project 1980 Austin Princess

[stuboy]

5am ungodly hour

[vulgalour]

Here we go, it's update time.  Today being Sunday means I get a day off, whether I like it or not.  That started with an excellent trip to Goats on the Roof which is a lovely restaurant specialising in rare breeds and has, sometimes, goats on the roof.  Today it did not have goats on the roof because they were being lazy and spending time on the floor.  We also didn't get special breed related noms because they were having a day of it what with the card machine not working and the generator having packed up... they're in the middle of nowhere really, it's a beautiful location.  However, we did enjoy delicious home made brownies and a mug of coffee and the scenery alone made it worth the trek.  Here's a picture of one of their resident Bagot goats.  You can find them here: www.goatsontheroof.co.uk

 

 

So that has nothing to do with the Princess really, but I like to share little things like that I find out on my trips even if this particular trip was done in Mike's Honda with the recently fitted Centra alloys.  Here's a picture of that too.

 

Princess pictures?  Yeah, sure, here we go then.  I mentioned previously I didn't have any shots of what I took out of the door bottoms to find out how rotten they were so let's start with that.  Winding the clock back a bit too, but there was a bit more filler and fibreglass than I'd expected hiding in them.  I decided to go in a bit heavy handed, if I'm honest, and just crack on with the flap wheel.  I very quickly disappeared in a cloud of filler.

 

The driver's door did have some corrosion as expected, but nowhere near as severe as anticipated.

 

In fact, much of the additional rust was being helped by the panel being stuffed with fibreglass resin and trapping moisture.  Took a while to dig it all out but the metal is actually pretty sound.

 

I buzzed along the bottom of both doors and over the arch curve just to get rid of the filler.  The rust itself was so minimal that it was barely worth mentioning.

 

Evidence of brazing in the rear driver's side door which has got to be a fairly ancient repair.

 

There was also evidence of previous repairs to all of the doors that were neat enough but excessively filled.  With some care these can all be saved fairly easily.

 

As you know already, I ran the car around for a while with some ugly red oxide over the bare metal until I got a can of beige that didn't match properly to tidy things up.  But the above is from back in June when I dug all the rot causing stuff out in readiness for repairs I've not yet got around to undertaking.  So on to today's undertakings now I have a moment to sit and write about them.

 

The spare interior I snaffled at Brooklands was nice and while the fabric had less sun damage and wear it did have some storage damage, unfortunately.  I hadn't got around to sorting this out until this afternoon, but was fortunate enough to find a bobbin of thread in a nearly perfect shade of brown so I could effect a temporary bit of stitching on the worst bits of the fabric.  I'm going to be retrimming anyway, but there's no harm in spending a couple of minutes just to make things look presentable and prevent the seats from getting any worse.

 

The worst bit was a tear on the passenger seat base.  A quick bit of Dr Frankenstein style stitching saw it at least all brown instead of peeling back to reveal the white fabric that protects the scrim foam layer.

 

 

Likewise on the seat back there's some little holes and a little more stitching saw them cosmetically neater.  The driver's seat had the same damage and had already been treated to the same temporary solution.  For some reason this picture came out very yellow.

 

Driver's side headlight surround was fixed before I made the 120 mile trek up here with a zip tie we had in the kitchen drawer of Stuff.  Looks far neater and less crashy.

 

I was also asked about the purple paint and how it was holding up.  It does need more work, but for an unfinished panel it's holding up remarkably well.  Bear in mind I washed this panel 7 days and 120 miles ago, and the car has been parked outside.  In person it looks cleaner and smoother than the beige paint.  There's no bloom or fade and when it's been washed and polished normally it comes up like new again and stays clean longer than whatever the rest of the car is repainted in.

 

 

To sign off this update, here's a picture of the car in front of another old semi-detached house because these are the pictures I like to take.  Actually, one more thing; the purple wing mirrors are great and I like them, they're better in most circumstances than the original door mirrors, but I wish they sat higher.  With that in mind I've bought a new pair (as in actually new, which is rare for me) of wing mirrors on stalks that I really hope work.  They're a bit of a gamble and they might look appalling but equally they could be one of the best decisions I've made so far.

 

[catsinthewelder]

The cars looking good VA,  good to see things are looking up for you.

