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

[big_al_granvia]

fucking 'ell mate, that is serious rot, credit to you and ginger for keeping going with it, at least you can take pride  that your giving it your all

[SiC]

Looking at sale prices of Sprints on eBay, I think I could get out of mine with a small profit as is. This thread is making me seriously considering doing that! I fear mine might not be that far behind. 

[phil_lihp]

Liked for the progress and the spirit, not for the extra rot, that's quite crispy.

[Tadhg Tiogar]

At this rate, you'll end up making entire panels by hand to effectively build a new car from scratch.

Homemade body panels could be a nice little sideline....

[dave j]

That arch is not unexpected though is it. Are there any other areas that haven't been prodded yet? Keep up the good work, it will be worth it in the end! 

[GMcD]

Herculean effort going on with this. I doff my cap.

[Tadhg Tiogar]

2 hours ago, captain_70s said:

...Every "repair" that has been carried out on this car has worsened it's condition to the extent it is now well beyond the point where anybody would bother saving it. Especially as it's a sub-Sprint car, the man hours involved will lead to resto costing several times the car's end value. Naturally work shall be continuing onwards despite the fact we never expected the car to be this bad...

Macbeth had it right when he said that he was in blood so sorely steep'd that turning back would be as much trouble as go o'er. Maybe he was trying to restore a Dolly whilst murdering people to keep Lady Macbeth happy.

[captain_70s]

2 hours ago, dave j said:

That arch is not unexpected though is it. Are there any other areas that haven't been prodded yet? Keep up the good work, it will be worth it in the end! 

Magnets have been flung around with gay abandon in the usual grot spots but you never really know until the sanding discs are flying...

The outer arch was known to be fucked, but the O/S seems to be in the worst condition. We expected some localised grot in the wheelarches at the sill end where they often get plated and along the outside lip, but to find the whole thing is utterly shot was a surprise! They rarely rot that badly, it's mostly because it's all been plastered in filler and been allowed to rot behind the scenes.

I know that the argument is "if those repairs weren't done the car would never have survived", but for the amount of time/effort/materials that have been spent bodging it and in turn making any future repairs a nightmare a decent job could have been done in the first place...

[big_al_granvia]

dont forget back in the 70's getting 10 years out of a car was good going, anything over that was almost unheard of. I dont know if you have ever seen kevtee on youtube, salvage hunting, the amount of cars that are classed as end of life for things as smoll as brakes and tyres. yours was probably getting grotty at 8 years and someone bodged it to keep it going a couple of years, then over the last 30 its had copious amounts of filler and gaffa tape. because welding is scary and very expensive, until now and its getting done right

[Talbot]

Even now the average life of a car on UK roads is only 14 years.  Granted, that also takes into account cars that end their lives "prematurely" (IE are crashed and written off), so if you were to look at the "natural age" of a car, it's probably 15-16 years.  I'm sure I've read somewhere that at one point during the very worst of 60s and 70s car rot that most cheaper cars were likely to be scrap at 7 years old, which means the fact that this survived beyond the late 80's is remarkable.  Even by the early 90's these were no longer a common sight on UK roads.  Stories of really quite significant rust at the first MOT were not uncommon, and aluminium tape, newspaper and filler were the accepted tools of repair.

Even into the mid 90's, when I was beginning to poke at a lot of rotten old late 70's / early 80's chod, a lot of garages repair methods was to simply spot weld a repair panel over the top of the rotten section and then filler it in place.  Even structural stuff would often be tack-welded on and just undersealed to hide the shitty repair.  I can still very clearly remember pulling the tacked-on sill repair panels off a friends Mini in the mid-90's without any tools whatsoever, and seeing the floor basically fall out of the car.  There was so much rot in there that we had to scrap the shell immediately.  it was absolutely and completely un-repairable, which is not something I say lightly.  That was an '83 shell in about '98.  15 years old and it was *beyond* fucked.

I think the Dolly in question here has actually been quite fortunate.  The very fact that there is at least something you can go back to and weld to is remarkable for a 42 year old car.  Some looked like that at 12 years old.

Also, you have to give the garage that did these "repairs" to the rear wheel arches some slack.  They would not and could not have expected the car to last this long.  It's most likely that they would have expected the car to be scrapped within a few years, the repair being the bare minimum needed just to scrape through another MOT or two before it was uneconomic to repair.

The more recent garage repair though.. that's less excusable.  £220 is only half-a-day's labour though, so whilst it was a bit of a bodge-y repair, I don't think you were overcharged.  Had they done the repair properly to the area, (steel cut out, new metal let in, internally protected, no filler, painted well etc.) you'd probably have been looking at nearer £1k.

