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1980 Austin Princess


vulgalour

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So, recently I went to the RAF Waddington show where I displayed the Princess to the delight of the vast majority of the visiting public, the only exception being three grumpy old men that muttered "those things were always breaking down" as they wandered over to the ancient Austin Seven and Ford Thames truck. I was genuinely amazed at how many people had favourable comments, memories and took photographs of the old girl and turned that amazement right back at them when they saw that the owner wasn't an octogenarian.

The day before the show my boyfriend and I had cleaned the car, put some air in the leaky tyre and parked her up at my parents where there isn't any mud. Unfortunately, the day of the show the tyre wouldn't hold more than 3psi so I had to hurriedly fit the ancient King Pin spare in the boot, which had the delightful habit of making the car pull to the left constantly but didn't vibrate through the steering wheel like the leaking tyre did. By the time we got to the club meet up point, the King Pin was removed - again, by me, in a cream linen two piece suit, I still don't get why I had to do this job - and swapped with the back tyre on the same side, eliminating the pulling completely. It's yet another job to resolve but I didn't have an option so we did about 120 miles on the dodgy cracked King Pin, sometimes at speeds of 70mph. Sadly, I wasn't allowed to do the drive there and back on doctor's orders, but this meant my boyfriend got to enjoy himself at the wheel, and gripe about the lack of power steering, the heavy clutch (which I thought was actually regular-to-light) and other quirks of a car that isn't less than ten years old. For all that, he said it was one of the most enjoyable cars he'd driven and certainly the most comfortable.

What we did find on the day is that the brakes are quite good, if they hadn't been we'd've had a Mk1 Ford Fiesta bonnet mascot when a highly modified Mk1 Ford Sierra estate span out on a surprisingly greasy roundabout at low speed. We also found out the Princess loves my boyfriend, but as soon as we swapped seats for registration, she didn't like me so much and the radiator fan bearing made an horrific noise and then the car stalled. Boyfriend gets back in for the drive home and car is good as gold, typically.

So, when we got to the showground when I was hoping to get some pre-visitor snaps of some of the cars that had turned up, we instead sat in the car.
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But eventually the weather picked up and it was actually a great day out, with some great moments from the public who seemed more delighted to see a beige Princess than the white Mk2 Ford Escort parked next to me. Comment of the show was directed at the Escort next to me: "That looks a like a Lada". Maybe there's hope yet and the general public aren't so unwashed as I'd been led to believe. Here's some snaps of her on the showground.
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Before the show, when we were cleaning the car, I had a little discovery. I've been toying with moving the front number plate so that it fixes straight to the air scoop rather than sitting vertically, in the hope that it would tidy up the front and aid with cooling a bit. I'm not sure if I can do this yet because I'm not sure how structural the central bracket is to the bumper.
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I've never really had need to poke around under the front bumper so imagine my surprise when I found something back there. Could it still have a key inside?
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Why yes, it could! Covered in Waxoyl and still works, so I now have 3 keys for the doors and boot.
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For now, the box is sat in the house while I decide whether or not to reinstate it. I wonder how long it's been there?

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If you do decide to use the Keep-a-key, you'll want to re-locate it carefully now you've showed the world where it lived...

 

On the wiring issues - without carefully re-reading the page, I'm unsure whether the spade connectors are "permanent" joins in the wiring, or connect to the back of bulb holders etc... Whichever- employ a soldering iron and solder wherever you can for reliability of the contact. If you don't have one, invest come next payday, five or ten squid will sort you out, with a roll of solder too.

Also, when you're shortening these old wires, be sure to strip back far enough to be working with nice clean copper.

 

Good stuff chap, keep at it.

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My old man had one of those in his Fiesta.

 

He kept it inside the car.

Admittedly it had the spare key for the KrookLok and not any of the outside locks. It also contained fuses and some other crap. Never understood that, tucked up under the dash. I think he still has it somewhere.

 

-Phil

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OMG. I'd forgotten about the old days of accidentally locking onesself out. After locking myself out several times (the most embarrassing involving a fit girl who I'd only very recently managed to get off with, the nearest key being 120 miles away, the AA being shit and an exceedingly long-winded re-entry via the gift of wire coat-hanger) I took the genius step of attaching a spare key somewhere behind the bumper with a piece of wire. Never heard of one of these fangled magnetic boxes. It would still be there if the car hadn't been fragged.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I don't think I am going to use the Keep-a-Key, I'll just keep it as a novelty, perhaps have it on the dashboard at shows or something.