 

 

I drove past that Goats on the roof place a couple of weeks ago in the BX and had a bit of a WTF at the sign,  I'd completely forgotten about it till now

[Dick Cheeseburger]

Interesting thread. Am I missing something though? From this:

To this:

[Sigmund Fraud]

Interesting thread. Am I missing something though?

 

I suspect you are missing this inbetween stage :

 

 

I reckon vulgalour has done a brilliant job repairing the above, considering he has to work outside with very limited budget and tools.

[vulgalour]

Sigmund is correct, there was an incident involving me and a Ford Connect van last October which was just another piece of shit luck to add to an every growing list.  I'm just about pulling level now and starting the process of house hunting but with the Princess being my daily there's only so much money I have spare to spend on her and it all goes on the mechanical stuff you can't see rather than the bodywork you can.  I have priced up getting the doors, front wing and nose end sorted and it's not a vast sum.

 

Speaking of bodywork...

 

Today has been spent in the company of three delightful 60s/70s Alfa Romeos, I even got my mitts on them helping with some of the jobs that needed doing.  The trade off was being able to make use of tools and space to do a little patch on the Princess.  This, unfortunately, is the only picture I got of any of the Alfas.  It's nearly finished now, just having interior fitted the engine tweaked for optimum performance and a finishing clean and polish.

 

My camera was playing silly buggers so I didn't get much of my progress shots.  There had been a small hole in the rear wing since getting the car and I finally got a patch welded in.  My welds were nice and strong but they weren't the prettiest.  I did make sure you couldn't pull the patch off with tools and that it was tacked on as much as necessary, it's only a cosmetic area but I wanted it sealed up so that water couldn't get into the wing and rot it further.  Ideally, it needs the bottom two or three inches of the whole quarter replacing to totally eliminate the rot, but it should do me through the winter which is the important thing.

 

I did put some filler on to hide the worst of the job but I'll take this back again at a later date.

 

Then it was just a case of applying some gloss black paint to keep the area weather proof.  Again, I'll tidy this up when I get home and make it nice again.

 

I'm not really getting on with the workshop MIG, I find the stick welder easier to work with, but you need really, really good metal to use the stick properly whereas the MIG allows you to work on thin stuff.  It's one little job off the list at any rate and while I don't condone bodges I'm hoping this will at least tide me over for 6 months.  I won't make the repair too tidy so that I am aware of it as needing to be redone properly.

[vulgalour]

Thanks to her continued sterling service, I decided to treat the Princess to some maintenance.  I reckon the car has more than earned it, especially after our recent adventures returned a very satisfactory 37.8mpg.

 

To that end, I hastened to Autosupplies and purchase some antifreeze, some glass polish and some wiper blades.  They didn't have a timing belt in stock and I forgot to enquire about an oil filter, driveshaft oil seals or a thermostat.  I'll have to do that tomorrow since I have errands to do.

 

New wiper blades were Lucas jobs and they showed just how knackered my old blades were, one of which had started to judder across the screen irritatingly.  Usefully, my neighbour needed a fresh blade to see him through until he scraps his car and mine were the same size and swapped in, an improvement over what was on his car and saved me throwing them away and him buying a new set.  Old wiper on the box, new on the car.  The new blades have a very flexible grey-ish blade that seems to sweep much smoother than the black blades I had fitted.

 

Next, I flushed out the coolant... I mean tap water.   There was no antifreeze in the car at all, I thought there might have been a smidge, but no, the car survived last winter and for however long before that with 0% antifreeze in it.  I flushed the system out until it ran nice and clear and then topped up with blue.

 

That should see me through the winter safely.  The thermostat looked okay and my brother managed to remove it without it smashing into a billion tiny bits, but I plan to change this when I find a replacement as I don't know when it was last done or how well it actually works.

 

Next I wanted to try and source that oil leak.  I want to put some fancy oil in, but not if it's just going to squirt out of a bajillion different bits of the engine.  Since putting 15/40 in instead of the 10/40 I topped up with last time I noticed the oil leak was much reduced, but it's still there.  The main culprit is, I think, the passenger side driveshaft oil seal, it's quite wet.

 

Especially so when compared to the driver's side.

 

The passenger side engine mount is also wet with oil.

 

As is the same side of the gearbox/sump area.

 

I already know that there's a leak on the rocker cover when the distributor is and another where the fuel pump is, but this should be resolved by resealing the rocker cover, at which point I'll do the timing belt too.

