Heidel_Kakao

Wonder how many RWD Mazda 323's survive?

Stars on bikes -

John Wayne on the set of Big Jake used a Honda motorcycle to get around the scenes.

Donald Sutherland clearly enjoying a Jawa 350.
 
 

Right so! I was looking to lease an EV through the business, but completely failed due to hating new car dealers, hating touchscreens and eventually settling on a hybrid which is out of stock until mid-late 2022. 
So I gave up and decided to get a Land rover. I failed at that too, after my mate sent me a link to the advert for this on ebay, at about 9pm. Ten minutes later I had arranged to drive down to see it the next day.

 
I'm a glutton for punishment, and I really miss my last t25 so it was pretty inevitable that I'd buy it. It was more money than I'm used to spending on these, but overall I was pleased with the deal.
A dawn raid by our very own @worldofceri had it delivered on Friday morning:
 






It's a Swedish van originally, and was imported in 2006. Incredibly solid, never been painted and a fantastic "worn in" look. It's a 2.1 "DJ" engine which is pretty healthy but as usual is weeping coolant from various places, they all do that sir. A friend has a rebuilt engine on his shelf so I budgeted that into the purchase - We'll see how it goes.
Totally original other than someone put some mega Fox/Gowesty suspension on it, proper mega bypass shocks with external reservoirs and stuff, so I reckon I can probably take it off jumps or something. I won't.
My plans are to (after cleaning the filthy interior) to just run it about, more or less as it is. It would benefit from a set of tyres - these are worn very ridged on the fronts that makes it even more noisy and harsh to drive, and has no spare wheel.
I've rotated the tyres so now the front ones are smoother, we'll see how I get on. I do need to source another matching wheel for a spare as these are full time 4wd so you need to keep the tyres rotated regular and within a very similar tread depth. look - there's even a sticker telling you to:

 
I really need to get some new number plates for it! If anyone knows a place who could make some OE style ones with that font all the VW dealers seemed to use in the 1980s, that would be grand - I want some with the dealers logo putting on the bottom:

 
 

Bugger me. (not literally) Grub on, down the neck and @junkyarddog got it with the first guess. More or less. Oh well.
Yes it's a Spartan Gulfstream 30ft motorhome although not made by Winnebago but by Spartan.
Here ya go.

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!

This is the story of a 1919 Federal truck that was in use until 1966 in Norway. It has a 54 hp engine with only a hand crank starting, a 4-speed gearbox and only brakes on the rear wheels. And originally it had solid rubber tires and then had 4 tons of load capacity when it got air tires the load capacity was lowered to 3 tons. It had 3 owners in its working life and Andres Hagen bought it in 1927 and used it until 1966 when he retired and he died in 1967. He used it to deliver  bricks in Oslo which were loaded on and off by hand 51 kg at a time all year round in all weathers and it never had a roff in his ownership so he drove open all year he also took care of all maintenance and repairs on it. It still exists and is now in a museum in Oslo.
Unfortunately I do not find many pictures of this and none are old so this is just one picture.

A_WOV - Exhumation 
I don't know how this happened, but I've done a mere 173 miles in the Mini since 12th July 2019. I mean, I know why, the Mini is a piece of shit, but I don't know where all the time has gone. I'm trying to remember what went wrong and when, but essentially in July 2019 it had just passed an MOT and  I did pretty  much all those measly miles going nowhere in particular that summer as I was mainly using the S123 and XJS. I put the Mini in a friends garage over winter, acknowledging that I wasn't really using it and then by Feb 2020... well we all know what happened. In April 2020 I recovered it, so I had it to play with at my house in the garden during lockdown 1.0 and a wheel cylinder popped on the way home! I remember limping it home on the deserted roads as I didn't want to meet an RAC man and catch the dreaded virus. Pretty dumb in hindsight.
During lockdown 1.0 I rebuilt the brakes just by throwing parts at it...
Then, for just under a year it sat at the bottom of the pile. Looking back I rebuilt the crashed Focus, got and "restored" the 480, had the Baleno twice, including quite a bit of work, sold the S123 and XJS, did various things with the 440 and bought the Granada, so I'm not giving myself a hard time about being lazy, but it is a shame I did nothing. Part of the out of sight out of mind attitude with the Mini was that I booked it in with MiniCraft for a renovation of the upper parts of the body once the 18 month MOT had expired, so it just hung around waiting for that. With the bodywork repairs officially cancelled recently (unfortunately) I thought it was time to see if I could get out in it for the summer, then find someone else to do the body work over winter, or next year. 
As I left it, the front brakes were binding and I couldn't do anything easily as the adjusters were seized, which meant going back into them, stripping them, exercising the adjusters from inside rather than mangling the spanner attachments and rebuilding them again.


