Isaac Hunt

Yay bollox etc.
Glad you're back as we will need boots on the ground in the Somercotes area around new year - the infamous prolapsed Cortina will be MOT exempt and potentially prowling the streets again.
EDIT: the thing is MOT exempt already but won't be tax exempt till next April so maybe that's the time to be on standby.

Hi all, you may recall i stomped off AS 6 months back after getting annoyed at the wanky moderation on here. Well I must have got over it to some extent, as i had been logging in from time to time recently, mostly to see what was on the for sale board, and guess whats happened? I've ended up with another car.

I need more projects like I need a hole in my head, but this turned up on the FS board with no back wheels and no price and I was intrigued. Struck up a convo with @Snake Charmer who was looking after it on behalf of the owner Alan. It had been on Snake's driveway for 15 years and it seemed like it was 'out of sight out of mind' for Alan. Anyway photos were exchanged, I had a chat with Alan, more photos and videos came down the wire, then Alan said I could take it away for £1000 and pay after it was collected!!! Very decent of him. (I think he mostly just wanted a painless sale and a good home for it). At that price i could not refuse. So @worldofceri was drafted in for logistics, Snake refitted the rear wheels and home it came to castle bo11ox!!!
I think both Snake and Alan are interested to see how I get on with it, so I'm chucking a thread up on here to record what happens with it (if anything).
So lets have a look at it.



So its a 1968 Zephyr Mk4, 2.5 Essex V6, 4-speed manual box and column gearchange. Snake has rebuilt the engine, and its got a new clutch and various other bits and bobs. It does run but doesnt drive as the rear calipers are dismantled and in the boot. Also the exhaust is rotten. I did bust out the mop on the bootlid and roof as well, I need to go right round it still.

So far all I have really done is stare at it, I absolutely love how it looks. I always liked the shape of these and they seem to have avoided the crazy prices and knucklehead image of most old fords. Probably cos they supposedly drive like a half-burst lilo on the Whitley Bay Leisure pool.
It seems amazingly unmolested really. Pretty much everything is present and correct. Stuff like the carpets and door seals etc do look like theyre 50 years old, but thats because they are right? I can't find any signs of it being welded amazingly - look at this flitch panel behind the NSF wheel. No splash guard - looks like it has the factory coating on it, yet all there is is a bit of surface rust.

NS sill flange:

Amazing! The only bits of rot I've found yet are the front wing tips and this little hole in the corner of the windscreen:

That'll be a screen out job to sort, but I did find a company in Oz that make new screen seals so if I can get hold of one of those, the screen can be cut out to avoid another palaver like I had on the horsebo11ox. Amazingly this does not seem to have rotted out the bottom of the A pillar!!!
Anyway the biggest problem is the lack of brakes. My driveway is sloped, so I've got the wheels chocked but with no brakes at all its completely immobile till i can get something sorted. The calipers were removed and dismantled some time back, heres how they look now:

Snake reckoned they might be salvageable but looking through the bits I could only find one piston!!! (should be 2 obvs) Also, these calipers are pretty unusual, theyre the same as you get on a Rover P6 and they have some very weird mechanisms inside them. I decided I needed another pair of calipers 'intact' so that i could see exactly how they assemble and be sure I wasn't missing any other bits. @barrett put me onto some stammering geezer in Brighouse who has a stash of P6 parts so I had a trip up there and came back £70 lighter but with with 3 more calipers ("probably don't even need a rebuild m8")
So today my workbench looks like this:


Now I've got 5 calipers! on the far left there is one which I am planning to keep intact as a guide to how the thing assembles, the other 4 are now in bits. Also I found the missing piston. Also got 2 new seal kits.
Now then, the real nub of the problem here is the pistons:

All the pistons I have, are in really poor condition like these. Theyre a really weird design with that arm on one end and clipped inside is a female-threaded adjuster that wobbles about, check it out in the middle of this cross section:

I noticed past parts sell reconned calipers for these/P6's so i thought they must have a source of new pistons, so I rang them up today. They reckoned they re-use pistons but bore out and re-sleeve the caliper bodies. I sat and thought about it and decided that sounded ridiculous - why fit a new sleeve, when the seal is static in the bore and the sealing surface is a moving piston? Then I sat in the garden for some hours wondering how I could get some new pistons machined up in stainless and how to attach those crank arms to them. I even opened one up to have a look inside:

Didnt really come up with a satisfactory answer TBH.
Then I had a brainwave when I realised that the main piston is not actually hydraulic at all!!! its the little one on the left of the X-section that is, that must be the one that PP resleeve. So actually, those miserable looking pistons will be perfectly OK after all. I will just clean them up as best I can and chuck loads of vaseline over them to protect them.
I'm hoping I might be able to go up to Cobblers' place and get some of these bits cleaned in his ultrasonic cleaner before reassembling but hopefully i can get them back together in the next day or two either way.
Also gave the backplates a clean up and a coat of red oxide & satin black (forgot to photo the finished jobs!)