 

I can't do anything about this for now, I'm going to have to do some parts hunting to resolve it though I suspect it won't be expensive to sort out.  In the meantime, I decided to get on with fitting my lovely new mirrors that arrived just before I got home.  I was hoping I might be able to drop them through the same holes the purple mirrors were fitted through, but no such luck.

 

After asking all the neighbours, I finally managed to borrow a drill for the job - still haven't got a replacement drill yet -  and just buzzed a couple of fresh holes to fit the new mirrors.

 

They look a bit odd, but I don't think they look too much out of place because of the grille and light set up.  Sold as fitting a Datsun Stanza/510 Truck they were something of a fluke find when link hopping from a set I think I saw in a Micra build thread and they really are very nice.  Great rear visibility in them and the driver's mirror appears to have a blind spot type magnifying edge to it.  They adjust just like the purple Reguvis mirrors they replace and unlike chrome ones I've used in the past, they don't seem to have much in the way of vibration.

 

I think I might need a new digi-cam though, this one has started doing some very odd things lately.

[purplebargeken]

Yep. New camera time. 

 

The mirrors. Hmmmm, not sure. A bit Marmite perhaps. I like Marmite, just not sure about the mirrors. 

[garycox]

Unsure about the look of the mirrors, if they're better for seeing stuff in that's the main thing though I suppose.

Are you keeping the other ones? If not I think Barrett might have expressed an interest in them a while back for the Bond.

[vulgalour]

I plan to restore the purple Reguvis mirrors and keep them... unless money is thrown at me quite hard, of course.

[vulgalour]

Since painting that rear wing beige again, the Princess has suddenly started to look quite respectable.  It got me thinking about doing a bit more tarting up just to make her look a bit more presentable.  There's a few areas that could do with a tweak here and there and it's amazing how much more positively people respond to a car just for being one colour.

 

Begrudgingly, I have to admit I like not having a patchwork car, it does look like I care for her as much as I do to the average punter... but it still annoys me because it feels like I'm doing it for other people and not for me.  Never mind, I put my thinking hat on today to see if I could improve on things a bit further.

 

It's this view that made me buy some paint today.  The black plastics against the beige actually works reasonably well.

 

So that made me decide to go out and buy a tin of satin black paint and eliminate the metallic brown on the C pillars...

 

 

...and the boot top...

 

...and this side still needs some attention to the beige paint just to smarten it up after the fuel leak down the side and where the rubbish respray lifted off with the coach stripe.

 

The C pillars now blend into the door frames better than the brown did and it gives a slightly more modern look to the car.  It also seems to visually lower the roof line a little and I find myself quite liking the combination of beige and satin black... not as much as the purple, obviously, but it makes the car look nicer in the short term than she did.

 

Short term plan is to tidy up the existing colour scheme as much as possible, apply some black coach stripes and the original badges to the boot and try and get the bumper straightened out.  I plan to do nothing to the scruffy bonnet apart from putting the Princess mascot on from my old bonnet.

[Mr Livered]

Looking good Mr V.

[vulgalour]

New waxstat and oil filter arrived today.  Still waiting for my spark leads and timing belt to turn up, but they've been posted so they'll probably be here tomorrow.  I'm holding off doing an oil change until I can do the timing belt and the valve stem seals at the same time, it'll also allow me to remove, clean and reseal the rocker cover to eliminate the weeps from it.

 

I suspect the old waxstat had started to stick just before the coolant flush and change so I was glad to get a new one to go in, one of the easier parts to obtain as it happens.

 

When you're removing the waxstat, you have to be careful it doesn't break.  I was careful enough for that not to happen, but the thermostat housing which is made not of aluminium but of unobtainium, chose this moment to break a chunk off.

 

Of all the things to break on this car, this was my worst nightmare.  Although I have one phone number left on my list, my searches and those of my peers have been utterly fruitless in finding a 1.7 O series thermostat housing for the past year and a half.  We rang around a few places anyway in the hope of finding one but nobody had anything in stock.

 

It was one of those horrible moments where I knew this one little item could see me off the road.  The car was just throwing coolant out of the subsequent hole in the casing too fast for me to go more than a mile without having to top up the coolant.  This was less than ideal.  Eventually my brother and I found somewhere selling Leak-Seal, which was billed as being suitable to repair small holes in radiators and pipes, was antifreeze, heat and water resistant... so we gave it a go.

