Joey spud

Does the feed to the coil run through the fuse box ? I was just thinking when it previously misbehaved didn't you have the headlamps on so maybe some high resistance at the fuse box (or ignition switch) dropped the power to the ignition and caused your fail to proceed ?

Yeah it looks like the cheap supply of black leather Ka seats is drying up fast I've seen leather BMW Mini seats in a Minor and they looked good but maybe slightly oversize.

Despite the perfect weather I've not got much done but I did finally stop procrastinating long enough to prime and paint the repairs on the rear panel and much to my surprise they have turned out really rather good. Again it's gone on a bit darker than the surrounding paint and I have made no effort to blend it in or hide the miss match at a panel edge. I fitted the bit that goes under under the door and realised that the quarter repair panel was set too far in so I had to add an layer of metal to make it align better. I've been trying to blend in this repair panel but have been making a pigs ear of it. I think I managed to misalign and distort the quarter repair panel and there is a lot of ancient filler in the car here hiding a previous repair so in the end I ground it all back off and hammered the joint in slightly and tried again. It's nearly there now honest... I never have much joy selling stuff on Facebook as I seem to attract scammers and retards so I didn't hold out much hope when I posted these seats up yesterday. But blow me down a Father and Son combo came over from South London earlier and scooped them up for their 63' Anglia with zero hassle. I really liked the look of these but they are 100% no good for my back. After years of complaining about feeling fatigued and a bit broken i have finally been diagnosed with the weirdly sounding desease Ankylosing Spondylitis and an x-ray shows I now have a partially fused lower spine and joint inflammation more or less everywhere else so I need to look for something more supportive like a pair of leather Ka seats or maybe MGF jobbies.

An assortment of clutch bits turned up yesterday so I promptly cut the new relay shaft about and added a 20mm bit of the old one to it. I also replaced the bronze bushes in the chassis leg that the pedal pivot on although to be honest when measured they weren't really worn at all. It all went together ok but where the relay shaft locates/pivots against the gearbox is a right bodge. On a minor box there is a nice machined housing that the nylon ball sits in but on this Ford conversion there is just a thin piece of steel bolted to the side of the gearbox with a hole in for the relay shaft to protrude through and this metal plate is very flexible and needed levering back into shape. I think i will weld some angle or small box section metal along the entire length of this plate to stop it flexing and loosing its shape again. Anyway the clutch pedal can now be operated easily with one hand whereas before it was a struggle. This overly long brake pipe has been annoying me too and despite my reluctance to keep disturbing the brakes I removed it and took 10 cms off it. There are loads of horror stories on the Minor sites of owners not being able to get the air out of their brakes after working on them but Boris has an excellent full pedal and whenever I have disturbed the hydraulics I have just left a union or bleed nipple slightly open and let any air make its own way out. Maybe having the remote reservoir up high gives you an advantage. I also made a quick bracket to run the reservoir pipe well away from the clutch linkage. The filler work on the arse end is finally good enough but the making good of the quarter panel repair may test my limited patience.

A metal line does make more sense but I reasoned to myself that modern stuff uses plastic pipe work for everything so my repair would suffice. Andrew Eggleton the Morris Minor botherer in Bath recently bought up all of Charles Wares stock so I guess that's something good.

My house has just sold and so I need him useable to drive to my new gaff a mile down the road.

Apparently a 1275 engine and Ford Gearbox combo often results in a heavy clutch and jerky operation which can be overcome by converting to hydraulic operation which is outside of my budget. My pedal is too heavy and has a short action between being engaged/disengaged and the brake pedal is binding up on the clutch pedal shaft which won't help so I pulled the mechanism off the car to have a look. All of the clevis pins are well worn and their locating holes on the pedal and relay shaft are badly elongated. So I have ordered a complete kit of new parts for £32. So this and a couple of cheap pedal shaft bushes should improve the feel but not the heavy pedal. Having a good dig around on a Morris Minor forum and I think I have found a simple (cheap) solution. If you cut and extend this lever on the relay shaft that connects to the pedal by 20mm it lightens the clutch and improves the feel no end. So that's my next step.

