garethj

Trigger to the rescue as usual, with a road test

@HMC I’ve got a 1978 MG Midget rolling shell here that needs to go ASAP. It’s got front discs which seem to go for £250 on eBay and a rear axle that might give better gearing for your throbbing power delivery. You’re welcome to have it for free if you can get it collected from Bedfordshire

It was March 2015 when I bought it so that repair has been around a long time

Not while I owned it, the only work was a new petrol filler pipe as inside the rear arches is a rust trap. The car looks good now, they were very rare when I bought it, that one must be about the only one left on the road now.

It’s not necessarily just go or no-go with these things. It might light up the continuity test on a voltmeter but the switch resistance has to be low or the BeCM won’t read it correctly. It was the same problem as with the Jaguar XJ40, the first car to use low current switching. Great when everything is new but after a few years and contact resistance has gone up, readings to the black box can go squiffy. Some parts are even worse because they have a resistor network in the switches, I remember the bubble Rover 200 had it in the steering wheel cruise / radio switches. Maybe the way to check with this is to unplug the harness from the wiper motor and see if it’s got 12V going to the 2nd speed wire. Then at least you’re testing the switch, the BeCM and the harness.

See this? I did some of the design work on this It looks like there’s some corrosion under the clickers so I’d suggest lifting the adhesive sheet and checking for rust stopping the contacts working. Use a fibreglass pencil to clean the oxidation off and the reapply the sheet again. There are air channels between each of the clickers so if there’s rust below one, it might be on any of them. Just to make sure you win the P38 trivia quiz, the thing that makes the notch-feel position is a white nylon slider with a brass roller and a coil spring. For reasons I forget, that coil spring had to be extremely long, probably to get a low spring rate for large deflection. The problem with a long coil spring is that it can buckle rather than compress in a straight line, to fix this there’s a thin plastic pin down the middle, called an “anti-buckle” pin. For the full two points in the trivia quiz, the name of the sales engineer to Land Rover at the time was Andy Buckley so the pin was nicknamed the Andy Buckley pin. Fucking hell, Engineers are sad.

Would a Saab 900 or even a 99 do? Not sure about the power steering though, I think they all came with it

I’ve owned two👍 Rust can be a big issue, as can engines. The state of the paintwork too and there’s a lot of it to paint. Having said that, it’s a fantastic thing to drive, I did thousands of miles in mine commuting to work

As we’re rambling around the topic here, I wonder if part of the reason for the Austin 7 being the standard for control positions is they were made under license in different countries. It wasn’t just popular in Britain but DKW made it in Germany and wasn’t it the first Datsun too?

That’s an amazing price! There seems to be two schools of thought with these: firstly that they’re incredibly reliable. They kept coming top of JD Power surveys and they seem very tough. Secondly, there’s a lot with failed head gaskets. With purchase price that low, you can certainly live with low fuel economy as long as he doesn’t do 20,000 miles a year

Cool, link when it goes up, please 👍

£15k for this Autozam, but just look how fantastic it is https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/MAZDA-AZ1-RARE-INVESTABLE-MODERN-CLASSIC-AUTOZAM-AZ1-JDM-GULLWING-KEI-CAR/352995160297?hash=item523026b0e9:g:978AAOSw5LRdv-9y

I would love this, it's a kei car but even by Japanese standards it's clever. It's mid engined; tucked under the rear seats so you still get a decent sized boot. 4x4 too and this is the turbocharged version for extra zoom and presumably extra toasty buttocks for the rear seat passengers. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Honda-Z-UM-4-Turbo-Intercooled-S600-Kei-Car-JDM-SUV/114150002548?hash=item1a93decf74:g:FkgAAOSw3e5eY-Wh

Elegant Twingo in black, it's been in Germany rather than France which perhaps explains the lack of dents. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Renault-Twingo-1-2-Initiale-Left-Hand-Drive/202922174613?hash=item2f3f1aa895:g:PEQAAOSw~nJeYQLB

Hardtop wedge, I much prefer these over the convertibles https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/TVR-OTHER/283801214835?hash=item4213dedf73:g:MVoAAOSw2d5ea6Zy