Ive got this week off work, booked it ages ago so I could do loads of horsebox stuff - Ive not touched that at all yet, as i am still in a 'love haze' with this Zephyr. More soon!

Bumpers off, it didn’t fight and the bolts unbolted having had lots of WD40. I still have flashbacks to my first attempt at 1960s car where my ADO16 snapped every bolt rather than undoing…

It's a Triumph, none of the panels fitted properly from the factory!

I have never been keen on GRP panels because they never fit properly and we have just changed a front wing on the Allegro from GRP to a good used original. Also on the whole unless panels are destroyed I prefer a repaired original panel to even a steel aftermarket.

Gold Seal was a big ‘brand’ for remanufacturing in the late 60’s through to the 80’s.
 I’m not 100% sure exactly when the brand was launched but if you rocked up to some secondhand chariot and it had been fitted with a Gold Seal engine it was much desirable.  
But back then, engines could get well worn very easily, especially if Nurse Gladys Emanuel had been running round town on full choke with lots of short journeys.

Gold Seal was a big ‘brand’ for remanufacturing in the late 60’s through to the 80’s.
 I’m not 100% sure exactly when the brand was launched but if you rocked up to some secondhand chariot and it had been fitted with a Gold Seal engine it was much desirable.  
But back then, engines could get well worn very easily, especially if Nurse Gladys Emanuel had been running round town on full choke with lots of short journeys.

Gold Seal was a big ‘brand’ for remanufacturing in the late 60’s through to the 80’s.
 I’m not 100% sure exactly when the brand was launched but if you rocked up to some secondhand chariot and it had been fitted with a Gold Seal engine it was much desirable.  
But back then, engines could get well worn very easily, especially if Nurse Gladys Emanuel had been running round town on full choke with lots of short journeys.

I have replaced the redundant regulator with a small junction box instead (£5.00 from Tool station).

And i have a modern fuse box and some decent spade terminals coming to tidy up the messy wiring.
While i still had my arse in gear i made a start on modifying the Marina down pipe to fit the Minors engine bay.

The front downpipe was easy enough.

The rear one is being a right bugger but i think i am getting there now.
I will have a dig through the scrap metal bins while at work during the week to see if i can find any preformed bits of pipe to improve its appearance further.
Once i am happy with it i will put it on the bench and weld it up properly.
And i have some exhaust wrap somewhere to lag it with to try and keep the heat off the fuel pipe directly above it.

Gold Seal was a big ‘brand’ for remanufacturing in the late 60’s through to the 80’s.
 I’m not 100% sure exactly when the brand was launched but if you rocked up to some secondhand chariot and it had been fitted with a Gold Seal engine it was much desirable.  
But back then, engines could get well worn very easily, especially if Nurse Gladys Emanuel had been running round town on full choke with lots of short journeys.

I had a result with this damage.

The tear just about joined up once the metal was straightened up again.

 
A bit of paint and that'll do.

You’ve redefined the word perseverance their old chap.  
Numerous times it thought you were at the Ford  Mondyenow stage.  
The PO dodged some bullets there when he said ‘fekkit’ as far as MOT repairs go.

Usually I bring one of my cars that is older or similar age (not hard). When I get the usual spiel about being unreasonable with condition in regards to age, I point over to mine and mention that is older. 

Of course not....One had to remove the lamp during the conflict.

I never knew that.  As far as Lutons go, the other fekker is a big Luton, does that make it a Bedfordshire.
The other ‘old skool’ term you don’t hear these days, is ‘Shooting Brake’.  I think the good call them ‘long roofs’. Car related I know

You’ve redefined the word perseverance their old chap.  
Numerous times it thought you were at the Ford  Mondyenow stage.  
The PO dodged some bullets there when he said ‘fekkit’ as far as MOT repairs go.

You’ve redefined the word perseverance their old chap.  
Numerous times it thought you were at the Ford  Mondyenow stage.  
The PO dodged some bullets there when he said ‘fekkit’ as far as MOT repairs go.

