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Rusty Triumphs in Scotland - Dolomite in "most reliable" shocker - 08/02/24


captain_70s

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7 minutes ago, Zelandeth said:

Thank you, really appreciate it.  That looks absolutely spot on for what I'm after.  Size shouldn't be a problem has there's plenty of room in the engine bay.

Time to set up a saved search on eBay methinks...

The ballast resistor will get pretty toasty so a bit of charring next to it doesn't hugely surprise me.

I think variations of those Smiths heaters were used in lots of old British cars, certainly Leyland ones so they shouldn't be too hard to find. My 1300 doesn't have the big metal tube  with the flappy valve as the heater sat nearer the middle of the engine bay (surprising how different the front and rear drive bodies are). Even my Routemaster had the same main blower bit. 

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21 minutes ago, Yoss said:

I think variations of those Smiths heaters were used in lots of old British cars, certainly Leyland ones so they shouldn't be too hard to find. My 1300 doesn't have the big metal tube  with the flappy valve as the heater sat nearer the middle of the engine bay (surprising how different the front and rear drive bodies are). Even my Routemaster had the same main blower bit. 

aye the motor looks like the same one @richardthestag dealt with on Sandy the landy

and he said it was from an MGB and thats always good because it means then the part should be hopefully cheap and plentiful! 

(amusing to hear the Routemaster has one tho, im curious how is it hooked up does it have its own heat exchanger or does it draw air from the heat exchanger between the top decks? I assume your talking about the cabin heater?)

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1 hour ago, captain_70s said:

There is indeed a flap, mine is jammed open and the cable had snapped. It is a fairly big fucker though (human hand for scale)

Cable has snapped on mine and it looks like it has been that way for a while. Not sure if I can be arsed or need to even fix it. But then mine will be more of a summer car anyway - not sure I want to keep up with the rust repairs if it was a all-weather daily!

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3 minutes ago, SiC said:

The blower assembly is very different to the MGB. 

do you mean the whole blower unit/snail shell or motor? I was just referring to the motor itself :)

I just figured it was worth mentioning if for whatever reason Triumph Dolomite blower motors are stupidly expensive or such for some reason (I aint checked!) incase say Zel comes across a complete snail shell for cheap but the motor is burnt out or such

I think its always good to know what parts are cross compatible/the same across a range of vehicles :) 

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52 minutes ago, LightBulbFun said:

aye the motor looks like the same one @richardthestag dealt with on Sandy the landy

and he said it was from an MGB and thats always good because it means then the part should be hopefully cheap and plentiful! 

(amusing to hear the Routemaster has one tho, im curious how is it hooked up does it have its own heat exchanger or does it draw air from the heat exchanger between the top decks? I assume your talking about the cabin heater?)

Yes I meant the cab heater. There's some kind of little radiator in the front of the cab. I can't quite remember as it's been a long time since I had my head up there but there's an in and out pipe from the engine bay. I know this because one of the hoses blew on the A4074 between Reading and Didcot once filling the cab with steam and hot water. Fortunately I was keeping the bus in Didcot at the time and always carried a 5 gallon tub of water for just such occasions. 

The saloon heaters were fed from a radiator behind that grille above the cab and relied on the bus moving, no blowers involved. 

Apologies for thread hijack. 

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The motors I imagine are common to virtually all BMC tin from the era with two speed fans.  The MGB definitely has a different housing though unless I'm mistaken, sure it's an all-in-one unit which also houses the heater matrix with the fan at one end.

The Dolomite setup would work particularly well for me as the integrated shutoff flap in the outlet tube would save me having to engineer that bit.

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11 hours ago, Asimo said:

Weirdly, the tape most often seen blowing around alongside the hard shoulder was from video cassettes. (1/2'' wide - double the width of 8 track tape)  Never understood video tape and motorways. 

From personal experience the school bus equivalent of X Factor, the contents of the tape were not approved of by the occupants of the back seat so it was disposed of via the skylight. Alternatively lorry driving porn aficionados binning evidence before going home.

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So, we're now on version 3.0 of the repair plan...

@GingerNuttz PM'd me on Monday offering use of his workshop just t'other side of Glasgow. Working on a car 30mins away rather than 3 hours is a considerably cheaper/faster/easier endeavour + he seems to know what he's going and has a Herald 13/60 so you know he's sound as fuck.

Once the world is slightly less completely fucked the plan of action will be something like this:

1 - Move car to location.

2 - Get the engine and subframe tae fuck

3 - Weld the bastard

4 - Reattach subframe and install new engine.

5 - With car now in movable state work through remainder of rust as money/time/convenience allows.

I have no doubt that by the time it's actually possible to do anything to to thing we'll be on plan version 12.8.03b or something, but bear with me... In the meantime have some HARDCORE GROT.

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Kinda' nuts to think cars used to look like this at 8 year old...

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4 hours ago, captain_70s said:

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Kinda' nuts to think cars used to look like this at 8 year old...