 

After chipping and peeling the old grey putty bodge off the housing and cleaning up the heavily pitted and oxidised areas, I carefully offered the broken piece back up the housing and glued it in before rebuilding the profiles of the housing and sanding it as smooth as access would allow.

 

It would have been a more perfect job but for the fact that the thermostat housing is so firmly wedged into the block that you can physically lift the car on its suspension by the housing when trying to remove it.  This job could almost have not gone worse, so once everything was sanded and cleaned we plumbed it all back in and fired the car up.

 

Happily, the repaired area doesn't leak at all.  Unhappily, the cap is now playing up a bit and lets the occasional drip of water out until things get up to temperature at which point it stops.  I need to get a new filler and expansion bottle cap anyway since both are past their prime and they've been on the list for quite a while.

 

I'm still going to be on the lookout for a replacement housing because I dislike having a bodge solution like this, but for now I'm just not going to disturb it if at all possible and just keep an eye on my coolant levels for the forseeable.

[Ghosty]

Won't this breaker you're after have a good housing on it?

[vulgalour]

yeah... but the breaker might be too good to break... I might end up with two of the damned things.

[Ghosty]

I don't think anyone would complain at having two princesses.

 

Jokes aside, that is true. You could have a silly purple one and a normal one too! Best of both worlds.

[vulgalour]

I can do nothing until I get paid for stuff.  I wouldn't normally mind, but it's holding up HLS transport and that makes it completely unreasonable, obviously.

 

In the meantime I thought I'd look at doing a job on the HL that's been waiting for aaaages.  The chrome inserts on the seals are pretty tatty looking now, particularly the rear one which is more orange than chrome.  I removed the bottom section, then rechromed it with the aluminium flashing tape but accidentally stretched it somehow so when I came to refitting it, the whole thing was creased all over.  I also panicked because I thought I'd bought a tool to refit the chrome insert but actually hadn't and couldn't figure out how to refit it... until I found a screwdriver and some WD40 at which point it popped back in fine.

 

Now the rear screen looked a bit worse, if I'm honest, because the chrome bit on the bottom looked like a really cheap replacement, especially when compared to the ancient orangey stuff.  Never mind, thought I, it'll just peel right off and I'll get on with a different way of renewing the chrome instead.  I also managed to damage some of it by accident when refitting which wasn't clever of me.

 

It was when I tried to remove the tape I wasn't happy with when I found out just how good a method this might be, the damned stuff is almost impossible to remove and comes off in little bitty pieces, it's really stubborn which is great providing it weathers okay.

 

Rather than fighting to remove the tape, I applied some to the upright on the driver's side and then ran my thumbnail along each side as you would when opening a Kit Kat.  Peeled off the excess tape and ran my thumbnail along again just to make sure any less-than-perfect edges tucked back under the seal.  Jobs a good un, takes all of a minute maybe to do this providing you get the tape on right first time.

 

I'd say this'll look pretty smart for the rear screen since it's all straight-ish lines.

 

 

Not sure how I'm tackling the front screen though as that has quite tightly curved corners.  I may cheat and just mitre the tightest bit of the corners and do the tape in four pieces.  Really, who's going to notice other than me when it's done?  This is also completely free since I still have some tape left over from doing the other interior stuff and a lot easier than trying to put new inserts in.

 

I would have finished the job, but it decided to tip it down so I can't very well apply the tape since I haven't got anywhere car-sized that I can work out of the weather.

[Rocket88]

Ref oil leak. Try 20/50 instead of 10/40..............

[vulgalour]

@Tayne: it's like you went in my head and made something I imagined into something real with that link, I was sure there must be a way of applying a decent chrome paint and now I see there is!

 

@Colc:  Trouble is, the thicker the oil the harder it is to change gear.  With 10/40 the gear change is nice and easy when cold but very notchy when warmed up.  15/40 it's quite a stiff change when cold and reasonable when warm.  20/40 I think I'd actually struggle to change gear before the engine had properly warmed up.  That's the issue with the gearbox and engine sharing the oil.  The leak is reduced to something less than I see in supermarket car parks from cars that are much younger than mine so I'm not going to worry about it for the time being.

