Felly Fav and Trum. *Wanna see a fupped gearbox?*

[Yoss]

49 minutes ago, LightBulbFun said:

Starter motor season? 

 

so, preemptively, how does one change the starter motor on a Routemaster?  

I never did the starter motor on one but I did have to change the alternator on RM 2213. It is just like a car but bigger, obviously. You do it from underneath but you don't need to jack it up, just take the grille off and lie underneath.

Interesting* fun fact: the interior illuminated advert panel at the front downstairs runs directly off the alternator. If that stops working it's a sure sign the alternator is bolloxed. Most vehicles just have a small ignition light on the dashboard. Routemasters have a big fluorescent advert panel.

[LightBulbFun]

15 minutes ago, Yoss said:

I never did the starter motor on one but I did have to change the alternator on RM 2213. It is just like a car but bigger, obviously. You do it from underneath but you don't need to jack it up, just take the grille off and lie underneath.

Interesting* fun fact: the interior illuminated advert panel at the front downstairs runs directly off the alternator. If that stops working it's a sure sign the alternator is bolloxed. Most vehicles just have a small ignition light on the dashboard. Routemasters have a big fluorescent advert panel.

hah very cool I wonder how that works exactly, is it part of the exciter circuit like how charging light dash bulb is in a normal car? does that mean if the tube fails or fails to strike for whatever reason, you dont get any charging? (or is a Routemaster alternator able to self excite?)

or is it some other setup?

[Yoss]

That I can't tell you. I know what happens but I don't know how or why. 

[Yoss]

So Mrs Yoss got in green Favorit one day last week and noticed a note tucked under the windscreen wiper. When she got back out to retrieve it she also noticed a piece of plastic. It was part of the door handle. Somehow she had managed to get in without noticing it was missing.

The note was very apologetic and well written explaining that this womans granddaughter had run ahead and somehow broken it off. I don't know why her granddaughter was going round trying door handles but as I say it was a very nicely written note and she seemed genuinely sorry and left her phone number offering to pay for a new handle. I thought this seemed decent of her so I texted to say not to worry, these things happen with children and I have some spare handles in the garage.

And in the meantime it was still perfectly usable, like I say Mrs Yoss got in without even noticing. So off I go to dig out a spare handle and all I can find are mk1s. I know I have a mk2 one because I found some cheap on eBay a couple of years back and when they turned up one of them was a mk2 despite the picture being a MK1. I emailed the seller and he apologised, gave me a refund and told me to keep it. It's a fair mistake, most people don't even know there are mk1 and mk2 Favorits let alone what the differences actually are. 

But I'll be buggered if I can find it now. So I've bunged a mk1 on for now, they are interchangeable, it's just the outer cover that is different. You can't really see it from this far back anyway.

But you can closer up.

The early ones are actually the same as an Estelle, at least on the outside, and look and feel much nicer. They are just more tactile with the ribbed section. The mk2 are completely smooth and just look cheaper. Now I want to change the other three rather than find another MK2 for the drivers door.

You can see here where the clips have broken and where they slot in over the metal bit.

It might be possible to glue it back on with the right glue, it's not like they ever have to be removed anyway so I shall still keep it.

And just for the hell of it, the two together.

It's not often they get to park side by side. They have to park line astern in the drive but occasionally I have to swap them round and drive them up to top of our Close to do so. Then the sun came out while I was doing it so I couldn't resist a picture.

[Yoss]

I have put the original springs back on blue Favorit. Not quite sure how noticeable it is in pictures as they naturally have a large gap between the wheel and front wheel arch anyway.

Lowered.

Standard.

It was okay lowered but it was too stiff. When I did it our other car was a standard Felicia so we had one car that you could drive over speed bumps and potholes without worry. But now I have green Favorit that's even stiffer and that's the one with all the other mods too so I thought I'd put the blue one back to standard. Even the Triumph is a bit boy racered but it has been like it for over 25 years so it's staying like it.