[Tadhg Tiogar]

58 minutes ago, big_al_granvia said:

dont forget back in the 70's getting 10 years out of a car was good going, anything over that was almost unheard of.....

...unless you owned a Volvo.

[Talbot]

7 minutes ago, Tadhg Tiogar said:

...unless you owned a Volvo.

Even their life was quoted as an expected 20-ish years.  That would have scrapped any 70's volvo over 20 years ago now.

Quite honestly *any* car less than exotica which has survived from the 1970s to now is doing astonishingly well.

[Tadhg Tiogar]

Just now, Talbot said:

Even their life was quoted as an expected 20-ish years.  ...

Volvo did make something of a virtue of this in their adverts at the time and, for a while, I wondered why our family didn't have a Volvo 264 instead of the Mk.3 Cortina that we did have....

[plasticvandan]

Agree with that,my dad was routinely the last owner on Leyland tin and dolly's as bad as this in the early-mid eighties,basically run it till the tax ran out.

[danthecapriman]

12 hours ago, Tadhg Tiogar said:

Volvo did make something of a virtue of this in their adverts at the time and, for a while, I wondered why our family didn't have a Volvo 264 instead of the Mk.3 Cortina that we did have....

True!

Volvo made and designed their cars to outlast the competition, something they almost always did short of writing one off. Even so, their cars from the 60’s and 70’s weren’t immune from rotting away. The 700 in the 80’s was the one that really capitalised on the Build and longevity though. Designed to last 21 years if I remember right and I’m sure that was actually on one of their adverts for the cars. Even now, nobody does that!

Volvo’s were never cheap cars though!

[blackboilersuit]

Liked for the progress, not for the rot! I'm not sure how much the 4 door Toledo varied from the Dolomite but Sonic is at your disposal if you need to measure up  an arch for making repair panels. As long as you don't go near him with tin snips ?

[Yoss]

Mine was worse than yours in some places and much better in others. The FWD cars didn't have the plastic sheilds up in the inner wings. Those box sections at the top of the inner wing were exposed so mud collected up there and they would rot out along the top of the suspension turrets with inevitable results. And on top of that they still rusted in all the same places as Dolomites. They were already very rare cars when I started driving in 1990.

[lisbon_road]

I'd suggest making up cardboard templates, seeing which ones you can make out of sheet steel.  If some are really difficult, I'd take them round a scrapyard and try and find something similar.  I remember a man making a rear valance for an HB Viva out of the roof of a Maxi as the bends were in a similar place (Story was that the Maxi owner continued to drive it for a while ...... I believed this when I was told.....)

Good luck, a formidable job but worse has been done.

[captain_70s]

MK2 Golf inner arches have been purchased and will be modded to fit. Trailing end of the inner sill, jacking point and door jam are now welded in.

Still on the lookout for an outer arch panel, but they're getting scarce...

 

 

[lisbon_road]

Wow, impressed with this determined work.  Pictures would be good.  I had a look and that outer arch is a very distinctive shape, v difficult to carve off something else for sure.

[captain_70s]

At work at the mo'. Shall sort pictures for the next big update post at the weekend!

The squared off rear arch with the trailing beading is a bit of a signature flourish for Michelotti styled saloons of the late 60s. It's very easy and painfully obvious to make an arse of the repairs, the prior bodgery actually looked decent due to the effort put into feathering in the repair panels with filler.

Hence my suspecting somebody has paid for a "restoration" at some point, rather than this being 40 years worth of backstreet garage MOT work.

[Tadhg Tiogar]

2 hours ago, captain_70s said:

MK2 Golf inner arches have been purchased and will be modded to fit......

Lokari apparently produces inner arch liners for Triumphs; I was quite surprised to discover this, but clearly there must have been demand for them. They even make arch liners for CXs....

[captain_70s]

HATE CARS.

So, engine was in, most of ancillaries bolted up. Went to wind up oil pressure with an adaptor on a drill. Nothing, no pressure. Eh? DOA pump perhaps? Then I notice the rapidly growing puddle of fresh 30W growing on the floor. Fuck.

Paint cups were deployed and several litres of oil salvaged.

The engine was separated from gearbox and shuffled forwards in the engine bay so we could see where it was leaking. Turned out a plug was missing from one of the oil galleries. Oops. Went to wind pressure back up, still no dice... Eh? Then the drill adaptor fell off the drill... and vanished straight into the engine. Fuck life.

So the engine was removed from the car entirely, sump drained and removed and the adaptor salvaged.

We then found the engine wouldn't turn, at least not without a lot of effort. Plugs were removed, bottom end was checked, nothing wedged in there... It was @GingerNuttz Dad who suggested the crank might have shifted with us heaving it out of the car, a tap on the pulley nut with a hammer had the engine spinning again. Fuck.