[vulgalour]

Saturday I had a little adventure and headed over to Malham in North Yorkshire for the Generic Rubbish Vehicle Event also known as Shitefest 2013.  The Princess performed flawlessly for the 220ish mile round trip, I am pleased to report.  It was an event well worth attending as I got to meet some top people and see some vehicles that I found genuinely interesting and exciting.  Exotica can be shiny chrome and massive engines but I take a certain delight in the more wabi-sabi end of the aesthetic scale, if you'll allow me a little pretention in terminology.

 

It's a bit of a trek to get over to Malham from near Chesterfield so I welcomed the opportunity of convoying with good friend and fellow chod botherer, Captain Slow (aka Sam Skelton).  We met up at Woolley Edge - a services that was disappointingly lacking in any sort of woolly edges - by which point the Princess had already attracted the attention of a young guy with a nice looking camera who politely asked for photographs of the car and an older guy who checked Howmanyleft.com on the spot to inform me there are only 3 1.7 HL Princesses left on the road.  Sam and I set off after a quick natter and route confirmation with me taking the lead until we had to pull off somewhere so I could get a drink and clear my cold-befuddled head a bit.  Sam took the opportunity to jetwash the Montego because when you're heading to an event held in a field that normally houses sheep you want your car to look its best.

 

 

Onwards we drove until we found the event field without too much drama... apart from the Mondeo that wanted my side of the road and nearly drove into me, which was fun.  Parked up in the field of (abandoned/broken/discarded) dreams.

 

I had taken a bootload of stuff with me, including some spares from the BMW 518 that my brother had (now gone, victim of the rust and the weighbridge) and Sam suggested I turn the Princess into a Teutonic barge.

 

There was more chinwagging until we decided we ought to head off to the pub.  Pubs are serious business. Me driving, Sam in the front passenger seat taking the picture and my other half Mike (aka Mike_Knight) lounging in the back.  They see us waftin', they hatin'.

 

We arrived at The Falcon which is a superb and tiny pub in a superb and tiny village.  This was a really beautiful part of the UK, I have a lot of time for it.  Mr Ian Seabrook (aka Dollywobbler) was kind enough to take a rather flattering snapshot of the Princess who looked at once at home and completely out of place.

 

DW also took this picture without me knowing.  It illustrates the pub you should seek out rather well should ever you be in the vicinity.  It was worth the brake cooking and first-gear-hills trek over the moors/dales/mountains.  I can comfortably say my new brake shoes are nicely bedded in now, especially if the smell my brakes were producing was anything to go by.

 

After a delicious bit of food in very pleasant surroundings, Sam, Mike, Joe and me piled into the Princess and headed back to the field a slightly flatter, less terrifying route since Joe is a local and knows the area well.  We avoided the killer sheep that leaped out at the car for no good reason and stopped near a big hill I've forgotten the name of but I'd remember if you told me.  Mr Skelton was once again at the helm of his DSLR to take a picture of one man and his wedge.

 

We made it back to the field without any real event.  Bonnet up so people could marvel at the weirdness under there and I wandered around with my camera in hand thoroughly enjoying myself.

 

 

But I didn't have all the fun.  I could regale you all with the stuff that went on, but this is the Princess thread so I'm sticking to Princess-only content.  I made a fellow Autoshiter Philibusmo almost wet himself with excitement by handing him the keys to my car.  Top bloke, drove the car like he was a part of it and I almost felt bad having to take the keys back.  Thanks again to Mr Seabrook of this picture of a very happy man in a very brown car.

 

There was a Soviet Princess owned by Will (aka Explosive_Cabbage) at the meet too.  It was amazing, I loved it a lot as did a lot of other people there.  I did liken it to a down-at-heel 1980s Working Man's Club, I stand by this description but mean it with fondness.  It was frankly the most rubbish car I've ever seen, but that makes my love and want of it no less, if anything it increases my affections for this most Soviet of solutions to personal family transportation.

 

 

Annoyingly, while the Princess was supremely well behaved for our day out, this morning she decided she wanted a break.  Fair enough, I did as many miles on the Saturday as I'd normally do over a fortnight and some of those miles were pretty tough hillclimbing ones that I'd never normally willingly inflict on myself, let alone an elderly and cherished friend.  By way of reward, she politely informed me today that first gear would be difficult to obtain and reverse is only available when the engine is first turned off... some advice leads me to believe at the very least my clutch hydraulics need flushing and at the worst I need to rebuild/replace the cylinders/seals if air is getting in past them.  What's strange is that the Princess went from being completely fine clambering up hills and bombing down the motorway and expressed no signs of having problems, was left overnight at rest and then decided it had an issue on starting up the following day.