I assumed it was going to be quite a simple job. I'd run it through in my head and decided I could probably do it in one afternoon but of course it took a lot longer. 

On the front I had enough bits to make up a whole strut beforehand so I just had to swap the struts, so two nuts at the top and one nut and bolt at the bottom but I managed to strip the thread on one of the lower bolts and had to go out and buy more.

I'm a bit confused by this.

The red spring is the lowered one and the black the standard. And yet with everything bolted up the red spring is longer, plus it is stiffer so you would think it would compress less with the weight of the car on it but it is definitely lower and stiffer once in place. I'm sure there is some law of physics to explain this but it beats me.

At the back I had the problem of the top mounting nut.

As you can see it's in a deep dished washer. No spanner would go in there and even a socket wouldn't seat properly so I ended up having to 'sharpen' a deep socket with an angle grinder.

I can't remember what I did last time when I put the lowered springs on in the first place but it wasn't this. That was seven years ago and I've completely forgotten.

On the plus side, the thread on the top of the rear shocks is so long that you don't need spring compressors.

By the time you've wound the nut to the end the spring has reached the end of its travel and putting it back together you can just lean on the spring a bit to get the nut on and then just wind it up with the spanner to compress it. Any job that doesn't need spring compressors is a bonus.

The springs make more sense at the back with the black one being longer than the red one.

 

Also the job was made more tricky by doing it in the garage but if I did it outside I'd have to put it at the front of the drive where it is wider but we have residents permit parking and this is the only car with a permit so the other two can't be left out.

It's not a bad sized garage for a single but it still means having to move the car over to do each side and you have to be careful when jacking up that you're not catching the mirrors on anything. 

Also not helped by the fact I've added shelves to every possible surface to try and help store all my spares. I really would like a bigger garage but it's not going to happen so you just have to make do with what you have.

 

But I took it out for a tour of the local speed bumps this morning and it is nice and comfy again. Obviously it rolls on the bends when you push it but not in alarming way.

I do have a rear anti roll bar off a Felicia which I could fit at a later date if I feel like it.

I only have the rear one though, where the Felicia had them at both ends where fitted (all 1.6 and diesels and late 1.3s too). I don't know how much difference the rear one will make on its own but I'm curious to find out. But not yet, I'm just enjoying the floaty ride at the moment.

[Zelandeth]

Those rear springs look suspiciously similar to the ones from an Estelle too...which I remember thinking looked absolutely absurdly long the first time I crawled under the back of one.

[Yoss]

3 hours ago, Zelandeth said:

Those rear springs look suspiciously similar to the ones from an Estelle too...which I remember thinking looked absolutely absurdly long the first time I crawled under the back of one.

Unlikely to be exactly the same seeing as one has an engine in the boot and one doesn't but apart from that they may well be similar.

[Yoss]

I really don't add to this thread very often because essentially the cars just keep working and nothing breaks but I've had a couple of jobs recently. 

On blue Favorit Mrs Yoss was complaining that the door wouldn't stay open and kept shutting on her when she was trying to get out. Sounded like the check strap and indeed it was. 

New one on the left, old one on the right. You can see the spring had bent and one of the little rollers had disappeared.

Which unsurprisingly was found in the bottom of the door, I mean where else could it go. 

I don't know why it bent but it looks like it could be bent back, though probably not easily. But one day these things things may become unobtainable so I'll keep it just in case. Mrs Yoss thinks I'm a hoarder but if I think something might be repairable it seems a shame to throw it away. She may be right. 

Annoyingly the new one was in door closed position and as it is designed to act on the weight of the door it is impossible to open by hand. 

Door shut position. 

Sticking it in the vice and tapping the end with a hammer moved it to intermediate position. 

But no amount of hitting would get it in to the fully open position so I had to refit like this which made getting the pin in very fiddly. So I dropped this screwdriver in the hole. 

