75 P6 V8 - Bye, this car

[mat_the_cat]

Maybe measure the voltage at where the distributor takes its supply from, and compare that with battery voltage (both when cranking). It could be local voltage drop rather than a poor battery? I've known similar with a Lumenition kit.

[Conrad D. Conelrad]

It will be investigated. But today I moved the fuel pump to underneath the tank. Now, I've endured some miserable jobs on cars, but this transcended awful.

[Junkman]

Good place for it to overheat there.

[Conrad D. Conelrad]

The fuel pump is no longer a problem. It survived a couple of stop start trips which would definitely have caused havoc before. Unfortunately this is only a temporary solution, because it means I lose my reserve fuel tank, and I don't like that.

 

But back to the foibles.

 

✘ Ignition system needs overhaul

I discovered the engine wasn't turning over fast enough to trigger a spark, so I bought a new battery. No rubbish either, I grabbed a tape measure and bought the biggest Varta Silver Dynamic that would fit in the Rover's battery box. Very posh. A good investment too, as this battery spins the engine with a bit more oomph than the old one, and indeed it started with the electric distributor. It drove beautifully too. The improvement was huge! 

 

This morning I went to start the car, and there was no spark. What is it now? I charged the battery again and triple checked that the right amount of electricity was getting to the right places. The best I got out of it is one solitary spark from the king lead. 

 

Fuck this piece of shit. Even if I can make the car work with it, and apparently I can't, I just don't trust it. 

 

✔ Screen washers, again

 

✔ Not on the drawing: Mustiness

The orange upholstery is beautiful, but the fabric was holding a lot of dirt and made my interior smell all musty.

 

 

So I took the covers off and cleaned them. A lot. 

 

 

This supercharged the orange. 

 

 

The foam inside is stamped with warnings to keep away from sunlight. Because this is what happens to it when it's exposed to 40 years of sunlight through the covers:

 

 

It's a shame, because the bits underneath which haven't seen any light are lovely, all squishy. These seats must have been dreamy when they were new. Unfortunately none of the foam places I tried were able to replicate the Dunlopillo, so I had to replace the worst stuff with generic upholstery foam. Here's  a bit of my electric cutting knife sculpture, and the stuff it replaced. 

 

 

 

The box sections were less fun. Cutting the foam to size is enjoyable, thanks to the meat carving knife sliding through it like a Stanley knife through warm Play-Doh. But getting it into the covers? The strips have to be wrapped in a bin bag and then, taped to a one of the car's door trims, dragged through the mesh channel on the back of the cover. 

 

It's all worth it in the end. Compare the following photo to the cat one:

 

 

These rock hard parts are now lovely and squishy. Even better, the cabin smells cleaner and powdered foam doesn't puff out of the seats anymore!

[Junkman]

  On 15/06/2016 at 23:03, Conrad D. Conelrad said:

Compare the following photo to the cat one:

 

rvr-foam4.jpg

 

The cat has developed an opposing thumb!

[Conrad D. Conelrad]

✔ Ignition System

With Shitefest fast approaching, I'd given up on this. I decided to stick the points distributor back in for the meantime, and was walking towards the car with it in my hand when a black Mercedes pulled up. Out got a very nice chap and fellow P6 owner who was being driven back from hospital by his wife. They'd been diverted down my street by a roadworks diversion, and decided to say hello. 

 

Despite being in recovery from a hernia operation (still wearing the hospital wristband, even) this guy set about my new ignition system with my multimeter. His knowledge of electrics being greater than mine (he had some) he had the car running in just a few minutes. Turns out the trigger thingy in the distributor was misaligned. 

 

He popped by again this Sunday with his car. It's a beautiful 1975 3500 which he's had for over 30 years. It's also Scarab Blue, the colour mine's supposed to be, so with the two cars parked nose to nose it was like a before/after of neglect. 

 

Speaking of neglect... Is "black as the night" the correct colour for automatic transmission fluid? 

 

[Conrad D. Conelrad]

The ORANGING continues.

 

[Junkman]

Make sure you don't post a pic of the rear valance we harvested from the haunted car.

Every P6 owner in the UK and overseas would try to break into your house.

