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Talbot's selection of historic chod. Mainly French, in no particular order.


Talbot

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Back between 2002 and 2011, I lived in a 1.5 bedroom granny-annexe barn conversion down in Dorset. It also had a massive double garage and a driveway capable of fitting about 15 cars on it. I bought an awful lot of chod, but never really did anything sensible with my time there. If I'd known then what I know now, I've no doubt I would have done things very differently, but hey, hindsight.

 

First off is the small selection of Seville-built J5 chod I owned.

 

The first one was advertised on gumtree in it's very early days, as "Talbot Express, £200". Sounds brilliant! Lets get a train up and buy it! So I did.

 

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One of the very last pre-facelift models. It was TERRIBLE. I could not for the life of me find 5th gear on the drive home, and I wondered what on earth I had bought. I had never owned a van before, so this was a learning experience. It came with about 6 months ticket, so for £200 it was brilliant, and I could forgive it pretty much anything.

 

It was immediately a very useful vehicle. Moving stuff here there and everywhere. It also had opening quarterlights (remember them?) which was brilliant. I miss them a lot. The gear linkage turned out to be a known issue on these vans, and was the sloppyest change I have ever experienced. There was so much movement side-to-side that reverse was basically on the passenger side of the vehicle, and you had to hit the dashboard to get it in. 1st and second were vague. 3rd/4th were easy enough, as the biasing spring meant that they were the default choice. 5th, however, was further towards the driver than there was movement left in the lever, so the only thing you could do was move the stick all the way over to the extreme of it's travel, then hurl the van into a vicious left-hand turn. This moved the engine and box on it's mountings just enough to give you the additional movement needed on the selectors, then quickly shove the gearstick forwards to get 5th. I got surprisingly good at this manouvre, and for a while used to randomly steer left whenever I was changing into 5th gear in anything else I was driving too.....

 

Very soon into ownership, it was quite clear that it had OMGHGF, but being an older pushrod design engine it was easy as you like to change the head gasket. It had clearly been shot for a fair while though, as this was the best that my local machine shop could do. He refused to charge me for the skim as he thought it was a bit crap, but I felt rather bad about that, as it had still taken up his time. We agreed to go halves on the cost, but no guarantees whatsoever. After the skim, it looked like this:

 

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Which I thought wasn't that bad at all.

 

Shoved it all back together and it ran fine.

 

Come MOT time, there were some issues:

 

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And a lot more rot everywhere else too. Had a think about what the best thing to do was, and clearly the answer was to buy another van! It was a very odd situation, where there was someone with a j5-bodied camper who wanted to buy an engine, as his was 1.9D powered and hence very slow inded. He had been looking at another van that was available for scrap, but he couldn't get it back, so would I be interested in delivering my engine to him.

 

Long story short, he never did bother with his engine "upgrade" (1.9D 70hp, 2.5D 75hp. Not exactly a huge upgrade!) and I got the details for the guy who wanted to get rid of his van. Contacted him, and he wanted scrap money for it, despite having plenty of MOT on it. Reason for getting rid? Slipping clutch, and he'd been quoted £loads to have it done, as the engine and box have to come out complete to seperate them on the bench. Anyone who has worked on Citroen DS or CX will know why... the camshaft (which is buried in the block) extends about 250mm over the top of the gearbox, and has a snakes-pit of belts that drive all the auxilliaries. There is no aux belt at the "normal" end of the engine. Consequently, you have to extract the gearbox off of this shaft to get them apart. Fun.

 

So on the basis of this picture:

 

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I got on a train to Reading to go and collect it.

 

Turns out the owner had been using it as a trials bike transport / dayvan, so had had very limited mileage over the past few years. Looking further into the history, it used to be owned by Gatwick airport, so had been trundling about Gatwick for a lot of it's life. It looked good, so I paid the £100IIRC for it, and drove it home. Very slowly, as anything more than about 1/3 power, and the engine raced away while you travelled no faster. 50mph was just about achievable. Just.

 

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Having got it home, the first thing to do was the clutch. Handily, I had an overhead gantry, so lifting an engine and box was easy peasy.