I went up the garden to the shed earlier this week and noticed there was a wet patch under the front of Boris which was strange as he has no coolant in him,I dabbed a finger in the puddle and sussed it was Dot 4 flavoured. This old pipe from the brake reservoir had split and emptied its entire contents onto the chassis leg taking my nice fresh paint off in the process. Thinking about it it didn't seem like a smart idea having a metre length of rubber hose full of brake fluid next to a hot engine slowly degrading so I had a dig around the shed and found some plastic pipe to do the long run from the reservoir to the floor mounted master cylinder and connected it either end with two small lengths of fresh 7mm hose. And the exhaust has now been fully fitted without any problems. There's loads of room around the axle. And it pokes out the back just right but it may well turn out to be a bit noisy with just two straight thru silencers fitted and I may have to revisit it at a later date and fit a conventional silencer after the front pipe. Body filler can get in the Sea. I hate the stuff. I can eventually get a half tidy result but it takes me an age. When I fitted the new lower rear panel to the car I should have took more time with the accuracy of the joint but I never do. This side has blended in quickly and quite well. But the o/s is being a right slag but I won't be beaten i want to get it about right and get a top coat on it.

I do like this old thing it's a useful wagon to have on the fleet. It delivered a mobi scooter yesterday and the day before was collecting a load of IKEA flat pack. It's even carted the brides maids about for a mate's wedding and the council begrudgingly let me into the tip as well. It's just a shame the seats are a faff to remove/refit and it certainly doesn't do modern van mpg's.

My house/contents insurance last year was £302 this year LV's renewal quote is £457 and i've never claimed in thirty odd years. I shopped around and got it with More than for £307. I understand inflation and materials/labour costs have increased but when you can move to another insurer and match last year's price then there's got to be something dodgy going on in the insurance industry.

My thoughts are now turning to this awkward gap that's usually covered by the bumper valance/bumper blade. To me the blade and valance arrangement is a bit ugly and gifferish so I am going bumperless or loosing the valance and pulling just the bumper tight to the body but either way the gap needs filling. Something simple like this bit of folded steel would do so I've been collecting shreddies boxes to experiment with.

Thank you. I am still going to apply a good coating of waxoyl to the bare metal surfaces of the suspension and hub assemblies and inside the wings and front panel.

So to recover from crawling about under the Morris and as the weather was good I used the rattle can that I painted the front panel with to blow in around the head light. I left it a day to harden then gently cut it back using a worn out bit of 1500 grit production paper and soapy water then polished it up to a shine with some 3M green cap compound and an old pair of pants The colour is a bit out but where it is it doesn't really show and anyway the o/s rear corner has been painted dove grey instead of clarendon grey at some point in the past.

Well i got my mojo back long enough to degrease and clean where I wanted to splash the stone chip and picked a dry wind free day to do the dirty deed. The interior is now one colour and hopefully the coating might keep some road noise at bay too. I have this idea to leave the sill assembly inside the door shut on show rather than fit their covers as I quite like the agricultural look they have and I can keep an eye on any water/muck that might start collecting there too. The underside side took longer than I had planned for but I had to rub down and paint any bare or flaky areas before I could apply the top coating. All told I hit Boris with four litres of the Gravitex and I still need to do the front panel cross member and o/s front chassis leg. And the feeler gauge bodge on the compressor was sound too. The brake and fuel pipes were unmasked and refitted with insulated P clips where required and the prop got popped on too. It looks a bit like a patchwork quilt under here but it's my patchwork quilt. The fuel tank is also fitted in to its orifice in the boot floor. I bought a roll of this cauking stuff to sit it on and it seems to have done a far nicer job than using messy silicone out of a tube. Last year I loosely fitted the exhaust and so started fitting it for real only to need a little bit of welding on a bracket and have run out of gas again. It looks like it's low but when it's hanging on its rear mount it's about right. Something like that.

These are brilliant cars and I think drove much better than Lada and FSO's offerings at the time. The Jikov carbs were a curse though and seemed way too complicated for an eastern European small car and would often drip fuel out the accelerator swan neck causing a chuggy idle and hard hot starts. I think getting the float level spot on was crucial. A friend who was into hot rods had a lowered orange coupe finally gave up on the Jikov and managed to fit a twin choke Webber carb onto it although it didn't give him anymore speed or mpg just a better drive.

