one that was also for sale at the scrapyard? I put the reg into carjam' and it's been reported as stolen yesterday in the Bay of Plenty region ! DZN515

[philibusmo]

NZ is full of Jap imports, it sometimes feels like every other car started its life in Japan. Most are imported between 4 and 8 years old, but this Metro lasted until 2003, a full 11 years before it was imported.

 

Paul, i've just checked and the Capella has been stolen, I wonder if it disappeared from pick a part or from a new owner. Seems like I may have got the Metro just in time to stop it disappearing forever.

[Jon]

That does look like a little corker, Phil. Top marks for obscure hot hatch ownership; a Japanese model Rover Metro is stiff competition for an NZ market Visa GTi! I must say that absence has made the heart grow fonder on the Visa front, so it'll be good to see it again some time. Still in two minds about how long that feeling will last once it's back in the fold, though.

 

Let me know if you need a hand on the car front and you're interested in not achieving anything, as I'm a real pro and can sup coffee and be inept with the best of them. I've got a Top Tip, too: save the time  spent going to the bother of replacing that pesky radiator temp switch and just run the air con when it gets hot. Infallible!

[chaseracer]

Bring it home! 

[phil_lihp]

Looks like you've done Ok there, that engine bay is seriously crammed though!

 

My mum had a brand new 111i in 1995 and by times it was presented for its first MOT the front suspension was very low and uneven, causing it to fail on that plus the front tyres it had eaten, it does seem to be common on these. The dealer regassed it back to standard height easily enough but there were always plenty of these around with the front end sagging whilst the rear stayed up, maybe the weight of the engine caused it.

[philibusmo]

 

I was planning on updating this thread a few weekends ago but unfortunately I had to cook an unreasonably large amount of defrosted beef, then there was a spot of bother which rather did my arm in, however I now have a large amount of time to waste, so I'm going to spend the next couple of hours slowly typing out this update with one hand.

 

 

A couple of weeks ago after some searching I managed to find possibly the only clutch kit in all of New Zealand which I planned on fitting in the workshop at work on the Friday evening, with a sleeping bag packed in case it ran into Saturday. Perfect. What could possibly go wrong.

 

 

I drove it to work bright and early on the Friday entirely on private roads due to the lack of WOF having sorted the brake imbalance the previous weekend. The clutch seemed only quite awful on the way there rather than totally fucked so buoyed with enthusiasm and a slightly early finish I decided to drive to Te Puke and have the suspension pumped up. I set off full of hope and joy and then a Holden Barina pulled out on me halfway up an unavoidable and reasonably steep hill and that was the beginning of the end for the clutch.

 

 

I decided to soldier on and got just far enough away from work to make walking back a right old slog when I hit traffic. I attempted to turn back but it was too late and the life of the clutch could only be measured in metres. I slowly trundled to reach a safe spot to complete my failure to proceed, with what seemed like all of the countries 5 million inhabitants stuck behind me but the last tiny hill before the lay-by was too much for the remains of the clutch friction plate and it gave up and lost drive with only a small patch of grass next to a ditch to pull on to.

 

 

I decided the best course of action was to stand at the side of the road looking forlorn which amazingly worked as well should appear out of the blue but my boss in a Mazda B-Series ute. Sadly he didn't have a tow rope but got me back to the workshop and let me borrow a red Suzuki Escudo (JDM Vitara, not the Pike's Peak race car from Gran Turismo 2) to try and get the Metro back with.

 

 

Meanwhile my housemate was on his way with the new clutch kit, which had been delivered that day, in his mostly faulty Jewish Racing Gold W220 Mercedes-Benz S Class. I tried calling him a few times to let him know that he was also required for a brief towing mission but couldn't get through to him. When he did turn up he didn't only have the clutch nut also had a hitchhiker in the passenger seat who actually wanted to be nowhere near where he was currently or where the Rover was stranded.

 

 

After a few minutes I managed to bribe him with a cereal bar to come along for the towing adventure as I really needed to move the car as soon as possible before the local rozzers came across it. We all bundled into the little Suzuki, but found that the seat sliding mechanism for the driver's seat was jammed in the correct position for Warwick Davis and the passenger seat was constantly adjustable depending on if the vehicle was accelerating or braking. Combined with an auto box that changed with all the delicacy of a sledge hammer it did not make for a pleasant journey.

 

 

What made it markedly less pleasant was having a Metro tied to the back of it. It turns out that a 1.6 automatic Vitara does not make an especially good tow car, especially on steep hills. Even so it was going remarkably smoothly (except for the hitchhiker sliding backwards and forwards in the passenger seat) right up until the point when negotiating a roundabout when a blind fool in a Honda Domani decided he would like to occupy the same spot on the road as the Suzuki, causing my housemate to brake sharply. Realising that I was going to collect the back end of the Suzuki I swerved, running over and snapping the tow strap. Luckily there was just enough momentum for the Metro to roll just past the exit of the roundabout as I watched the Honda drive into the distance, blissfully unaware of the the mayhem they'd just caused.