[LC Torana]

  On 15/06/2016 at 23:03, Conrad D. Conelrad said:

So I took the covers off...

 

Huh?

 

What?

 

How?

[Junkman]

  On 03/09/2016 at 11:40, LC Torana said:

Huh?

 

What?

 

How?

 

It's something only Mr Conelrad can do.

 

Don't ask.

 

I suspect his permagrumpy cat has something to do with it.

[LC Torana]

I am in continual P6 awe at what you guys manage to do.

 

 

(Oh, and I keep missing this thread because it looks like it's about boring Rover 75s.)

[Conrad D. Conelrad]

PEAK ORANGE

 

 

[Junkman]

Do I spot a Mango driver's door card there?

[Conrad D. Conelrad]

You do indeed.

[Junkman]

I appreciate that you are finally taking care of the important bits.

Are the lower ends of the front wings still flapping a foot from the car above 60?

[Conrad D. Conelrad]

I fixed that with string.

[Conrad D. Conelrad]

Two year update!

 

I had some concerns about the brakes. They worked well enough, and never felt unsafe. They passed MOTs without issue. But they were nothing special, and if the brake pedal was stamped the car felt like it was trying to go in four directions at once. I blamed the ancient pads. I was forced into action when one of those pads lost its friction material. A set of new pads was procured, but couldn't be installed as one of the pistons was seized in both calipers. That probably wasn't helping.

 

 

See the big piston? That's our culprit. The rubber parts which were supposed to protect it were in tatters. Replacement calipers were sourced from Junkman's recently deceased Haunted Rover (RIP) and fitted over the course of a fun afternoon in which nothing was seized or broke. Oh, wait, everything was seized and broke.

 

 

 

Now I feel silly for not fixing this sooner. Properly functioning P6 brakes are amazing. The car stops sharp and straight, it's wonderful.

 

[Conrad D. Conelrad]

The heater worked once. I don't mean 'once upon a time', I mean once. It worked one time. I drove through one winter with no heater, and had no intention of repeating the experience. The first cold day we had recently told me it was time to start investigating the heater issue. 

 

The P6's enormous heater is not controlled by a water valve. The matrix is constantly in play, with heat directed into the car by a system of three flaps. The first controls whether air may enter the heater box or not, the second controls whether that air may cross the matrix or not, and the third directs the resulting air between the footwells and the windscreen. 

 

Since the car can't be driven with the heater box removed, a known good box was sourced from Junkman's recently deceased Haunted Rover (RIP). Known good, but with a couple of small issues - the foam on the flaps had disintegrated through age, and... 

 

 

I briefly considered a complete strip down and rebuild of the heater, but reading the accounts of people who have suggests it's a massive job. So all I did was re-foam the flaps and weld it up in the 'ugly but functional' style.

 

 

Then, because learning from previous experience is a sign of weakness, I decided to swap the boxes over at 4pm one afternoon. After all, it's only taking one out and putting another in, right? That's what, an hour, tops?

 

I spent that long removing ONE hose clip which was as inaccessible as it was broken, and had to be cut off with a Dremel. Also, the throttle linkage has to be dis-assembled for the sake of a few millimetres of clearance. Then there's all the levers to thread into the cabin... At least there wasn't any scary rot hiding underneath the box. You'll notice it's night time, and I am outside, and I don't even have the new box installed yet.

 

 

In the end, replacement was a much simpler ordeal, and with a bit of trepidation I took the car for a spin. In no time at all the cabin was toasty warm. Wonderful. 

 

As for the heater box I removed, I can't see what was wrong with it. Ironically, the physical box is in much better condition than the one I just installed. There isn't a trace of rust on it, and all the flaps appear to be working. Whatever. I'm warm now. 

[Rocket88]

Ghostly.................with Halloween approaching, I'd hide it somewhere. These are the best Rovers of evah.

[LC Torana]

^ that reminds me of an embarassing story with my P6B heater.

 

Last winter, heater wasn't working, and I had my elderly mother working the controls up and down while I fiddled with the adjustments, all to no avail.  No warm air, mo matter what I did.  Couldn't find anything wrong, but couldn't get it to work, either.

