Project Rusty Triumphs in Scotland - To gas or not to gas(less MIG) - 09/11/24

[Tadhg Tiogar]

6 minutes ago, captain_70s said:

I've actually ordered quite a few things from Rimmers over the years, much to my shame....

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

[Yoss]

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. 

[LightBulbFun]

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?)

[SiC]

The blower assembly is very different to the MGB. 

[SiC]

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!

[LightBulbFun]

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  

[Yoss]

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. 

[Zelandeth]

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.

[somewhatfoolish]

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.

[captain_70s]

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.

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

[Austat]

4 hours ago, captain_70s said:

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?

[captain_70s]

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. 

[GingerNuttz]

If anyone else wants to chip in a weekend here or there feel free to come through, I'm up for getting all the welding plus painting the car. Operation make the Dolly great again is a go. 

[SiC]

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.

[GingerNuttz]

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 

 

 

[motorpunk]

Good luck! 
 

A Dolly was the first car I ever did an engine swap on. It caught fire. I haven’t done one since.

[busmansholiday]

20 minutes ago, GingerNuttz said:

and paint for a living 

Bit of filler and a good coat of Dulux ?

[GingerNuttz]

58 minutes ago, busmansholiday said:

Bit of filler and a good coat of Dulux ?

Spray painter I should have said haha

[Talbot]

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.

[Talbot]

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)

[captain_70s]

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.

[captain_70s]

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...

Even painted my flaps.

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. ?

[SiC]

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?

[captain_70s]

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.

[somewhatfoolish]

#savethetronda

[captain_70s]

4 hours ago, somewhatfoolish said:

#savethetronda

Currently on #savethedoloshite

First cars first...

[paulplom]

15 hours ago, captain_70s said:

 

 

Reusing masking tape!? That's a first.

Good to see some Scottish traits are still alive and well.

[captain_70s]

It came off clean so it went again...

I'm a Yorkshireman living in Scotland, so the definition of a miserly bastard.

[SiC]

I get the sense you don't love this car anywhere near as much as your Dolomite?

[captain_70s]

8 hours ago, SiC said:

I get the sense you don't love this car anywhere near as much as your Dolomite?

The Acclaim is a better car, but it's not a car I intend to keep indefinitely. For me it's my modern motor, reliable if dull transport with the bonus of cheap classic car insurance, it's replacement is already on the cards. I'd like to weld it up to a standard where it doesn't need touching for a long while and possibly sell it to Girlfriend_70s for a derisory sum to keep it kind of on-fleet...

The Doloshite is a permanent fleet member.  It's more than a car to me in multiple ways

It was the second car I bought, but the first car I bought that I wanted, and the first that 100% belonged to me, no finance company involved. It was probably one of my first big meaningful purchases, I've always been fantastically stingy with money, I really never bought myself anything until I got the Dolomite and I'd wanted a classic car since I was about 13.

It was a fucking terrible buy, I could have bought such a better car if I'd not bought the first thing I viewed, which turned out to be a bodged to hell and worn out resto project. Given I paid out real money for it (£1400 for a Dolly 1300 7 years ago was top whack) I desperately tried to convince myself it wasn't as utterly fucked as it was... But it was, the engine has always been shot and the filler was always going to fall out eventually...

I think that's part of the reason I want to repair it, it'd be far easier to get rid and save up to buy a nicer example but I want to have the car I thought I was getting 7-years ago. More importantly I want to be able to learn the skills to make it that way myself, I want to be a proficient welder, to be able to fabricate panels, to be able to rebuild an engine. For the last decade my mental health has been diabolical, between the ages of 15 and 25ish I was consistently miserable, devoid of any motivation or self-confidence, thoughts of suicide were a daily norm.

I couldn't work on the car, when anything went wrong with an attempted repair I processed it as a personal failure. I'd fly into an utter rage, angry at myself, at my lack of ability, at my bad decisions at my inability to prove myself. Even when things went well they weren't good enough, I was never satisfied and I hated myself for it. My only respite was driving, I loved blatting around the rural North East in my shitty green car but you can't just drive a 35+ year old car running most of it's original parts at 124,000 miles, it's gonna need work... and I couldn't do the work. Working on cars never goes smoothly, it's always a farcical disaster, especially when you're inexperienced and I couldn't process those situations in a healthy manner.

Even my parents, who have always been really very confused as to why I could be miserable when I had "nothing to be miserable about", realised the situation was bad because my poor old Dad used to sneak into the garage and do the lion's share of work to the car while I was away at work...

My solution was to indulge in some retail therapy. I bought another Dolomite, this one a bargain, but still rough as all hell. Only now I didn't have a garage to work in, because that was full of the first Dolomite, which was usually immobile and I was still unable to work on either of them without ending up utterly hating myself. So I sold the modern. Now I HAD to work on a car because I NEEDED it to get to work and any functional result was acceptable, but I was doing 50 miles a day in old cars on rural Aberdeenshire's mud and salt strewn lanes. I'd also just moved into my own house which crippled my finances and highlighted my lonely lifestyle. I very nearly bought a fucked Austin Princess that'd been dry stored for 25 years because I was really starting to lose the plot and was chasing dreams in desperation...

I had a mental breakdown. I lost my job. I started taking anti-depressants after being forced to seek professional help. I moved to Glasgow, where my old college mates had ended up. I met up with the Scotoshite lot and socialised . I met my girlfriend. I was tinkering with my Civic and even when things went utterly pear shaped I just accepted it. Oh well, shit happens, I'll sort it eventually. I could accept not everything I did would be perfect, that frequently things would go all fucky and that it possibly wasn't entirely due to me being the sort of person who would be better off dead...

I bought the Acclaim, it was fucked. FOAD offered a space to poke at it and potentially weld it if it wasn't too fucked. We welded it. I'd never had done that before, I wouldn't have been able to accept the offer, much less dare to attack the thing with the electric metal pritt stick...

I still had the Dolly, in a lock-up garage I'd originally acquired to store the Princess I never bought... That lockup was £70 a month, I couldn't afford it, and I wasn't getting rid of the car after all that... I'd get it roadworthy over a weekend and drive it 200 miles to Glasgow to a pre-booked MOT. So I did. Finally the fucked old car doesn't fill me with feelings of dread and despair and self loathing, I see a car I want to fix, and I'll do it. Even though, from a logistical standpoint things have never been worse for actually getting the job done, no driveway, no garage, less money than ever but now I have the motivation and ability to actually attempt it.

That's why I'm obsessive with fixing the car I think. It represents me overcoming something that at times nearly killed me. I can't do it alone, I've come to terms with the fact I might need help from other people. I can process that I'm not necessarily a hideous inconvenience and that I shouldn't feel horrendously guilty for accepting offers of assistance. If I would be willing to lend a hand to fellow car peeps then it stands to reason that others might also... The Shitters on here and my mates (some are now one and the same) have been amazing, and although my mental state has reached the point where I can finally sort things out I'd really not be able to practically do very much without all the help they offered and given. Thank you.


Welp. That rapidly escalated into a... thing.

tl;dr - I'm gonna fix my car whether you like it or not. Fight me. Here's a picture of a Marina I drove.