Today, I found this bulb in the driver's footwell. Checked my dash lights and they all appear to work so I'm not entirely sure where this has come from, unless it's been rattling around in the back of the dash and has only recently dropped out. I've put it in the centre console for now until I figure out where it should live.
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However, this is actually another one of my OCD updates, I got bored of deep-cleaning the kitchen (a job I don't particularly enjoy) so I decided it would be much more fun to clean this.
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I've been wanting an excuse to get cracking with the engine bay so that I can see how bad it really is, the muck in there hides a fair amount of paint bodgery I'm not best thrilled about. Much of the area between the engine and bulkhead looks like this.
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This ducting for the air filter has been sprayed silver, I'm not sure why, and was done in situ judging by the silver overspray all around it. Annoying, as it gives me more work to rectify it properly, but perhaps I can get a better looking section of pipe to replace it?
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I want to replace the ducting with something new eventually, but for now I moved it out of the way, disconnected and removed the washer bottle to clean it inside and out and got the metalwork somewhat better looking than before. The washer bottle is actually pretty clean inside with very minimal discolouration to the plastic, but the outside has some very well ingrained dirt that I'm not sure of the best way to remove without damaging the finish on the plastic.
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The wheel arch came up great, for all the paint is pretty shocking up close.
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Some of the paint bodgery made me laugh despairingly. In this and other areas, new paint has been thickly applied by brush over the old, unprepared paint, minor rust blemishes and oil. Suffice to say, a fair amount of the top coat came off with soapy water revealing what is fairly good original paint beneath with the rust staining being just that, the actual rusty areas being very tiny little spots that I'll treat once everything is cleaned up.
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So at the end of play, with my fingers looking like prunes and feeling a bit tingly from excessive water and cleaning agents (I have no marigolds/latex gloves), this is how it looked.
Right hand side just about done, left hand side as was.
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Dad's going to help me go through the wiring loom between Monday (when I'm off to hospital for head scans) and Thursday (when I have a job interview) to see if we can't find this electrical fault.

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Update time again! In readiness for pressing her into daily commuter duties I wanted to make sure the Princess would sail through her next MoT which means one or two niggles need sorting out. I still have to fit the other steering rack gaiter and buy at least 1 tyre to replace the perished one, 2 so I can replace the spare if it can't be repaired and prevented from leaking again. I should be sorting out tyres in the next couple of days, when there's some spare funds.

Other items on my list for the MoT were getting the electrics to behave, which meant calling on the services of my Dad. After this, the only thing I can really see her failing on is the little bit of rust on the rear arch bottom (gaffer tape as a temp fix) and emissions, everything else works as it ought and there's no crusty bits underneath that I know of. Oh, and maybe the brakes, I think the drums are probably out of balance so I'll take a look at those when I do the steering rack gaiter.

First thing I did was turn the bonnet rams around after being convinced they were upside down. This now means the bonnet shuts with much less resistance than before, this is not an improvement.
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The other fail was the tape I'd used to hold the sound proofing back tidily, seems to have lasted overnight but no longer, which is a shame. Shall have to find a better solution to tidy this bit up.
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Had a look at the wiring from the old electric fuel pump and removed some of it that wasn't needed.
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Plugged the two relay halves together to tidy things up a bit too.
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Then made an effort to tidy up the messy wires on the battery so they're not crossing all over everything. Turns out I have the wrong battery fitted, which I didn't know, and by the looks of things it's a replacement earth/negative cable. This is how I did it.
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Then Dad pointed out the earth cable could be done better and safer.
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My Dad is, as I've said before, a bit of an electrical wizard as far as I'm concerned. He helped me understand how to read what the wiring was doing and we discovered the cause of the fault in the lights, though it wasn't what either of us had suspected at all. After checking the connectors and the rear light clusters themselves, it turns out the bulb holder parts are conductive while the plugs maintain earth, the bulbs are all fine and the fault wasn't making itself known. We checked and checked again, Dad consulting the rather large wiring diagram for the rear lights while I tried very hard to learn something. After we found the problem was somewhere in the left hand brake light we tried plugging the left hand stuff into the right hand side.
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This eliminated the connectors and the right hand cluster as being at fault, it was definitely something about that left hand cluster, but we couldn't see what. The only obvious damage at first was the slightly lifting of the conductive coating.
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In puzzlement, Dad removed the light cluster and the lenses to inspect it better, and that's when we found the problem that had, until that point, been invisible. It's likely I caused the problem when I checked the bulbs shortly after getting the car.
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The conductive covering had been removed from the plastic base material which meant the brake light couldn't earth properly, causing the disco lights. Now, it had been mentioned that "there's a problem with the earth", but this is not what we expected it to be. This was repaired with the cunning use of Bacofoil and aluminium tape (the glue is non-conductive on the aluminium tape, so the foil was needed).
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I also found out why I couldn't get the rear lights as clean as I wanted, the back of the lenses were filthy.
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So they got cleaned up. When we plugged everything back together it all worked properly, with none of the previous craziness. Job jobbed! Last thing to do was put the rear lights back together and she's ready to hit the road again, with all the lights on and doing what they should. Success!
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@micra: thank you :)