While in there I took Mr. TidyBeard's advice and chamfered the leading edge of the shoe to make them less grabby and then went about re-assembling them and adjusting them properly once the adjusters were free. The offside was ok, but the nearside could not be setup and it was becoming obvious that the drum circularity was...erm... not circular. After having ordered parts for the Granada I found £11 for a drum for the Mini an absolute boon, so just got new ones. This probably explains why the Mini used to pull left on hard breaking and had a tendency to lock that nearside wheel.
While I waited for delivery I addressed some rust because it's a Mini. Not bad rust, just some peelage from a recent repair cleaned up and repainted.


With the new drums and the ability to tweak the four shoe adjusters the brakes are now bellissimo. I treated it to a wash because I think a washed car presents better to an MOT tester. I wish I hadn't - the paint on the nearside A-pillar fell off in one sheet with just some gentle sponge action. Incredible, never seen that before and left me laughing.

With that the car was driveable again, yet with 24 months having passed since it's last MOT, I decided to put it in for one to get a better idea of the immediate "to-do" list. Today I can report that it has pretty much passed. That's a result in the AutoShite world. It hasn't actually passed, but it's as good as!

The dipswitch thing is from a period correct theft attempt, where the steering column cowling now moves around with the indicators, so if you indicate left then go for main beam the cowling is in the way. Part of the charm, lol. I'm not sure the hazards not working is a flippant thing with an old vehicle - of the four switches on this car that's probably the most important 🤣
Regardless, the major defects are going to be repaired immediately and the Mini will be driven. The target: 174 miles before the next major setback. I'll report back on how that goes, 50:50 it does it.

Ex Broadsword, who has looked after it with meticulous enthusiasm….
First Range Rover I have ever owned, due to much prejudice from A.A. Recovery days. Air suspension and alarm / immobiliser have been ruthlessly deleted, and it’s 2.5 dizzler , so no Nickaseal fears.
So what’s it like. Let’s get one thing straight, it’s not fast… it’s not even brisk. It’s endearingly ponderous, pressing the loud pedal just turns money into noise, with no appreciable increase in “ performance “.
This does not matter a jot. Stick it in drive, gather momentum in a stately manner, and sneer at the peasantry. People do tend to get out of the way of black P38 with some alacrity. Most things seem to work, it does 28 to the gallon, and seems to leak a little, so regular oil changes are ongoing.
One glaring omission, no cup holders….RR should provide a serf in the glovebox to decant one’s Earl Grey…
Apart from that, enjoying it thoroughly…

Yup…. Be careful! You have to be prepared for deafness and you will need regular appointments with your local chiropractor.
Mechanically very simple, but some bits can be bloody expensive, and watch for galloping rot

@purplebargeken springs to mind, I’ve had a 1997 fairway and an 2005 TX2. IIRC @wuvvum has had a metrocab.
The tx is probably the most numerous ex black cab in the bargain basement price range- fx4s seem dear/ get blinded up for wedding hire, and later stuff can also still be a bit pricey. A line in the sand for me when looking at was 06 plate as from this date the road tax is £50 per month. Not the end of the world but for me, for an non essential extra vehicle that was too much; especially if said vehicle is only about £500 to buy, which is entirely possible for a running driving mot’d tx2 with a bit of looking around. Certainly with age limits and electric legislation kicking in I would Imagine it’s going to be a buyers market in the next few years. I paid £365 for one direct from a London fleet operator last autumn.
the tx1 is still a Nissan engine, the tx2 is a Ford duratorq 2.4. Each has their fans, including some old school operators who re- engined tx2s with the less complex 2.7 Nissan from the tx1. 
My tx2 was direct from London service (lots are autos from London- usually found with Lxxxx plates) Mine has rock hard Commercial city tyres that were “interesting“ in winter on country roads, sometimes reverse took a while to Engage from cold. Apparently this is not uncommon. Rebuilds are not too pricey as there are commercial outfitters in London who can do it for a reasonable price with competition keeping the price down. 
 
Usually an owner driver is a safer bet from a care point of view - mine had been Rented by the driver from a taxi firm, presumably 24/7  but still seemed to have been looked after ok. I bought mine after the first lockdown and , capturing the zeitgeist had appropriate livery on it.

Yup I was watching that last night. Can't wait to do it for real 😀I drove it round the sellers yard at least lol.
Engine fired up instantly from stone cold with no smoke. There was a receipt for the front brakes being rebuilt as that is what it last failed the MOT on. Air system seemed fine. Interior is complete. Chassis seemed solid. Tyres seemed good.
It didn't stink of horse piss to all those doubters out there lol. As to what I am going to use it for.... Car transport. If it does 20MPG carrying Cedric it's still more economical than driving Cedric at 16MPG.

Mine is already white so I just need to get these decals reproduced.

So a week after driving my van for the first time I have gone one better and arranged to buy this Leyland Roadrunner for £800 😀
The number plate says lorry lol. F392 LRY
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Leyland-DAF-Roadrunner-Horsebox-Wagon-Lorry-/254959172986?_trksid=p2349624.m46890.l49286


It's powered currently by a non turbo Cummins B series engine but we may have to sort him out some forced induction at some point.
You may well be wondering why I have bought a truck and specifically a Roadrunner.... well it's because of the adverts below!
 