 

In shameful defeat, I dropped the car in to the garage to get the heater working.

 

They only flushed the bloody thing out and it was fine...

[Conrad D. Conelrad]

PREVIOUSLY ON ROVERAMA 75
 
The petrol tank which came with the car was full of grit. This caused a great many fuel starvation breakdowns. After a catastrophic attempt to clean it out, I gave up and found another tank. This one worked pretty well, but still had a lot of rubbish in it. To catch it, I installed a diesel filter as well as a normal paper type. This is what the diesel filter caught:
 

 
and still the paper filter was getting clogged. But at least the car ran. It was still running this week, except it started losing power around 3,500 rpm. If I slowed down, it recovered. Felt a bit like fuel starvation. Wonder what could cause symptoms like that? Yeah, another blocked filter. It's a few months old.
 

 
For unrelated reasons, I sent the car to the Rover P6 Sanatorium with instructions to give it a good tune up. It's come back a new car. It feels perkier, it idles inaudibly, and if I knock it into neutral the idle doesn't rise by 1000 rpm. The throttle linkage has been completely rebuilt, destroying my cable tie and threaded rod masterpiece, but at least the gearbox kickdown works now. The gearbox got a bit of long deserved attention too - the jet black ATF has been swapped for some pink stuff, and the sump's been cleaned out. Lovely. 
 
Also discovered during this tune up - despite two filters, the carbs were full of that sandy crap from the tank. It had to go. But where oh where was I going to find a proven good petrol tank?
 
A replacement tank was sourced from Junkman's recently deceased Haunted Rover (RIP). That car's fuel filter was never anything other than canary yellow, but since I had the opportunity I whipped the sender out to have a peek inside. 
 

 
WOW! AMAZING. There was about a tablespoon full of loose dry stuff falling about in there, so I thought "what the hell" and duct taped the Dyson hose to the sender hole and shook the tank about about until it was empty. Perfect. 

 

  On 21/10/2016 at 16:32, Conrad D. Conelrad said:

Then, because learning from previous experience is a sign of weakness, I decided to swap the boxes over at 4pm one afternoon. After all, it's only taking one out and putting another in, right? That's what, an hour, tops?

 

I agree. I've removed and replaced petrol tanks before, it's only a case of popping a wheel off, undoing two connections, pulling the old tank out of the boot, then the whole thing again in reverse. So, why not start on this at 5pm one afternoon? I'll be done in what, an hour, tops?

Well, would you know it? I'm a fucking moron.

 

It all started well enough, insofar as I removed a wheel without crushing my skull or anything. Since the fuel gauge doesn't work properly, what I thought was an almost empty tank turned out to contain quite a substantial amount of petrol. This exited the tank in a pattern one could call "wide area maximum atomisation". 

 

 

Soon enough I'd filled the immediate area with a lot of petrol in a wide variety of inappropriate containers. But it was all out, and soon enough, so was the tank. "That's the hard work done" I thought to myself, in a term re-defining display of naiveté. 

 

All I had to do now was remove a small pipe union from the old sender unit, and screw it onto the new one. 

 

 

A couple of hours later, I gave up. I'd repeatedly oiled it, heated it as far as I could while sitting in the centre of the Colosseum of Flammability, and mangled it with every tool I had until it was unrecognisable. At this point I had a real problem. I couldn't leave all this petrol out overnight, but I had nowhere to store it. I couldn't put the old tank back in the car, because it would definitely leak. 

 

By now it was dark. Then it started to rain. 

 

 

I took a photo of the mangled bit and PM'd it to Junkman, in a desperate hope he had the mangled part on some of the fuel lines removed from Lyndon. Tapatalk kept giving me a baffling message about failed protocol or something, so I kept re-trying only to find I'd sent him the photo eight times. This must have conveyed a sense of urgency and panic, as he hurried a suitable bit over in the Range Rover.

 

After this, it was pretty plain sailing. It took about 40 minutes to get the car back together and the petrol re-homed. There don't seem to be any leaks, and I've reconfigured the fuel outlets so I can use the entire tank including the reserve with my electric pump. Unfortunately the fuel gauge doesn't work, so I must have screwed up the wiring somehow. Which is almost impressive considering there are only two wires. 