Having got this thing running properly I intended to move on to replacing the front wishbone bushes. Dived under the front to jack it up and found a large pool of oil on my newly-cleaned drive. I hate this bloody car! It looked like oil but was not under the engine or the gearbox, it was towards the nearside rear of the engine compartment, under the ABS unit, so my first thought was brake fluid, since I have already pratted about with this. But no. Turns out that the nearside steering rack gaiter had decided to split spectacularly and dump all the (new) power steering fluid. Another job I didn't expect, want or need. Should be straightforward enough though, right? Wrong! Bought a new pair of rack gaiters and set about replacing them. You can supposedly do this without removing the track rod ends by stretching the small end of the gaiter over them, but I didn't fancy risking splitting the new boots so I removed the track rod ends. Not too difficult, although once again I tried the "hitting with two hammers" technique to break the tapers and failed miserably. I have never succeeded when trying this, but fortunately I have a proper tool which did the job with no problems. Eventually managed to lever off the inner boot clips but access is very restricted because the rack is within the subframe, so surrounded on three sides by solid metal with various pipes above it. Removed the split nearside gaiter and attempted to fit the new one but no way I could get the inner end over the rack tube, not helped by the fact that the new gaiters were both distorted and nowhere near round.
Generous* working area:

High-quality* replacement parts (and almost circular):

No matter how I tried the boot either went inside the rack tube or turned inside out and it was impossible to get fingers in past the end of the rack tube to stretch it over. After much cursing and swearing I finally decided that the only way it would go on was if I could I slide it over without touching the rack tube, but the boot diameter was too small. The rack was about 60mm diameter and so was the boot, but, as per the photograph above, it wasn't round. After several nights sleep and some lateral thinking I found a round glass jam jar that was about 75mm diameter, dunked the boot end into boiling water to soften it, then stretched it over the jar and left it for a couple of days. When removed it shrank back fairly quickly but by being as fast as I could I eventually managed to get it on after 3 or 4 attempts. Now being an expert* I repeated the process on the offside boot, which wasn't actually split but was looking pretty manky and I didn't intend to lose another lot of power steering fluid at a later date. Since I had removed the track rod ends and they appeared to be the originals I decided to fit new ones, so it now has two new rack gaiters and two new track rod ends and I can move on to tackling the job I had intended to do in the first place.
If I am not learning anything else from this recalcitrant pig I am at least learning patience, perseverance and lots of new swear words.
 

I had a 1990 Montego with an S Series Engine in it.  Cambelt had been replaced whilst it was my fleet car.  I was having the engine ‘pressure washed’ by a guy down the local car auctions when the fekkin stopped running and wouldn’t restart.  It turned over but wouldn’t fire.  Some investigation concluded the Cam Belt had let go.  I towed the fekker home.  Phoned up a mate of mine in the trade “tell me how fekked it is gonna be”.  1.6 S series you say, “yes”.  You be fine, it is a safe engine.  He was right, one new belt later and we were back in business.
i’d watch that crab if I was you, looking at the interior hygiene that might not be the only crab you catch.

I had a 1990 Montego with an S Series Engine in it.  Cambelt had been replaced whilst it was my fleet car.  I was having the engine ‘pressure washed’ by a guy down the local car auctions when the fekkin stopped running and wouldn’t restart.  It turned over but wouldn’t fire.  Some investigation concluded the Cam Belt had let go.  I towed the fekker home.  Phoned up a mate of mine in the trade “tell me how fekked it is gonna be”.  1.6 S series you say, “yes”.  You be fine, it is a safe engine.  He was right, one new belt later and we were back in business.
i’d watch that crab if I was you, looking at the interior hygiene that might not be the only crab you catch.

I had a 1990 Montego with an S Series Engine in it.  Cambelt had been replaced whilst it was my fleet car.  I was having the engine ‘pressure washed’ by a guy down the local car auctions when the fekkin stopped running and wouldn’t restart.  It turned over but wouldn’t fire.  Some investigation concluded the Cam Belt had let go.  I towed the fekker home.  Phoned up a mate of mine in the trade “tell me how fekked it is gonna be”.  1.6 S series you say, “yes”.  You be fine, it is a safe engine.  He was right, one new belt later and we were back in business.
i’d watch that crab if I was you, looking at the interior hygiene that might not be the only crab you catch.

I picked up a Clarendon Grey flavoured rattle can while at ESM on Monday and being an  impatient so and so i used it all up on my yellow front panel the same evening.
After leaving it till today to harden i have given it a wet sand with some 1200 grit paper followed by a cut back with 3M's excellent,but pricey Fast Cut Plus on a pad.

 

A totally pointless endeavour really when i have shit loads of rot removal and welding to be getting on with but i needed some shiny,shiny to get me motivated again.

I'm a bit gutted but I can't make it now this year, I was really looking forwards to it but the Dolomite which is the car I've booked in has smashed its starter motor and my dad's offered to come over on Saturday to help me fix it (it's a right sod to get to the top bolts) and I need the car fixed for a local show. 
Have a great time those who are going! 

Passed 😁😁😁😁😁😁😁