 

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Once the clutch had been done, it was pressed into service, and being a LWB-High-top vehicle was even more useful than the last one. Speaking of the last one.. I had some friends over one weekend, and we decided to cut it up to get rid of it. After an interesting afternoon of beers, hammer-and-bolster, grinders and varous other tools, this:

 

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got turned into this:

 

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The blue one needed a few mechanical bits and pieces over the next year or two. Firstly the front suspension was rattling like a machine gun for no obvious reason. Eventually found one side damper top mounting was loose, and had worn a large hole in it's mounting plate:

 

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To get to this, a few things had to be done. This for instance, which is a fairly frightening thing to do:

 

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And, as I had no 22mm ring spanner to get the damper top mounting undone, but I did have a rather tatty 22mm deep socket and a grinder, this happened:

 

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After a while, I also noticed I was loosing coolant, but could find nowhere that I had any kind of leak. It took several months, but I eventually traced a blown head gasket. Not to the combustion, but from the water to the outside world.. Very odd:

 

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So, head off, and a complete rebuild of the head. I was even a bit bored one evening doing it, and used a die-grinder on the inlet ports and machined them all smooth. Made absolutely sod-all difference! One thing I had done while stripping and rebuilding the head was removed the injectors, which were utterly siezed in position. Doing so compltely disturbed their opening pressure setting (I had to dismantle them in situ and take them out bit-by-bit) so needed to get them re-set to the correct opening pressure. Everywhere I contacted wanted rather too much money (like £50 per injector!!) so I came up with something else, which I'm still quite pleased about even today:

 

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That is a BX hydraulic pump, with a cut-open coolant expansion tank as it's supply, with a 0-300bar pressure gauge and a connection for the injector. You fill the reservoir up with diesel, then turn the pump by hand. After priming, the inector starts spitting out fuel, and the pressure needed to do so is shown on the gauge. After a bit of fiddling and adjusting, it was quite easy to get the opening pressure to roughly the 185bar needed, and got all 4 injectors set the same. With them refitted, it ran beautifully, and even gave more power/economy than before. I suspect the injection pressures had all been a bit low beforehand.

 

 

Next: The welding. Oh my word the welding.

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So. The first inkling I had that there may be some slight* corrosion, was this picture:

 

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Doesn't look that bad. Surely it will be quite easy to fix. Well no, as it happens. Turns out that this model J5 has the outer panels spot-welded on to the sill. The seam corrodes as it is open to the elements, which takes out the bottom part of the outer panel, and the face of the sill. So to repair it properly, you have to cut the outer panel away, then repair the sill, then re-manufacture the outer panel. Like this:

 

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The outer panel was damaged anyway, and I managed to cut a repair piece out of the old red van before we cut it into bite-size chunks.

 

Sill repaired, more cut out from the outer panel:

 

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Repair piece cut to fit the gap just perfectly:

 

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Welded into place and ground back flat:

 

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And then painted in Zinc rich primer, with the sill painted over in bitumen based black paint I never did paint it body-colour, I just wanted to stop the corrosion:

 

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Then one day, driving down the motorway, the exhaust cracked in two and the back box fell off. Bastard thing!

 

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So that got treated to some additional braceing before being shoved back on.

 

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It also started leaking diesel from it's fuel tank, so I was very pleased to have kept the tank from the old van. Working under a van on Drive-ons is a little unsettling, especially as I have no idea how old the drive-ons are, or what weight they were rated for:

 

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The previous year, when I took the van for MOT, it had passed fairly easily. I suspect very much that the tester had gone rather easy on it, as he commented at the time that he was about to move house, and needed to use a van to do so. I said mine would be available for him to borrow, but of course it needs an MOT. "Oh, don't worry about that"..

 

Well, a year later, and I am worried about it. I decided it would be a good idea to do a corrosion assessment on it before putting it in for MOT, so I took it in to where I was working at the time and put it up on the vehicle lift. This looked completely and utterly wrong and very disconcerting. I had to leave it up here for an hour or two just to get used to it being there before I ventured underneath.