And used the weight of the door to get it in to the open position whereby I could drop this little pin in. 

 

 

I had a far more important job to do on green Favorit. Blue Favorit is almost entirely standard whilst green Favorit is very much not so I thought I'd put a set of modern badges on the back. 

 

I thought about making up the Favorit name from the letters of other models but I was going to have to buy three badges to get all the letters. Fabia and Octavia would do most of it but I was going to have get a Roomster or Superb just to get the R and the badges are at least a tenner each which seems a little extravagant for a tight wad like me so I settled on this. 

I have 125bhp in this which is five short of the original Fabia VRS but it is lighter so I reckon the performance must be similar. I've justified it to myself anyway! 

The round badge is designed to fit on a curved surface so I had to file the top and bottom off a bit to flatten it out. I actually went a bit too far at the top but it looks okay from a couple of feet away. 

 

Sorted. 

[Yoss]

Wheel swap on green Favorit. The Ronals are nice and shiny but have 195/50s on which makes them very slightly too wide. The Team Dynamics, which is what the car came with are on 185/55s.

It's only 10 different but they do look noticeably wider. 

Both wheels are 7J so I suspect putting the narrower tyres on the Ronals would solve the problem which is what I shall do next time they need replacing. 

It's fine most of the time until we take the dog on holiday. The back seat is given over entirely to the dog (he's a big lad) and it's fine if we take him out normally but when we then load the boot with all the holiday stuff the tyres rub very slightly on the arch. It wouldn't be enough to do any real damage, it has just taken some of the writing off the sidewalls but it makes an annoying noise inside the car. 

We are off to Norfolk next weekend so it's back to the Team Dynamics. I like these too, the black matches the mass of black plastic all over the car but the Ronals do always look better when I put them back on. 

I've even invested in two new tyres. 

 

This was probably the first time we found out the Ronals rubbed a couple of years ago in westest Wales. You can see Chieveley peering at me through the rear quarter light. We had unloaded everything at the Airbnb at this point but it still looks a bit low at the back. 

[Yoss]

Green fav is not the quietest thing anyway but Mrs Yoss came back home the other day sounding like an American muscle car. 

Ah, that'll be why then. 

 

Obviously this being somewhat messed with the exhaust is non standard so a little bodgery was called for. But even that didn't go to plan so even the bodgery had to be bodged. No inbetween photos because Gungum was involved but we ended up with this. 

Not pretty and the tail pipe isn't in quite the same position but I don't think it's going to fall off for a little while. 

Ever since I bought the car the exhaust has annoyed me anyway because it came out just to the right of where it should and an extra hole had been cut out of the bumper. It also sticks out more than I think it should. It should come out of the rectangular slot alongside (is it rectangular, I'm not sure as it only has three sides?). It is that shape to match the cut out for the towing eye on the other side. 

So this has rather forced my hand now hasn't it. I should have done it sooner really. I've already done the front pipe and cat which goes just past the gear lever so there's only half of it to do. There is a company in Salisbury that made a whole bespoke system for my Triumph including the manifold. That was over ten years ago and it's still perfect so I think I shall be giving them a call. 

I have a brand new bumper in the loft (who hasn't?) which I shall put on blue Favorit as that's the sort of show car, its all original anyway, and then I'll put the bumper off of that on the green car so I can finally get rid of that annoying cut out. At some point anyway. 

[High Jetter]

51 minutes ago, Yoss said:

 

That's what I call a top-quality repair! Top shiting.

[Yoss]

Yes I started with the wide repair bandage but I couldn't get the jubilee clip thing to join up so I cut a piece of it out and wrapped the smaller bandage around it to hold it in place, with half a tub of gun gum underneath first. Followed by the two exhaust clamps to actually hold the two halves together and copious amounts of aluminium tape at the rear end as the pipe was just going in to the back box and had some uneven welding around it. 

Belt and braces, and another belt and some more braces as the saying goes.