If that isn't a good enough reason to buy a truck I don't know what is haha.

So when I  finally got to the FOD I realised I had lost my sunglasses and they were most likely on the side of the M40 where I had failed to proceed earlier. So I just went back to look for them and found them 😀 They are genuine Rayban Aviators with a blue tint and I have had them about a decade so didn't want to buy new ones if I could avoid it.

I knew I would get use out of these again eventually after I sold the XM but I thought it would be a CX estate not a van!

160 mile round trip to the FOD was my first proper drive in the van and I bloody love it. It's slow to accelerate but in an endearing way not frustrating. Nice and comfortable, decent stereo and it handles well too.
@wuvvumYou undersold sold it by saying it does 80 if you keep your foot in it. I was getting 90+ indicated on the flat. Number 1 rule, never lift lol. Conservation of momentum is key!

So I have my first ever van 😀 Going to tax it from the first of May and then first van duty will be collecting a spare engine for Cedric from Yorkshire.
It has 12 months MOT and is in fine fettle thanks to @tommotech

Might have another go at deep cleaning the interior but that's about the only thing I am going to do to it.

A thread bump due to sad circumstances😢 Some of you may remember me having this Corrado VR6 a while back, well I have inherited it now as my brother passed away recently. He had owned it since 2003 so it's been in the family a long time and I will never sell it.
Unfortunately it's not very healthy at the moment, it has a nasty top end noise above 3000RPM. Now as I don't have to care about resale value this may be the perfect opportunity to rebuild it stronger and better than ever.
Do we have anyone with dubber knowledge that knows how involved a 3.6 VR6 swap is? Rather than spending the money on an engine rebuild I would rather have the bigger engine, and then maybe a turbo on top of that.
It's low down on my priority list as the Cedric still comes first but the Corrado will live again!

So you may have seen that I picked up this fine machine a week ago, it's my first ever V8 and easily the most technologically advanced vehicle I have ever owned ( that's not saying much though!) and the most refined too.
I bought it with the intention of using it as an engine donor for my Volvo 940 estate as while it's a nice driving car it's not the greatest example so I won't feel bad about destroying it.
I did an oil and filter change on it today to protect the most important part I don't think it will be getting any other servicing in my ownership. I like wafting around in it as it promotes a very relaxed driving style and it has a pretty nice stereo too, I have confirmed that it can do a pretty good one tire fire (no LSD sadly) if the traction control is disabled but it's really not designed for those kind of childish activities.

Anyway if it's good enough for Doc Martin it's good enough for me!

I gave the interior a good clean today and it came up okay, just need a new horn and it's ready for an MOT. 

The Dark Wob.
It's another forum, a bit like this one, but with all the degenerate scum who like to tear down fellow humans and who weren't allowed to carry on their Vile Hatred™️ on this forum. There's many there that spat their dummy and left, and a lot with a foot in both camps.
They like to report back on what happens here and systematically rip to shreds anyone who shows any weakness or eccentricity that doesn't quite match their own. 
They spent a lot of time slagging off the mod team, as well as Dollywobbler. Then they turned on some other forum members, such as myself, Lightbulbfun, HeidelKakao, YesOuiSi, among others.
If you enjoy being a bit of a tw@, with no moderation, and are thick skinned, by all means join. 
Otherwise, listen to Obi wan.

I'm well aware they're watching this thread for more ammo to take the piss of, hope this is juicy enough to keep the trolls happy 😂😜

Thanks for a brilliant service as ever @worldofceri with a bit of a last minute detour straight to the garage where it awaits the ministrations of the MOT man.

 

Fleet news
I have done an in house buy from @SmokinWaffle It’s 12 years since I last owned one.  They’ve always impressed in that 405 ride and handing balance thing they have going. My last was merely a GLX TurboD. Never mind a top drawer EXECUTIVE. This particular executive user chooser wasn’t all conspicuous consumption though as they mated EXECUTIVE refinements to XUD power in the practical break Bodyshell. 
 
This fleet announcement is very in house and also brought to you by @worldofceri as our esteemed transport man is on the task. He was involved last time it moved I think, so it’s the second time he has moved it. 
Id like to tell you I’m going to spend the next 10 pages refining my welding and through blood sweat and tears weld and mot it, but I’m not going to. I’m going send it to my local shite friendly garage to sort it so I can simply use it. 




And with those seats, who wouldnt want to spend more time in rather than under it!

I was being nice. Not being critical of Heidel in any way. I love his thread and enthusiasm.

I thought you lot knew your military vehicles? Was my photo of vehicles that are too new? I think the design dates from the 1960's but I suppose armoured troop carriers don't need to change that much... It has 3 crew and can carry 7 soldiers with enough storage to last them 48 hours.
I passed a nice army lorry with crane too, which I think Heidel would like...

Sleeping in the Roadrunner tonight with Sonic.