 

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Once I felt a little happier about that, I was then very unhappy at the amount of corrosion I found. It was everywhere. Anyone with any sense at all would have not bothered. This was in one front wheelarch..

 

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So, I took it back home and set-to with the grinder. The front floors were bolloxed:

 

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I particularly like this picture.. There is a 500w floodlamp inside the vehicle. There should be no light getting to the ground, but nevertheless:

 

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The sills were completely biggered too:

 

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Although one thing I did find, which was quite re-assuring. The repair section from above that had been done about 2 years previously. For the first time, I removed the ply lining that was on the other side of that repair, and found this:

 

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So the repair had actually had some decent penetration of the welds! I was pleasantly surprised by this. I did give it a clean up and some zinc paint to make sure it stayed that way.

 

 

This is getting a little picture-heavy, so the next post will be the repairs.

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I've heard some of these stories, but not seen the photos.  The van up on that lift is indeed... wrong.  I've moved house several times in that van so it's a bit disconcerting to see something capable of holding all my worldly possessions suspended in mid-air.

 

It was a surprisingly nice thing to drive as well, I always thought.  Quite physical compared to modern vans but as long as you let it set its own pace and didn't try to hurry it was quite reassuring.  Parking it at work was something of a challenge though.

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From ground level it looked like this:

 

post-3568-0-60799300-1520521921_thumb.jpg

 

The floor was 6' off the ground for me to walk under it, and the van itself is over 6' from floor to roof (it's 7'6" clearance IIRC) so the whole thing was over 12' high in the workshop.

 

Scared me silly.

 

Which made no sense, as the van was all-but empty, and about 1700kg unladen (1800kg payload with 3.499tonnes max weight) and the lift was rated to 3.5 tonnes, so I was *well* within the load capacity of the lift.

 

I think it doesn't help that the lift has no obvious structure to it. It sinks into the floor when not in use, and never did look as strong as it clearly was.

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I wouldn't say the van in the air was particularly disconcerting at all. Just as long as the lift was a good make and well maintained. I have seen some Chinese ones now installed which I certainly would not trust. Good of you to persevere with it when most would not have bothered. It just shows how some vehicles rot, much depends on the quality of the steel and I always suspected van steel was inferior to car steel.

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So, to get started on the welding. The floors were repaired. I had to leave the hole on that little bit of steel sticking out, as it was the only reference I had for the location of the floor stiffeners for the seat box:

 

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Galv sheet used to repair. I don't like welding Galv as the fumes and detritus it gives off is lethal, but if you grind the edges back, it's fairly safe:

 

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Same issue the other side too:

 

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The sills were cut back to be repaired too:

 

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New sills were not available, so I set to folding and bending sheet galv to make them:

 

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And welded in.

 

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The next section to be attacked was a little more challenging, as it's the front wheelarches where the box section comes up along the side of the engine bay and the fairly thick stiffener comes down from the front McPherson struts. Suffice to say, it's a high-stress area, and needs decent quailty repairs. I had to remove the suspension and brake pipes out of the way and get drilling the spot-welds out:

 

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Then cut a section to repair the panel that forms the box section:

 

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Now a panel to repair the wheelarch.

 

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And then bend the stiffener back down and weld it back on.

 

I then found the other side was just as bad, but got a far better series of photographs of the procedure:

 

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I may well have used this grinding disc beyond the manufacturers expectations:

 

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Once I had finished all that welding, I realised just how close I had come to running out of welding wire! You'll also no-doubt note that the spool is "non standard" on that welder. It should take 5kg reels, but I was so fed up with wasting money on small reels, and I had a collection of 15kg reels from where I had worked a few years back, so bolted a length of scaffolding to the top of the welder, greased it so the spool goes round easily enough, and job's a goodun:

 

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I was never particularly happy with the welder I was using. A clarke 150A mig. Ok I suppose, but it's a hobby-type torch, which used to overheat somewhat on longer runs, and the torch was never long enough. Also didn't help that I was running on CO2, which makes a hot messy weld. Still, it was all I had, so it had to do.

 

post-3568-0-48920700-1520523797_thumb.jpg

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I wouldn't say the van in the air was particularly disconcerting at all. Just as long as the lift was a good make and well maintained.