 

In the meantime, I shan't be using the car until I've flushed the system at least but thanks to this horrible cold I think we could both do with a bit of a rest for a couple of days.

[Rt Hon.Tony Coleman Milne]

Good to see it is returning to beige!

[vulgalour]

Feeling far better today and the sun was shining so it was time to crack on with bleeding the clutch.  Weirdly, the gear selection felt improved, but still wasn't that great and reverse was recalcitrant but since I was going to bleed it anyway this was a none issue.  I know I haven't done this job during my ownership and I have no idea when it was last done.

 

Got the tools together.  Turns out the reservoir for the clutch cylinder is very difficult to access and ideally you need a flat sided funnel to get in there or a funnel with a very long spout or something.  We made do at any rate.  Bleed nipple was happily not seized and didn't try to shear off or anything so that was a relief too.

 

Decided to flush the whole reservoir to eliminate any old fluid.  The first pedal pump just evacuated air and absolutely no fluid so that would explain some of the problem.  After that, the fluid that came out was decidedly unhealthy looking.

 

Once flushed and everything done up again the clutch is feather light with the biting point somewhere near the floor rather than about a quarter of the way up the pedal travel.  I have no idea what age or condition the clutch is in the car as I have no history, but with the way it now behaves I'd say it's probably fairly new.

 

Next thing to investigate and adjust is the handbrake which now hardly works at all though I'm experiencing no issues with a lack of performance from my foot brakes.  Hopefully it'll just need the cables readjusting/replacing.  I don't get excessive handbrake lever travel, but there is simply very little effort from the handbrake itself, it's back to as bad as it was when I first got the car.

[dollywobbler]

Did you bleed the slave as well? No idea where that hides on a Prinny.

[Sigmund Fraud]

Did you bleed the slave as well? No idea where that hides on a Prinny.

 

Er... Bottom right of the first picture ?

[meggersdog]

The brake fluid level looks a little low on that picture.You might want to  check you haven't got a leaking wheel cylinder.Brake fluid soaked shoes and drums equals rubbish handbrake.You want to remove the drums to check the handbrake mechanism isn't seized anyway.

[dollywobbler]

Er... Bottom right of the first picture ?

 

Ah yes. Far more accessible than a Discovery one!

[vulgalour]

Clutch - as far as I can work out, there's only one bleed nipple for both the master and slave so that's what we did.  It made enough of a difference for me to be comfortable it doesn't need bleeding again for the time being.

 

Brakes - When I did the rear shoes recently the drums were clean and dry internally with no staining or leaks visible.  The original shoes were in pretty bad shape and once replaced the brakes were much improved and I'm not experiencing a lack of efficacy from the foot brake since this was done.  The handbrake was adjusted as instructed in the manual and did work better but has since become poor again which makes me wonder if the problem is more related to the unevenly stretched cables as there's no sign of leaking brake fluid on the brakes or the lines.  The fluid level in the reservoir is unchanged and it's about where it should be, but it is next up for service I just haven't got round to it yet.

[Mr_Bo11ox]

You dont just bleed a master or a slave cylinder, you bleed the system, which is what has been done here. Keep up at the back wobbler!

[dollywobbler]

On the Disco, you bleed the master, then the slave. They're a lot further apart though. Nipples everywhere!

[vulgalour]

Look, no hands!  How did I fix this?  I took off a boot ram and refitted it and now it works.  I don't know how or why, but I'm happy it works now and a free repair is always a welcome one.

 

While the boot is open, here's the rear light cluster covers I stole from the HLS.  I could do with another set really, but I've had no joy getting hold of a set yet.

 

The only other thing I did today was to give the car a clean inside and out.  Taking pictures of interiors is not easy.

 

Exteriors are much easier.  I'm wondering what to do with the bonnet, I think I'm bored of it looking tatty now and have been considering giving it a coat of beige just to tidy things up.  Opinions?

 

When I remember to, that grille badge is coming off again for a bit. Fancy a change back to the cleaner not-badged grille  Happily, I made it so that this would be very easy to do.