project 1980 Austin Princess

[vulgalour]

Not sure what's going on there, Keef.

---

We finally got the brakes sorted today.  Another bleed through and we found the rear passenger side drum was a bit recalcitrant until it spat out a blob of some gungy black stuff, presumably that's been floating around in the system for quite some time since I have bled the brakes on this car at least twice in my ownership and it's not done that since the first bleed through.  The pedal feels very different now, in a good way, so I'm looking forward to actually testing the brakes properly, which I'll do when the car isn't blocked in by a recalcitrant P38.

Yes, we did go to the trouble of fitting bleed nipple covers all round.  That's the first car I've ever had with a full compliment of those, they'll likely all ping off in a few months.  The only other job I could do today was repair the mirror, a simple case of cleaning back the broken weld and rewelding it with more heat.  Went back together no problem and, with the brakes done, we could get the car back on its wheels.

My list of jobs is quite small, though some are a bit expensive:

Re-gas displacers - driver's front especially in need and I have no spare front displacers

Rust repair and repaint of rear driver's door

Rust repair on rear arches

Repaint front valance and, maybe, bonnet

Fit new windscreen seal - To be done before the weather turns again, now it's finally warm and dry I stand a chance of getting it done.

Proper respray - I really do want to get the car properly resprayed.  Realistically, I'm expecting a minimum £5,000 investment on this which is a massive spend for me.  To me, the car is totally worth the cost, I'm not in this game to make any money (just as well, really, given my choices) and if it costs nearer £10,000 that's okay too providing I've got it. Luckily, £5,000 is going to take me ages to save up because right now I've got about a dozen different colours I like that I can't choose between so it gives me time to make up my mind.  Or find more colours I like.

[vulgalour]

Drove the Princess home today, finally.  The brake job was just one of those jobs where it was plenty of little things going wrong and then waiting on parts and so on.  That said, it was well worth doing.  All the while I've had the car until very recently the brakes have never felt inadequate and have always met the legal requirement so apart from general bleeding there never seemed to be any need to investigate further.  How wrong I was!  The brakes are so much lighter and more responsive now than they've ever been, it really has been something of a revelation.  It's difficult to explain it really, it's almost as though the brakes feel like they're off a newer car, just not an over assisted car with a dead feeling pedal.  It's like there's more fine control on the braking progression and I don't have to brake as hard or as early to slow the car down.  This isn't really that surprising given that everything is practically brand new up front now and all 8 pistons are working in the calipers rather than just 2.

Now to enjoy driving it for a few weeks before disabling it again to get the front displacers re-gassed.  At least that's a fairly straightforward job.

[SiC]

before disabling it again to get the front displacers re-gassed.  At least that's a fairly straightforward job.

Quoting this for when you are swearing at them because they won't come out.

[Noel Tidybeard]

22 hours ago, vulgalour said:

Now to get the front displacers re-gassed.  At least that's a fairly straightforward job.

[scdan4]

Hurrah for shiny new brakes. How short did you stop at the first junction?

[vulgalour]

About two car lengths.  Did that slightly awkward "oops I've slowed down much too soon I'll just creep forwards at 4mph" thing.

Had a surprisingly easy time of swapping the rear door for my (fairly rotten) spare so I can repair the one I took off and finally get it painted to match.  Eventually I'll replace that rear Allegro hubcap with a Princess one.

[Noel Tidybeard]

wots the difference?

[vulgalour]

With the hub caps?  Allegro ones have a smaller black circle and no scalloped edge.

[Skut]

On 6/24/2019 at 6:23 PM, vulgalour said:

 

That's a simply mental number of caliper pistons for just the front wheels. Like something from an aircraft. 

[New POD]

53 minutes ago, Skut said:

That's a simply mental number of caliper pistons for just the front wheels. Like something from an aircraft. 

On my old metro Turbo it had 4 piston either side. What happens is that gradually one after another seizes up until there's one per wheel working. 

In comparison to the Lucas Collette caliper with one piston per side, they are just full of cost. 