Trust me.. it was VERY offputting. Not from a weight point of view, just the sheer overbearing feeling of something that size that high up in the air. I had much heavier things on that lift that looked nowhere near as frightening.

 

Although this wasn't one of them:

 

post-3568-0-30285300-1520524223_thumb.jpg

 

post-3568-0-27576000-1520524258_thumb.jpg

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..... Slipping clutch, and he'd been quoted £loads to have it done, as the engine and box have to come out complete to seperate them on the bench. Anyone who has worked on Citroen DS or CX will know why... the camshaft (which is buried in the block) extends about 250mm over the top of the gearbox, and has a snakes-pit of belts that drive all the auxilliaries. There is no aux belt at the "normal" end of the engine. Consequently, you have to extract the gearbox off of this shaft to get them apart. Fun.....

 

It's partly why I went for an automatic.

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I wouldn't say the van in the air was particularly disconcerting at all.

 

It's a visual thing.  Talbot doesn't scare easily as a general rule (except frogs) but seeing the van double its height on that spindly-looking thing must have been disconcerting.  The fact that it's a big empty open space doesn't help either.  I didn't really like seeing my BX up there (and I've seen BXs on lifts lots of times).

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One of the things that my LWB van was partigularly good at doing was towing. For a while, I was part of a mobile workforce for National Grid Gas, and everyone just lives in caravans during the working week, as you move site on a regular basis. A friend decided he was going to live in his caravan as a permanent thing, so bought an absolute beast. He couldn't tow it, so I did.

 

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Over 40' long from front to back, and a total weight of about 4 tonnes, with just 75hp to pull it along. It also tramlined like a bastard on the motorway. A-Roads were much better.

 

 

Come 2011, and I have a new career job which necessitated me moving from the Batchelor Pad down in dorset. I had not actually been living there for several months, and the MOT on the van had lapsed. I had to clear all my stuff out of there fairly quickly, which necessitated scrapping a staggering amount of stuff (I weighed in some 5 tonnes of scrap, none of which was complete vehicles!!!) and also meant I needed to get the van moved. It also had no insurance any more, so the only was to move it was by trailer:

 

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As wrong as it looks, it actually towed quite well. Side profile looks even more absurd until you consider that the vast majority of the van is open fresh air and the roof is thin-sheet fiberglass:

 

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Doesn't stop it catching the wind though...

 

As luck would have it, my work had rented a rather tatty industrial unit on an estate near where I live for a few months, so I was allowed to shove the van in there for a bit:

 

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Along with a much better welder, the inside space, on actual smooth concrete, with a roof and lighting meant that surely I would be able to do any bits of work needed to get it a fresh MOT?

 

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Erm...

 

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Bollocks.

 

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And this is the largest box-section directly under the drivers seat, which is about 4 layers thick. It's toast, and would need some very careful cutting and fabrication to repair it:

 

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Well sod. The biggist restriction was that I was now properly full-time employed, and had a family to look after. I'm sure that if I had 2 weeks of uninterrupted time available, I could do the same again and get it all repaired, but I just did not have the time.

 

Since then (late 2011) it has been parked in my back garden, and time is not being kind to it. I accidentally smashed the driver's window glass, so it's no longer sealed to the outside world, it has been used as a general dumping ground for all manner of bits and pieces, and the last time I tried to get it running, it absolutely refused to do so. I suspect very much that the injection pump is internally siezed or rusted, meaning although it has a battery, glowplugs and good fuel, none of that fuel is being injected.

 

I feel rather sad for it, as I did many many miles in that big blue van (maybe 30k or so I would guess) and I liked it a lot. I've even looked for other similar vans that I could buy to keep a J5 on the road, but they are extremely rare as a panel van, and staggeringly expensive as a motorhome. If I won the lottery tomorrow I would absolutely have a month-long weldathon and restoration of it and get it back on the road, but as things are now, with even less time at my disposal and a thousand and one other far more pressing projects, I suspect it will end up being scrapped fairly soon. There's a bloke down in Chard who breaks these to supply parts to the campervan market, and he's offered a sensible sum for it.