The passenger side front fender looks properly fucked with it starting to crack at the bottom, best to replace it with a less rotten one rather than trying to repair the current one. Are there any other panels that will need replacing?

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2 hours ago, Austat said:

The passenger side front fender looks properly fucked with it starting to crack at the bottom, best to replace it with a less rotten one rather than trying to repair the current one. Are there any other panels that will need replacing?

Starting? Both of the front wings are 95% filler south of the bumper.

Wings are £135 a side in GRP, £300-400ish each for NOS steel. 

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I think you're going to need both welding and judicial use of fibreglass to have any hope of getting this finished in a reasonable time frame.
E.g. trying to welding that wing will either make it look messy if done quickly or time consuming if done neatly. Whereas it's not a structural element, so cleaning up and fibreglass would do. Especially longer-term you could get a club GRP wing.

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It should only take 4 or 5 weekends to complete the welding work and have it in primer. The captain is going grp for the front end by the sounds of things so that will save me from making repair panels for the wing bottoms. I've restored tons of cars and paint for a living so we should breeze through it ? 

 

 

Hopefully 

 

 

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On 5/4/2020 at 5:37 PM, Tadhg Tiogar said:

There's a reason why they're called Rimmers....

Owned by someone called "Arnold"?

 

This thread is spectacularly brilliant.  Your devotion to doing work while living three floors up from a car that has to be parked on the road is remarkable.  Many lesser mortals would likely have sacked it off by now.  Couple of thoughts:

While trying to move a car as you were in your vid, either turn around and push it with your back towards it (you can push harder with your legs that way) or push on the tops of the tyres.. that way you get 2x mechanical advantage and can move things up hills you couldn't do otherwise.

None of the welding looks too difficult.  The fact that you have the engine out makes it 200 times easier.  If you can get it to the point you have all the tools needed to hand, that's a number of hours' work (as opposed to a number of months' work)  The hardest bit looks to be the wing.  Are they bolt on?  Can you get a good second-hand one perhaps?  If not, there's really nothing that wrong with cleaning up and stopping the rust, and then filling it to within an inch of it's life.  If you protect it properly from the inside, it should last many more years.

Also.. having used an engine crane at the roadside before now, all I can say is "Just don't".  It's utterly awful.

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On 5/4/2020 at 11:29 AM, Tadhg Tiogar said:

At a considerable price if you feel like being Rimmed.

When you said that I was expecting £300+.  Actually, for the complexity of the pressing for those chassis legs, that price is very reasonable.  If you start looking at things like chassis sections for Land-Rover, which are a far more simple shape (flat panels, easy welds) they are eye-wateringly expensive in comparison.

I'd consider very carefully just buying the chassis leg and welding it in.  Will save a fair bit in welding/grinding consumables, and will save hours and hours of work.  I'd buy it, and I'm a tight-fisted idiot who fabricated my own spring perch for my Merc when they were available for £40 off ebay. (story for another thread)

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Ideally the entire front end will end up being GRP at some point because racecar, the N/S wing is fairly far gone in awkwardly shaped places and the O/S isn't massively better, the valance is crusty all over and the nose panel is a mixture of rot (TADTS) and filler where I suspect it's had a bump on the nose. The panels for that will be £500 odd though, by the time you factor in collecting them from the Midlands, so in the short term (ie:, the next 5 to 40 years...) it'll be a mixture of patching and filler I suspect.

Wings are welded on, although if I end up cutting them off (or going GRP) I'll convert to bolt on, for ease of future works. They aren't structural on a Dolly.

I'm not entirely sure what constitutes "chassis leg" and "inner wing box section" as per the repair panels. I'd consider the whole thing as being a chassis leg but at some point one evidently becomes the other. I think the bits I need need are the actually inner wing box sections.

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  • 4 weeks later...

No fucks given gaffer tape tart up. Judicious use of wire brush, sandpaper, Vactan rust converter and red oxide primer so we'll see how it lasts...

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Even painted my flaps.

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Fucking thing is a heap, even the bumper is rotted through... Now most of the filler has fallen out of it I'm seeing why most people wanted to buy it to break for spares. ?

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I know your Moto is never scrap and always repair but ... is there a limit/eventual line?

Edit: I guess the 6 month extension has been useful on this one. Reckon it'll pass in Nov? Or is it visibly in person getting that bad?

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I don't think it's actually any rustier in most real terms, but all the historic filler work has been shaken loose... The arse end of the car acts as one big mud/water scoop with rather obvious effects.

It's currently on a "run to fail" plan. If it survives beyond the point where the Doloshite is a usable vehicle again then I'll turn my attention to making it actually not hanging. A few weeks of concentrated welder action would see it good enough for another 10 years of use, but I need to having something else to drive in order to take it off the road. There is no real reason to save it other than I already have it so I may as well do this one... It's also too handy of a car to just give-up on, starts on the button, never needs any mechanical work, does 37mpg, cheap classic car insurance, coming up on tax exemption etc.

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