Asimo

Do we need a seperate thread for the utterly doomed?

Interesting that the completely-rotted away bits were plastic. (The space between front wing and bumper-end)
https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/425488259984244
What a difference a garage makes.

https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/944478797030390

Neat work, Matt. I'd be inclined to relocate that aerial though...

Cabin filters by size.
 https://www.wixfilters.com/Lookup/FilterBySize.aspx

£3500 and it comes with a replacement chassis. That's a flippin bargain for the best looking TVR

And it’s good news!

The good folk at Halfway House Garage fitted the replacement exhaust, braided brake lines, sorted out the tracking and gave it an MoT. 

It now drives nicely, and the exhaust is mega - a proper howl at higher revs. Not the quietest though…
Need to polish these a bit.

Glad to reach the end of this stage of works on it to be honest, it’s been a bit of a mission and there’s been a few occasions when I’ve questioned my sanity for taking it on.

Primed and ready to weld in:

Ideally I'd have left the aerial off, but access is incredibly restricted behind - the original poked through from the back and was tightened from the outside, but all I can find to replace it need tightening from the rear. I'm hoping I can reach the back to tighten, but don't rate my chances of actually threading the nut on!
Then began the long process of welding it in, swapping sides regularly to allow to cool.

Driver's side is done...

...but I ran out of gas when the passenger side was almost complete

I didn't quite cut it perfectly at the bottom, so need to bridge the gap with weld.

I've finished off both pillars now, and cut away the rusty lower lip. Ahhhh.

The inner panel is in a similar state. I will have to rethink my plan, but reckon I'll have to cut out more of the front panel for access - which means it'll be more difficult to neatly weld in a length of standard angle section. However I can probably use that to weld in a functional repair to the hidden panel, and buy the proper repair panel for the visible outer repair.

Do a Vice Grip Garage, then.
Go there, fix it in situ then drive the 400 miles home...

If that Ford 350 was a V4 that used 40% of the petrol I’d snap that up. Perfect comfort  / space / simplicicity combo.
Broken but cheap. Shame it’s 400 miles away. https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/283636641414154

Looks sweet. Says 'it wants a new engine', time for a bigger a-series?
https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/1156752642358698/

Being a van driver I'll come at this from a different angle. A 110 bhp 3.5t Merc Sprinter will happily cruise along all day above the NSL, fully laden, with the aerodynamic efficiently of a house and its just using 31.5bhp per tonne.

Probably some EVs.

These updates almost feel daily at this point!
Yesterday, I had a rare day off the tools, and instead had a day spent on the computer, sourcing more parts that have been discovered in poor shape. They'll be here at some point.
Today, we had an actual break on the miserable weather, and even some sunshine! 

Decided to crack on with the block again, stripping the last few bits off before it goes away for repair.
Timing belt tensioner spring is the original! Suppose it's just a spring, the pulley itself is grumbling so that'll be changed.

All the various mounting brackets etc were removed and I decided against the original plan of leaving the cylinder liners - as I had it pointed out to me, I've gone this far with it, so why stop there?
Glad I did, as more evidence of mingebaggery by the previous owners became evident - clearly this has been run on water for ages.



Thankfully it cleaned up pretty nicely.

The water pump turned out to be the original too!

I then spent a couple of hours cleaning up, cataloguing and boxing everything up from the block strip job, in order to make room for the head strip. Made decent progress in short order so I popped the head onto the clutter free workbench.

This ended up being a rather pleasant job and the Haynes manual was pretty helpful in that regard for once.
The camshaft seal was found to be U/S on removal so a new one will be ordered.


In no time at all, the camshaft was off, cleaned and stowed in the driver's footwell for safekeeping.
Tappets were off next - didn't have a fancy magnet on a stick, so I used a board magnet 😅

Everything was marked with paint dots to keep everything as a matched set and in the right order.

Which left me with valves, and a problem. The spring compressor wouldn't operate without fouling the edge of the head!
Ended up improvising with an injector socket, and just screwing it in to get the collets.

The socket was absolutely the millimetre perfect size required for the job!

Paint markings evident here.

Eventually, all the valves were out!


I had been cleaning the components as they came off so they were all bagged and tagged and ready for reinstall.
Finally, I knocked it on the head, with a rag draped over it to keep the dust out.

A productive day, and a productive weekend all round! This week will be focused on dropping off the block and head, working the remaining mechanical jobs on the BX, and prepping the Rover for a road trip - eventually, I'll get a break!
Cheers!

One chapter in this 1970s book ("The Small Business Casebook", S. Birley) is about the (mis)management of Gilbern. The price and specs of the Invader are being compared to other cars, but this list doesn't seem to make much sense? Cars in a totally different price and performance league (AC, Aston, Dino), the Citroen DS and GS, floppytop Cortina... Also, according to sir Google the Crayford William is a microcar!