 

.. If I can get it to him. The Discovery pictured, although still in my ownership, needs a stack of work too, and I very much doubt I can borrow that trailer again. Maybe I'll have to hire a flatbed recovery lorry to move it.

 

Another picture from happier times.

 

post-3568-0-22133000-1520554392_thumb.jpg

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Is the C25 powered by a CX diesel engine?

Near enough, yes. There are detail differences.. the oil filter housing and arrangment is different (CX oil filter sticks up and is accessable from above, C25/J5 points down and is accessable from below) and many of the pipes are different, but the basic block/head/gearbox arrangement is identical. The CX engines are referred to as the M-series, the C25/J5 engines as the U-series.

 

The C25/J5 also (rarely) had the CX Turbo 1 Diesel engine fitted, which made the van quite a bit more useable. It never got the Turbo 2 Diesel engine, which given it's history and known manufacturing problems is probably a good thing.

 

Anyone familiar with CX diesels will recognise this:

 

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As being blatantly a CX engine bay, but with more space and better access. You can see that the Alternator, water pump and vac pump for the brakes are all mounted on top of the gearbox, driven by that odd arrangement with the camshaft sticking out over the gearbox, with nothing at the non-flywheel end of the engine:

 

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It also has the CX's slightly odd cambelt arrangement with one massive belt from the crankshaft to the camshaft and (oddly) oil pump, with then a piggyback tiny little belt between the camshaft and the injection pump.

 

Once you're familiar with it, it's not too difficult to work with. The worst access is for the starter motor. It's under the exhaust manifold!

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....It never got the Turbo 2 Diesel engine, which given it's history and known manufacturing problems is probably a good thing....

Porous engine blocks made from Indian recycled scrap; shite from new! Actually mostly replaced by Citroën once they realised.

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I've had 2 Talbot Expresses. The first one (Autosleeper coachbuilt job) had a 2.5TD, it hauled the van along with real pace but was an arse to maintain. You could boot the throttle at 70mph, wait for the turbo to spool up and it just WENT. Mine had been through multiple gearboxes too at ~70k.

 

As mentioned above, the camshaft goes through a hole in the gearbox to drive the vacuum pump which makes clutch changes a bit of a pig. I did it with the engine in the van but it was hard on my own. 

 

The sump is a cast ally job, mine cracked and was an engine out job to change. The accessory drive plate on the cambelt side of the engine has to be removed as does the gearbox to get access to the bolts. That was a great fun* weekend when i was supposed to be on holiday in it. 

 

To be fair, i got it sorted and the current owner has ran it virtually trouble free for the last 7 or 8 years now. He had to put another gearbox in it though.

 

My next one (a SWB autosleeper) I put a 306 DTurbo engine in. Once i'd put a 2nd hand pump on, it was brilliant.  

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Porous engine blocks

Quite.

 

I got a fair way into building a bitsa engine for this from various scrap CXs. It was a Turbo 1 block, but with turbo 2 crank, rods, pistons and so-on. I had worked out where the intercooler was going to go, and worked out some sensible pipework routing. I was even considering fitting CX air conditioning to it, as I had all the parts needed.

 

Never did happen though. Shame, as the upgrade from 75hp to 120hp would have been well worth it. I fear the fuel economy may have suffered a little though. I used to get around 35mpg from that van, (and once saw well over 40mpg on a very sedate journey up the motorway) which I always thought was very good for something with the aerodynamics of a block of flats.

 

I suspect 20mpg would have been more likely with the turbo engine!

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I've had 2 Talbot Expresses.

Have you sung the song in your head though... To the tune of "National Express by Divine Comedy"

 

"Take the Talbot Express, when your life's in a mess, it'll make you smile..."

 

Every now and then I could not get that song out of my head. I curse the day I realised it fitted so well.

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We have. That was the CCC meet where we had a "disreputable blue van corner", population myself and one blue Acadiane AK400. You had the 2.5TD Express there, and I had a nosey around it. I remember the conversation about the front bumper, in that I quite liked the plastic moulded one on the campers, and fancied finding one for my van. You commented that the normal metal one is still underneath, so it's just a clip-on upgrade.