I think the rattle was down to premature wear of the cams and tappets caused by dirty oil and blocked oil galleries rather than than rocker arm/valve clearances. Older/wiser Guys at the dealer woundn't bother checking and adjusting them if it was required on a service schedule at most they might just change the rocker box gasket. They used the same engine in the 1300 Peugeot 309 and that didn't suffer with the problem i guess they improved the quality of the parts and their oil supply.

It's a shame you didn't check and see if you had lost a spark from the coil lead and/or a plug lead while it was in no go mode. Back when i had old Brit/Lucas cars i always seemed to have an odd spark plug,rotor arm,condenser,bits of wire tape etc in the door pocket it just seemed the norm back then. You say the wiring is a bit iffy could you be loosing a decent feed to the coil ? Again back in my early RAC days i got a lot of use from two lengths of wire connected to a 410 headlight bulb as the brightness of the bulb was an easy way to check if a 12v supply was good or if it had a massive volt drop in it. A favorite get you home fix if you had lost feed to a coil or fuel pump was to unplug the dead wire and run a wire from a headlamp instead so lamp on engine runs,lamp off engine stops obviously can't do that nowadays.

I'm sure you've discounted this but it isn't the rotor arm going to earth when it gets hot ? A simple check i used to do was pull the coil lead from the distibutor and hold it a few mm away from the rotor and then crank the engine. If you got a spark jumping the gap then it was going to earth when hot.

Yeah that wont help. In the 80's i worked at a Peugeot/Talbot dealer in Rochester and had the frustration of trying to quieten the clattering valve gear on Alpines and Horizons. It didn't matter what clearance you set them at they still sounded the same.

Yeah I have done some research (looked at the internet) as i thought maybe van and car bonnets or early late ones differed but you're quite right some just seem to fit better than others.

I'd forgotten all about those. Back in the day my mum had an auto one on Motability after not being able to get a new Rover 100 auto anymore and absolutely loved it. Sadly it was picked up from her home by the dealership for it's three year service and got severly rear ended on the A28 Ashford road by a kamikarzi tipper driver. She wanted another to replace "Oliver" but they had stopped making them.

The new switch/cut out thingy turned up today for my old compressor and it stopped the air loss but it still wouldn't get above 20psi so I pulled it apart and found this... The outlet valve/flap had snapped,I looked on eBay etc but couldn't find a replacement then I had a eureka moment... One feeler gauge blade cut to size and secured with a pop rivet. So no excuses I'll have to clean the underside ready for stone chipping now. Boris came with the wrong late type indicator/side light lamps. Which I don't much care for so I have acquired a pair of early side lamps to use as indicators (amber led bulbs) and moved the side lamp up into the head light. You would not believe how happy I am finally fitting these original glass lamps.

While I was on a roll / still interested I thought it might be worth finding out if the wing I repaired off the car in 2020 would actually fit on the car. The answer was nearly. Ah that's not so good. I think the problem was with the outter wing and inner wing. With a bit of trimming/welding of the mounting flange and some hammering/ repositioning of the inner wing I was able to get a satisfactory alignment after all. Before calling it a day I popped in a flat glass H4 headlight and fitted the chrome hockey stick. Visible progress it's like Boris is getting his face back.

I still can't be asked to crawl around preping the underside for stone chipping so I faffed about with the front panel and grill instead. I had bought some Clarendon grey enamel paint but it was way too dark (almost blue) so I diluted it down with some white radiator paint it's not bang on but better than before. I painted the cross member and chassis legs,it'll do for area's that are out if sight. In the future i am going to fit an electric cooling fan but for now I've put the blade back on again. I fitted the slam panel with the rad already bolted on then realised you needed it out of the way to be able to secure the top chrome strip fixings. I think the bonnet might need some tweaking as it seems it's front edge is totally the wrong profile. Or it's a 64 year old bitsa so it really don't matter...

When I was on the RAC i was always surprised just how many non starts were due to low fuel. Volvo V70's were a sod for refusing to start if low on fuel and parked on a slope.