 
 

50 horsepower per ton is plenty. Violent acceleration is just willie-waving.

It is isn't it? Rather lush
I thought it a Zephyr so was going to make a Z-Cars/Brian Blessed joke but, instead, have a picture.

An unpopular opinion:  Drivers should be re-tested on a regular basis, and to a far higher standard than they are currently.  This is actually more important than checking the car on an annual basis.
However, this will never happen as the Government makes far too much money from fuel duty and other vehicle taxation, so removing dangerous/idiotic/incompetent/blind/drunk/thick-as-shit drivers from the road will cost them too much money.
I would happily sit a driving test on a regular basis.

50 horsepower per ton is plenty. Violent acceleration is just willie-waving.

Repeated my first ever drive!
50 years ago today I turned 17 and thus went for my first "Learner" drive, in this Riley 1.5, 8 miles to school.  
Luckily for me Dad's commute was past the school gates. I drove that Riley all over the place during the next few months, which were it's last few months on the road as it was utterly rotten and by the end, just running on three. (It had seized while I was driving, damaging a piston and to stop the resultant massive oil consumption the pushrods of the seized cylinder were removed)



This is the only photo I can find of 644 JYC. I'd removed the front uprights, hubs and brakes for possible use on my Minor.

I really like this car so glad it's still on here.

Owning a fleet of borderline scrap that you abandon / "park" around the streets of your local town isn't quirky or endearing.
It's antisocial, and I'd be pissed off living next to someone like that.

At the risk of appearing predictable...
 

The car was sopping.  A kind friend lent me his dehumidifier and I had it running for around 3 months..............and just couldn't dry it out - the hardura had soaked up so much water it was rotting underneath and making the car smell.  There was corrosion everywhere and each time I looked at something on the car......it needed sorting.  
Plan was to get really go hard at it and get it mot'd inside 6 months...........but that went out of the window.  
The drivers seat had also collapsed and that needed sorting.  More on that in pictures below/going forwards.  
Initially I was just going to get the waterpump on the engine sorted (it was totalled) and then sort the carbs (leaking underneath) and put a new radiator in (broken/leaking/rusted extremely badly) and then just get it going...........do as little to it as possible...........but the list just grew and grew.
These are simple cars.  Galvanised chassis with a fibreglass body...............but my god............they fight you.  Every bolt was corroded/absolute shocker to get off.  And you need 12 foot arms sometimes (if you're doing the work on your own) because half the bolts of the important things are screwed out from the outside but you need to hold the nut on the interior).  
 
Just getting the seats out was a monumental hassle (you have try to pinch the bolt inside the car, within the seat rails, whilst trying not to round off the corroded nut underneath the car.............honestly - if lotus could think of an easy way to do things.....they'd avoid it for the hassle way...............
 
I ended up taking the carpets out (rotten in places) and all the hardura too.  Right back to the fibreglass.
 
 

I've copied and pasted these initial updates from another forum.   
 
This goes back to 2021/early 2022. First two posts will cover the back story and then I'll add what I've been doing to it this last month.  There's been quite a delay on this because my wife became very ill in mid-2022 and all life turned to making sure she came through her illness (which she has, all-clear been given etc etc).  Life is sort of back to normal (although i'd argue that something like that changes life and perspectives across the entire family.  Not sure what normal is now tbh).  
So back to 2021..............I've wanted to have a build thread of my own for years but I've never had a car that I felt had sufficient interest (or age) to warrant a thread.  But Covid changed my attitude - felt that life can be so precarious that I really had to step up my search for something.  I live in West Wales and alot of my local friends are electricians or carpenters or plumbers.  They go to a lot of houses and farms.  I told them all to look out for anything under a cover or tarpaulin or looked a bit forgotten that to give me a ring.  In 2022  I got a call about this car from one of the lads.  He didn't know what he was looking at, just that he knew it needed saving and 'it looks quick'!  

I met the owner (whom used to use it quite often but then his life took a turn for the worse and it had to be set aside to prioritise other things going on - totally understandable) before xmas 2021 and agreed a deal and paid a 10% deposit....then  xmas and life got in the way and it was only today that I was able to go and pick it up.  The plan is to ignore the exterior for the moment.....and just get the interior dry and all fitted out (I've got all the parts but he did the headlining and then life got in the way and some of the interior needs putting back). 
 
I've got a couple of dehumidifiers coming to help with the drying out too.  I then am going to get the car mechanically fettled and then MOT'd.  Once it's MOT'd then I'm going to use it for business meetings, day trips with the kids, charity runs, going up to North Wales to see my Dad and Devon to see my mum etc etc..  

Some initial pictures - bear in mind it was under a tarp(for 3 years, with the passenger window open..........) right up until the point you see these pictures. 
 
We got it into my shed and onto the ramp to see what we had.  The interior needs a lot of fettling.  On to the next instalment.