 

That was either 2007 or 2008. A decade ago now. I feel old.

 

Never did find a bumper for mine for less than £stupid.

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Quite.

 

I got a fair way into building a bitsa engine for this from various scrap CXs. It was a Turbo 1 block, but with turbo 2 crank, rods, pistons and so-on. I had worked out where the intercooler was going to go, and worked out some sensible pipework routing. I was even considering fitting CX air conditioning to it, as I had all the parts needed.

 

Never did happen though. Shame, as the upgrade from 75hp to 120hp would have been well worth it.....

Presumably there were differences between the T1 and T2 ECU programming?

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I really like this thread, please post more....

I'm beginning to run out of photos and stories for this one. No doubt people have noticed that the photos are not quite modern quality. They were generally taken on Nokia camera-phones, which were not very good at keeping dirt out, so they often got quite blurry and crappy. And the lenses on those early cameraphones were not exactly brilliant. Still, better than nothing.

 

One thing I did find with my van was that the front lower track arm inner bushes were banjaxed. Completely shot. Here it is next to what I thought was a replacement for it, being heated up in some boiling water in an attempt to fit it.

 

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As it happened, I discovered (after a fair bit of looking) that there are several weight variants of the J5/Express/C25. 1000, 1300, 1400, 1500 and 1800. The numbers generally referring to the load capacity of the vehicle. Mine was an 1800. Turns out that all of the smaller ones use the same suspension, springs, arms, bushes and wheels/tyres, but the 1800 model has larger of just about all of these parts (the wheels are a dead giveaway.. smaller models used 14" wheels. This one used 16" wheels).

 

And of course the bush I had was for the smaller ones. After consulting various places, it turned out the 1800 version was harder to get bits for, and the lower arm inner bushes were NLA.

 

So on the back of that, you have to improvise.

 

From left to right: The smaller-van bush, the knackered 1800 van bush, and a split polybush that is actually from a Range Rover. I think it's one of the C-arm bushes, but am not sure. It's also been modified with a file/grinder to make it a little bit smaller diameter in the middle.

 

post-3568-0-89107700-1520599410_thumb.jpg

 

Except the tube in the middle is the wrong size, so putting the sleeve from the 1800 van bush into the modified polybush, makes something that will fit:

 

post-3568-0-05460500-1520599471_thumb.jpg

 

post-3568-0-09540900-1520599618_thumb.jpg

 

And fit it did. Went in a little bit too easily IIRC, and I thought at the time I should possibly have machined off slightly less of the polybush, but it went in OK, the van handled better than before, and the MOT man had a good look at it, and commented that it was possibly the only van he had ever seen with polybushes. I asked him to have a good poke at it, as I wasn't completely convinced about it, but he said there was no play and the amount of resistance it gave to being levered "felt pretty good". Ok then, that'll do.

 

post-3568-0-62197000-1520599642_thumb.jpg

 

Performance Van YO!

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Presumably there were differences between the T1 and T2 ECU programming?

ECU? Very funny!

 

Lucas DPC injection pump you mean. I think you're getting confused between the Turbo 1 / Turbo 2 petrol and the Turbo 1 / Turbo 2 Diesel. The most Electronics in a Turbo Diesel CX was in the radio. Which is how it should be!

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ECU? Very funny!

 

Lucas DPC injection pump you mean. I think you're getting confused between the Turbo 1 / Turbo 2 petrol and the Turbo 1 / Turbo 2 Diesel. The most Electronics in a Turbo Diesel CX was in the radio. Which is how it should be!

 

Ah, that explains a misconception I had. Actually, the way you've explained the hybrid thing makes the CX DTR T1 & T2 more comprehensible now. The DTR T2 was the CX I'd intended to find once I was sure I wanted to scratch the itch, but couldn't find one for the budget* I had. The one I really wanted (G83 XWK) was bought off eBay by a dealer - Bradley James - for two grand and then almost immediately flogged on for five grand. That car turned up down here in Edgware where the current owner seems to be properly neglecting it.

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