 

@face: You are watching a person learning here. Without my Dad's help I doubt I would ever have found that electrical problem, it nearly beat him and he understands wiring diagrams and the numbers on the multimeter! It's only the past couple of years I've got involved in car maintenance beyond the every day oil changes and bulb swaps and really got into the mechanical side of things and, on the whole, it's pretty straightforward stuff if you take your time.

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Time is something that is currently a premium for me with three young children.

 

I used to do the odd stuff, but years ago now. Hopefully in a few years I will be able to dedicate some time to a Morris Ital, or something.

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HA HA, I tried that with my step son.....absolutlely useless at it....years latter he joined the army and they gave him a degree or some such as an engineering mechanic.............he can maybe rebuild a tank but he can't tell one end of a bolt from a machine screw or how to put things back together on a car..... :roll::roll:

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The Princess I had (which was only about 5 years old at the time) had knackered bonnet struts too, I remember.

Maybe they just weren't up to the job in the first place, that bonnet probably is quite heavy.

 

Wonderful car though, and keep up the good work. :D

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@WVM: Hmm... interesting *strokes beard*. My beard that is, would be weird if I were stroking your beard, if you have one.

@Mike: Yes, it probably is.

@Stude: The bonnet is made of something akin to Lead or Gold, it is very, very heavy. I'll have to see if I can buy some new ones from the interwebs or something.

 

___

 

 

Today, went for my first run out in the Princess since RAF Waddington a month ago. Must have done a good job cleaning her because the rain still beads on the paint and muck doesn't stick, which I was thrilled about. I was also thrilled at my working lights, I managed to get all the way down the overgrown lane, past the police Volvo waiting at the end and out of their sight before they started playing up again.

 

Looks like I'll need a new cluster back to fix the problem permanently. I also think a lot of the vibration through the wheel is due to the wheel I consigned to the boot whose tyre will only hold 3psi because with the nasty old Kingpin on the back the steering wheel doesn't vibrate at all and the ride is smoother.

 

I dropped in to see Dad on my way to the superduperwupermarket and he showed me some rather excellent wheels he has planned for the Carina. While bumbling around the interwebs, trying to remember the name of a VW post van (Fridolin, not Frikadellen) we came across a website with wonderful things on it. Namely, said website has a steering wheel I want for the Princess, but it's $200 USD and they don't have UK postage listed... and it's for a truck.

 

l143235.jpg

 

18" of lovely, lovely steering wheel. I want it.

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Looks fantastic, the trucks here have really nice interiors - they make European ones look a bit sparse. What diameter is the steering columb on a princess? it may be possible to match it up with the truck sizes as they are all imperial sized here. I can arrange shipping with USPS to the UK if needed, I ship things to family members from here.

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I'll have to check the spline size and it'll have to wait until I've paid for more important things like tyres... but I will find out, that's a generous offer and could save me a world of hassle! I need to check an 18" wheel is going to look sensible in place of the Ambassador one too, I'm not sure what diameter the Princess wheel is, but I suspect it'll be at least 16" so an 18" wheel should fit.

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