 

 

We got the remains of the tow strap tied back together pretty sharpish and managed to get back to base without incident other than the Suzukis check engine light illuminating on the final steep hill.

 

 

With the Rover sat in the workshop my housemate and the hitchhiker departed and left me to it. I didn't have an alternate way of getting home so the clutch had to be mended.

 

 

 

 

The Haynes Book of Lies (™ autoshite hilarious* recurring jokes Inc) describes the first step of changing the clutch as ‘remove the gearbox’ which as it turns out is the first step in changing the clutch but it's nowhere near as simple as that statement suggests. I won't go into the full details but as anyone who has removed the gearbox on a tiny front wheel drive hatchback with a big engine will know, you have to remove a great many components in a very confined space. This is some but not all of the components that had to be shifted. The air box, the oil catch canister, starter motor, gear linkages, clutch cable, speedo drive, brake calipers, shock absorbers, drive shafts, lower ball joints, track rod ends, some wiring loom, coil, arch liners, 3 bell housing cover plates, air con pipe work, engine mount, gearbox mount and anti roll bar mounts. By midnight the gearbox was still firmly attached so I grabbed my sleeping bag and found the most comfy place I could to sleep, a dingy in the shed next door.

 

 

 

 

By lunch time on day two the gearbox was ready to come off. This had not been an easy state to get to with a free vital components giving serious grief. In particular the ball joints and track rod ends which needed a serious work over with a hammer followed by some abuse with a crowbar. It took a good couple of hours just to get these apart without a ball joint splitter. Surprisingly the other components to cause a royal headache was the coil and gear linkages, mostly because they were so utterly inaccessible. The final hurdle was the drive shafts which as usual did not want my to be removed from the gearbox without a fight however with much swearing and the use of a smaller crowbar they were also free.

 

 

With the gearbox to engine bolts removed and a trolley jack under both I removed the mounts and it very quickly became assistant that the box was not going to be removed from the car entirely without the engine or subframes coming out as well. I managed to wiggle the box between two parts of the passenger side front subframe and partially into the wheel arch so that the flywheel and clutch were just accessible with a gap of a couple of inches. I removed the clutch by loosening the bolts securing it to the flywheel one by one, turning the engine by the crank pulley to get to the next bolt. This was then repeated to remove them.

 

 

 

 

 

I did the same when putting in the new components in place, torquing up the bolts in a pattern bit by bit, the hardest part being aligning the clutch on to the crankshaft without being able to see what I was doing and only being able to use my finger.

 

 

Then came the very hardest part, getting the gearbox back in place with a trolley jack and a few odd bits of wood while I clambered in and under the engine bay trying to get all the bolt holes in position and the threads started on the bolts. This once again took a couple of hours as I was doing it by myself with very little of the correct equipment. Refilling the gearbox with oil was less easy as I didn’t have a funnel and the filling point is tiny and has a spring or something in it.

 

 

 

 

With the gearbox back in place, the rest of it went back together remarkably smoothly. It was all utterly fucking awkward of course and took the best part of a day to carefully squeeze my arms up into the engine bay to torque up bolts with a cheap socket set. The only parts that caused undue bother was the suspension, trying to lever the ball joints back together. While access was easy I also regreased the upper wishbones.

 

 

 

 

With it back together I gingerly started it and went to reverse out of the workshop, and it only flipping well did it. Three days, and two nights in a dingy well spent. It drove home without any problems.

 

 

BONUS FEATURE VIDEO TWEET:

 

 

https://twitter.com/PMozzy/status/739334764897832961

 

 

The following week I got rained off at work and so used my unexpected free time to go to Te Puke and have the suspension pumped up at a place that specialises in minis. The hydragas Daleks are a bit few and far between here, so I was lucky that there was one so close, as well as proper hydragas fluid that is also made of unobtanium here. With the suspension pumped up, a working clutch and the rear brakes fettled I took it back to my local WOF testing station for its retest and it went straight through. BONUS.

 

 

I then zipped around in this little rapscallion for a couple of weeks, including a long journey three up to Auckland and back and it hasn't missed a beat, being zippy, comfy and economical. My only complaints are that the suspension is very bouncy and choppy, and it really does seem excessive. There's a road in the town centre with about 20 small speed bumps which hardly affect most cars but this Metro just keeps bouncing for about half an hour after braving Devonport Road. Do we think that the displacers may be way past their best? If so I’ll consider importing some new displacers at some point.

 

 

Then I had my left arm crushed, and 6 and a half weeks on, I still can’t drive manual so the Metro has been sat in the carport unused while I’ve blezzed around in a couple of dull Japanese Automatics, the utter misery of which will be discussed in a future post.

 

Footnote: Due to injury, collection missions, having the use of only one arm, a tablet dying and a phone which isn't far behind this post took the best part of 7 weeks to write, so may not have been particularly coherent or readable. I do not apologise for any inconvenience or upset caused.

[beko1987]

Fantastic spannering! Luckily there's no one in the office to hear me laughing this early in the morning! Bonus points for typing all that with one hand!