[vulgalour]

That's pretty much what had happened with mine.  Aviation redundancy engineering could well be inspiration for it, they do seem rather excessive for what the car is.  A frivolity arrived in the post today for the Princess.  I got some clear indicator lenses and orange bulbs to try out in place of the orange indicator lenses and clear bulbs up front.  I haven't got a preference either way on the appearance, though I do like that the clear lenses obscure the origin of the MG B units somewhat so they look a bit less like they've come from another car.

If I want to change back to gingercators, it's really easy to do.

[Asimo]

The four-pot calipers were to allow for dual circuit brakes that always acted on the front wheels. The cheap dual-circuit-brake solution is one rear and the diagonally-opposite front brake on each circuit. This of course makes the car pull viciously to one side or the other if one brake  circuit fails, a problem usually circumvented by fiddling with the suspension / steering geometry.  BL did not want to compromise the suspension and steering in this way, hence four pot, dual circuit "excess".

[vulgalour]

I'm not complaining, I'm just surprised, given what corners were cut elsewhere.

[Noel Tidybeard]

get some silver/chrome indicator bulbs to lose the fried egg look- worked well with my primera

[vulgalour]

I kinda like the fried eggs, feels more in keeping with the era I'm trying to evoke.  Chrome bulbs are a bit fancy and modern.

I finally had the time and motivation to get on with stripping the paint off the two doors I want to put on the car.  The spare orange front door is actually in better shape than the one on the car so I'll repaint it.  The front passenger door on the car has been repaired before but is good to go again so I'll be keeping that back as a spare rather than worrying about repairing it really nicely.  The rear door I removed from the car was quite laborious to strip the paint off because there was so much paint on it, easily the worst of all the panels I've had to tackle.  The rust isn't as bad as I expected, thankfully, what's going to make this a bigger job is that the door has a historic corner repair that's caused more rust than its cured, so I have to undo all that.  The spare orange rear door on the car is comprehensively rotten so I'll be stripping off what's useful and then scrapping the remains.  It could be repaired if you really wanted to rebuild the bottom 12" of it, and the top 2" of it, but I don't.

The other thing that's been bugging me for ages is the plastic trims on the front of the car have always been slightly off so I spent some time realigning those to fit more evenly.  I need to make some new pegs on the bottom of the headlight trims (these always snap off) so they hold into the centre rail properly, it sticks out on the bottom outer corner of the driver's side and makes the outer headlight that side look like it's in completely the wrong place.

Because I'll be doing some more painting soon and remedying the bits deemed less important when I started the last round of welding repairs I took another look at the front end colour split and after some experimentation have settled on this. Black was too much and the beige has always been off and it's taken a while for me to find something I like.  Keeping the thin beige outline around the grille helps balance it out better than just wrapping the side split straight around and makes use of an existing bodyline.  The red (in digital sketch at least) seems to really help tone down the jutting chin and take out some of the visual height of the front of the car.  Since I can't really bring the front to a lower, sharper point, this is the next best thing.

 

[vulgalour]

Since the unplanned lay-up because of the brakes saga, the Princess has acquired a slightly hunty cold idle.  Once warmed up it's perfectly fine and doesn't hunt at all.  Cold, with any amount of choke, it hunts a bit, and I'm not sure why.  None of the settings have been changed from before the lay-up, I'm getting fuel and good spark, and I can't find any air leaks.

Do we think it's just a case of giving it an Italian tune-up to clear it out a bit?

[Fumbler]

7 minutes ago, vulgalour said:

Do we think it's just a case of giving it an Italian tune-up to clear it out a bit?

Yes!

[stuboy]

5 hours ago, vulgalour said:

giving it an Italian tune-up

drive it like a hire car

[vulgalour]

Got the two doors I'm repairing almost completely stripped down now.  To get the glass out of the rear door you have to remove the quarter light, it's a bit of a faff.  On inspecting the frame properly, all of the rot in this rear door seems to be caused by repairs over old rust that has simply rotted through, it won't be too terrible to repair, looking at it.