 

So, I'd been aiming to be finished by 6pm. I was finished at 10:30. 

 

Cars, eh?

[Junkman]

The really funny bit is, that when I arrived to deliver the replacement for the borked bit

(the Range Rover surprisingly DID NOT (!) grenade in a hilariously expensive fashion, believe it, or not!), I had a lit ciggy in my phiz.

There were buckets of petrol all over Conrad's front garden and the entire neighbourhood stank like a 1978 Libyan petrol station.

Thanks God petrol isn't flammable, otherwise Sale, Stretford and Urmston would now be in the News, OMGISIS, Brexit, Hillary, Trump and all that sort of rot I am sick and tired of.

 

Oh, and permagrumpy Conelrad cat gave me the glance as if everything was my fault.

[vulgalour]

This is a veritable rollercoaster of a thread and the mango seats make me want a P6 again.

[billyboy406v6]

Love what you are doing here, but with the use of various parts from the haunted car, is it possible it will rise again from the ashes and wreak havoc on this beauty ?

[Junkman]

  On 28/10/2016 at 02:09, vulgalour said:

This is a veritable rollercoaster of a thread and the mango seats make me want a P6 again.

 

Emotional rollercoaster is basically what P6 ownership is all about. If you aren't prepared for this, buy an Alfa Romeo.

 

 

 

  On 28/10/2016 at 05:49, billyboy406v6 said:

Love what you are doing here, but with the use of various parts from the haunted car, is it possible it will rise again from the ashes and wreak havoc on this beauty ?

 

Initially we were seriously worried that this would happen, Little Bastard style and all, so at first we only installed relatively insignificant bits from the haunted car

to see what's going to happen. However, when no adverse effects could be observed, we started to harvest more stuff from it and used it on our cars. So far, so good.

Conrad's car even brakes with brakes from the haunted car, something I would probably not have had the guts to try, but now my car gets the brake servo from it.

 

But the reverse conclusion is how evil the haunted car really is. Although most of its components are flawless enough to be used in other cars, the sum of them in that car

just was a constant source of misery, suffering, ailment, disappointment and despair.

 

Two things:

 

- The current owner of the remains of the haunted car intends to restore it.

 

- The head doctor of the Rover Sanatorium knows of another P6 displaying the behaviour of the haunted one.

  According to him, those are the only two such examples he ever encountered.

[vulgalour]

Two, you say?

 

[Squire_Dawson]

Might be stating the obvious but it looks like the fuel tank had been coated internally and now it's all coming off.

[Conrad D. Conelrad]

  On 22/10/2016 at 04:23, LC Torana said:

^ that reminds me of an embarassing story with my P6B heater.

 

Last winter, heater wasn't working, and I had my elderly mother working the controls up and down while I fiddled with the adjustments, all to no avail.  No warm air, mo matter what I did.  Couldn't find anything wrong, but couldn't get it to work, either.

 

In shameful defeat, I dropped the car in to the garage to get the heater working.

 

They only flushed the bloody thing out and it was fine...

I think they can suffer from trapped air too. The new one I just put in only blew lukewarm air until I pulled the upper hose off and let water run out for a few seconds. Now it's like the tropics.

 

  On 28/10/2016 at 13:26, Squire_Dawson said:

Might be stating the obvious but it looks like the fuel tank had been coated internally and now it's all coming off.

Looks like it. All four tanks I've looked inside have had that white coating. Plus flakes of the same. Also baffles, just to make cleaning them out as difficult as possible.

[cort16]

  Quote

 

 

he throttle linkage has been completely rebuilt, destroying my cable tie and threaded rod masterpiece

 

What are you saying there's a solution without using cable ties? I'm not sure I believe you.

 

That grit in the tank is strange. It's usually bits of rust you find in the filters not half a granite quarry.

[Junkman]

  On 28/10/2016 at 13:26, Squire_Dawson said:

Might be stating the obvious but it looks like the fuel tank had been coated internally and now it's all coming off.

 

They all do that, sir.