Crank float was checked, it was now at 0.025mm. FUCK. When checked out of the car it'd been at 0.018mm, dangerously close the max tolerance of 0.020mm. Well now the project is stalled (much like the engine would be if I ever tried to use the clutch in it's current state) until I can source custom oversized thrust washers. No idea how the tolerance has grown so much, perhaps I wasn't prying the crank hard enough when testing on the stand? Perhaps it was just favourable circumstances when we tested?

 

@Jikovron also just messaged me to say there is a gallery plug at the front of the engine too which will also be missing. That'll be the cause of the still missing oil pressure, bet it's behind the timing cover plate too. Why build an engine once when you could build it TWICE? ?

The good news is that this was all discovered before we fired the engine up and it destroyed itself...

 

In bodywork news Mk2 Golf inner arches have landed are are being modified to fit.

As they arrived.

Following mild butchery.

I also bought this:

We need this to arrive before the inner arch shape/depth can be finalised. The leading end of the arch will still have to be fabricated but we have the opposite side to use as a template...

 

So essentially the project is stalled until the arch panel arrives or a thrust washer solution can be developed. Shouldn't take forever but still a bit of a bastard.

 

[Yoss]

I put a like on it, not for the bad news but for the usual well written and entertaining post. It's shit now but it will make an entertaining anecdote in about twenty years. 

[LightBulbFun]

2 minutes ago, Yoss said:

I put a like on it, not for the bad news but for the usual well written and entertaining post. It's shit now but it will make an entertaining anecdote in about twenty years. 

wot he said  

its always a dilemma of mine, many shitters here are really good at making their posts well written and entertaining even when something goes wrong or something such

I want to like the post because its a good well written post etc , but I dont want to be seen as liking things going wrong LOL

[big_al_granvia]

hold that thought about the thrust washers, a mate of mine has access to a full machine shop, will pm him

[big_al_granvia]

bollocks, mate has a broken leg atm or he would have done it

try these lads, they have full machine shop facilities ans have built triump engines https://www.facebook.com/Brayon-Classic-Engineering-175192409285114/

[Asimo]

On 8/9/2020 at 11:40 PM, Tadhg Tiogar said:

...unless you owned a Volvo.

This L plate bastard

was rotten as fcuk when I bought it in 1983, so 11 years old. I believed all the Volvo pub talk about them being immortal and didn't look at the inner wings or the floor.

Then the torque-converter stator seized...

[Talbot]

On 8/16/2020 at 3:37 PM, captain_70s said:

Crank float was checked, it was now at 0.025mm. FUCK. When checked out of the car it'd been at 0.018mm, dangerously close the max tolerance of 0.020mm. Well now the project is stalled (much like the engine would be if I ever tried to use the clutch in it's current state) until I can source custom oversized thrust washers. No idea how the tolerance has grown so much, perhaps I wasn't prying the crank hard enough when testing on the stand? Perhaps it was just favourable circumstances when we tested?

Did you do the tolerance test with the thrust washers well oiled?  It's entirely possible to get a film of oil behind the thrust washer, and then another between the crank web and the thrust washer.  Times 2 for the other one, and suddenly you've gained 0.005mm that isn't really there.  Usually when checking crank endfloat you need to apply a reasonable amount of force to the crank to ensure that it's definitely solidly up against each of the washers in question.  Also, it should be very repeatable on a dial gauge.  If the reading varies by 0.001/0.002 mm each time you check it, that's usually a sure sign you have something amiss.

What's more concerning is why the slightly excessive float is causing the engine to jam up.  There shouldn't be anything that by just moving the crank 0.005mm further than it should go then binds it up.  If you have the engine back out of the car, I would be looking very carefully to see what is causing the stiffness (ooh matron) when turning the engine over.  Can you hear anything clashing when you try to turn the engine over?  Also, which direction of movement of the crank causes it to bind up?

 

On the plus-side though, that's some superb work with the inner arches.  They can be an utter pain to get right, but the work there looks superb.  I highly highly recommend a hole or two drilled somewhere in the car so that you can get a waxoyl lance (or similar) in to the gap between the inner and outer arch and once the work is complete you can regularly flood that area with cavity wax and prevent corrosion in that seam.

[Jikovron]

Entirely my fault!

I reckon the crank grinding outfit I used put big fillets on the journals, and it looks like the shells go full width on the 1st and second position, I'm kicking myself as if I'd spotted that as a bind situation I'd have dressed the shells narrower so the crank could float freely.

Looking at the stock washers they only have a 10thou life before your into the backing steel which is probably a replacement interval of 20-30,000 miles or when 12-15 thou has been added to the float.

Custom ones will sort this, and the fillets will clearance faster than the washers wear.