The front orange door has given me a bit of a quandary.  Most of the door is in excellent condition, especially the usually rotten bottom edge which is very nearly like new.  The problem is at the top.  Inside the door skin there's a separate sheet of steel that I assume acts as a brace for the weather stripping since it spot welds to the door skin and the edge the weather stripping pushes on to.  On this door, that brace has rotted through across the entire length and you can't get in to repair it because of they way the door is built up.  What it hasn't done is rot through the outer skin except for one small spot.  To repair it, I'll have to remove the door skin from the frame and the brace from the skin and then rebuild it.  That's an awful lot of work.  The beige door on the car is in much better shape in this area but needs attention to the bottom where they normally go again, due to historic repairs of varying quality.

So do I strip the orange door down and repair it, knowing it's then going to be in excellent condition, or do I chop off the problem section of the beige door and replace it with the excellent section of the orange door?  It's probably more proper to dismantle, restore, and rebuild the orange door because it's in much better condition overall and it probably won't realistically be more work to do things this way.  Either way, what was going to be just a 'quick repaint' now isn't, and that's a bit annoying.

Did a fluid check and topped up the screenwash and a little bit in the brake fluid now that a few miles have been done and the system has settled.  No leaks found on the braking system anywhere and now that things have bedded in they feel very good.

While doing the check I spotted a wet spot on one of the water hoses.  Wiped it away and the spot reappeared, with an occasional bubble.  That'll be a pinhole in the pipe then.  24mm OD heater pipe is out of stock everywhere locally it seems, so I'll have to order a length in since Mike and I don't have any in stock.

Finally, the cold idle hunting issue cause was found.  The weather suddenly turned while I was driving which prompted the need for headlights and wipers.  Queue all the electricity falling out.  Weather cleared as quickly as it went bad so no harm done and Mike and I could check things over at the unit.  Throttle cable was a bit warm, but so was everything under the bonnet, but my suspicion was a problem with the earth.  Went through all the various points and nothing looked amiss until checking the main body earth.  It wasn't the best connection any more so we beefed it up with a bigger bolt and cleaned the corrosion away.  Instantly improved everything electrical and smoothed out the idle so hopefully that's all that problem was.  Incredibly easy fix too, which is the best sort.  I should have twigged it was this a few days ago when I had to use the horn in anger and it just sort of went phweeee rather than PAAAARP.

[Noel Tidybeard]

given the appetite the car has for nomming throttle cables maybe extra earth leads may be worthwhile

[vulgalour]

That is an extra earth lead.  The only reason it's nommed any cables is because of the main earth and the only reason that's ever been a problem is because of this things propensity to dissolve.

[Noel Tidybeard]

eco car innit- biodegradeable ?

[vulgalour]

It's been spending time with those 90s Mercedes and getting ideas from their wiring looms, hasn't it?

[Fumbler]

Must have. This topic even made it to Hoovies' Garage Y-Tub channel.

[vulgalour]

A proper picture update on this, since I've made some progress today.  It all started when we noticed a pinhole in a heater hose, simple enough to replace it once I'd acquired a relevant pipe online after finding all my real world suppliers were out of stock of what I needed.  Easy peasy job, quick top up of the coolant and everything was back to normal.  The old heater hose had gone all spongey and weird and was steadily disintegrating from the inside out.  I checked the other hoses and they all seem okay.

After that I did my errands for the day and nothing untoward presented itself.  Because we'd done a few miles and got the system circulated I checked the coolant when I got home to see if it needed topping up and the contents of the overflow bottle were not good.

When I set off, the coolant was a nice pale blue so something had definitely gone wrong.  Just in case, I topped it up and let the car idle for a bit.  Very quickly started getting bubbles in the expansion bottle, an oily film on the top of the coolant that was steadily dropping in level and the slight smell of coolant out the exhaust along with the occasional spit of water/coolant too.  Strangely, the oil hasn't appeared to emulsify so perhaps I caught this early enough that there's not been much mixing of fluids.  Suffice to say, I see no point doing a compression test on this, it wouldn't tell me anything I can't already see.

The last time it popped the head gasket it went coolant to exhaust and the water came out fast enough that it would expel it faster than you could put it in.  At the time, I removed the original head and fitted the spare I had from a '79 car and it's been running on that with no bother since.  I've decided to have the original head tested and rebuild that if it's good (it should be) so that I can deal with a couple of other issues it has a bit easier without totally disabling the Princess.  This way, if I need to move the car a short distance for any reason I still can.  The head is incredibly easy to strip down on these since they're only 8 valves.

Everything is numbered as it's removed.  I also knocked out the old waxstat housing which, predictably, snapped in the process.  This is no great loss, the top of it is badly damaged with a big piece missing and it has heavy pitting in several places.  I do have a spare housing to go in if need be.  I am planning to replace the old waxstat housing with a straight pipe instead and have a modern thermostat in a housing in-line with the top radiator hose.  This should work fine and be a lot easier to maintain.  I've always filled from the overflow bottle anyway because of how fragile the waxstat housing is, so it's no hardship to modify the system this way.  Camshaft and bearing surfaces still look really clean with no noticable wear and all the bolts that needed to come out did without any fight.

The head on the O-series is slightly unusual since it serves as a camshaft box as well and has no separate rocker cover.  It's a very lightweight and robust unit.  This one has been given a bad coat of silver paint as part of that bad historic restoration, and I'll be stripping that all off back to bare alloy before it goes away for testing and skimming if required.  I only have on item left to remove and that's an old exhaust manifold bolt that's had the head sheared off well before I got the car.

There's nothing of obvious concern in any of the parts I removed.  No excessive carbon build up, scoring, or other obvious damage.  I'm hopeful it will return from the machine shop with a clean bill of health.  Rebuilding and installation is incredibly easy on these heads, it's pretty much impossible to get it wrong.  I haven't had a lot of free time lately so I'm snatching an occasional hour outside of work to do this, I'm hoping I make much better progress on it all over the weekend.

[Noel Tidybeard]

did we ever figure out if a 2.0 montego stat & elbow will fit?

[vulgalour]

The Montego option was foiled by a lack of suitable casting face on the head to drill holes to accept it and it being too large in diameter because of how much wider thermostats are than the weird waxstat thing the Princess uses.  The advantage of the in-line thermostat is I'm not tied down to any particular manufacturer for it so it has some longevity for repairs and servicing.

[vulgalour]

It's been a month and what progress has there been?  Machine shop #1 returned the head cleaned, pressure tested, and with a 6thou skim.  They couldn't install the pipe I wanted so it was off to machine shop #2.  MC1 were very quick, and the whole job was £80 which didn't seem too unreasonable for what was done, in all honesty, so it went to MC2 pretty much straight after and has been there ever since.  Mike dropped by while on one of his errands to find out what the score was and was told they hadn't had a reply from the pipe supplier so they might end up using what they had in stock, which does rather beg the question of why I've been left hanging for so many weeks if they actually have the part available already.

Oh well, such is the way of these things, and at least I've got the BX as back up (which has been behaving remarkably well) so I'm not flapping about having to wait so long.  Until I get the head back obviously I can't get it rebuilt and, if we look like we're going to head into September with this I'll be SORNing the Princess for a bit since there's no point paying tax on a car I'm not able to use.

[Noel Tidybeard]

would one of these be worth the money on the off chance it would fit an O-series?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/BMW-E46-E91-ROVER-75-MG-ZT-R47-M47-THERMOSTAT-TOP-HOUSING-2-0-DIESEL/222097511173?hash=item33b60b1305:g:WY8AAOSwVL1WAAfZ

[Tadhg Tiogar]

15 hours ago, vulgalour said:

..... they hadn't had a reply from the pipe supplier so they might end up using what they had in stock, which does rather beg the question of why I've been left hanging for so many weeks if they actually have the part available already....

It may not be the correct part, though.