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

[Fumbler]

12 minutes ago, Yoss said:

Indeed. It wouldn't be a straight swap, at the very least, the engine mounts would need to be fabricated. It wouldn't be worth it just to put the 1850 in, that only has 91bhp and I've already got 75bhp in the 1300TC so it really wouldn't be worth all the hassle for an extra 16bhp. 

But if you fit a whole Saab engine and box it could be fun but of course it's back to front. So you could possibly turn it round and drop it in the hole but I've no idea how you would then get the gears to work. 

I would love to get rid of the Rotoflex couplings on mine though. I see the Saab has normal inner CV joints. But there are probably easier ways to do that. 

The Saab box being alloy as well will probably make a nice improvement in the power to weight ratio.

[Dyslexic Viking]

This makes me wonder would it be possible to put a Saab turbo engine and gearbox in one of these?

[Yoss]

5 minutes ago, Fumbler said:

The Saab box being alloy as well will probably make a nice improvement in the power to weight ratio.

Yes it would. The time to have experimented with all this was probably about twenty years ago. There were probably quite a lot of ropey 99s and 900s going for peanuts then. I doubt they are common or cheap now. 

[Yoss]

15 minutes ago, Asimo said:

The SaaB 99 used gears initially, they changed to chains in about ‘76.  It is actually 3 separate single row chains. The VW K70 also featured a similar box under the engine arrangement. 
A significant problem with all of these layouts, and the Issigonis & Peugeot engine-over-the-box models also is the additional inertia of the gear train between clutch and gearbox: the poor synchromesh has to change the speed of all of those gears / chains instead of just the clutch plate. Not good for either gear change quality or synchromesh life. Compare to (almost all) motorcycles which have their gearbox parallel to the engine: clutch is at the gearbox end of the primary drive. Always.

Gear change is really nice on the 1300 when it's not worn out. The gear stick attaches directly to the back of the box, there are no linkages to get in the way. It gets sloppy because there are four plastic bushes where the lever bolts to the selector forks but they are a doddle change and I still have an unopened packet of ten with a unipart label on so they will keep me going for a, while.

Synchros can wear but I don't think any more than any thing else. 

[Yoss]

9 minutes ago, Dyslexic Viking said:

This makes me wonder would it be possible to put a Saab turbo engine and gearbox in one of these?

Or to put a Triumph 1300 in a Saab! 61hp in a 900 would be interesting. 

[Asimo]

Agree that the Triumph is a relatively good gearchange. I changed those plastic bushes on a friend’s 1300 many years ago, ( then the engine, then I crashed it a bit for him, then he crashed it properly☹️).  Good, direct linkage, nice mechanical feel.

Cetainly a better gearchange than on my (Triumph engined) SaaB 99 for sure. 

[Yoss]

3 minutes ago, Asimo said:

Agree that the Triumph is a relatively good gearchange. I changed those plastic bushes on a friend’s 1300 many years ago, ( then the engine, then I crashed it a bit for him, then he crashed it properly☹️).  Good, direct linkage, nice mechanical feel.

Cetainly a better gearchange than on my (Triumph engined) SaaB 99 for sure. 

Yeah, we've done most of that. Not long after I passed my test I was following a friend in his 1300TC when he lost it on a slight bend. I was following in 2000 mk1 and we really weren't going that fast but his car was still on crossplies (because original, didn't make that mistake again). His progress was stopped by a lamp post. A hexagonal concrete lamp post. There was an imprint of three sides of that lamp post right through one of rear doors from the sill to the roof. 

[Yoss]

Found a couple of pictures from the aftermath of the above incedent. 

It was the blue one. This is the good side. Mine was the white one and the engine was shagged so we decided to swap them over. The chap in the middle is the guy who crashed it. 

We'd never done anything like this before but the entry in the Haynes manual on engine removal was only about six paragraphs so we thought how hard can it be. And this all in a council car park, I think such things would be frowned upon now.

Weirdly this isn't too different to the job I'm doing now. This was 1990. Some things never change. 

Now, the front panel on the blue car was perfect which was rare on a 1300. The white one looks okay from here but it was stuffed full of filler. So we decided to keep it, so a friend came round with his big angle grinder. This involved moving the car to a different car park that was reachable with an extention lead from our house (still living at home then). 

This shows the bent side well. Unfortunately you can't see the dent itself. It really was a good sharp imprint of the hexagonal lamp post. 

[Rocket88]

Those were the days….. kerbside re sprays etc….

[Asimo]

Triumph 1300 stories...

I was asked to recover a stolen / found 1300. Cool, always fancied a go in one of those.

So out to a layby in the middle of nowhere where it had been dumped.

I noticed it looked a bit high at the front.

Shrug.

I sat in, tried a few keys and soon found one that worked in the ignition. Turned the key, nothing.

Asked for a push start, went for 2nd gear and no gear-lever!

On further inspection, no gearbox and therefore no engine.

Dissappointing.

[Yoss]

Been to Alton bus rally today with blue Favorit. They have a classic car section too so I got in with that. Went for a walk and came back the new owner of my old bus as he hadn't seen the Favorit since its respray. The cars next to me, vauxhaul Firenza and a mk1 Escort had their bonnets up so I thought I'd have some of that, show off my 1.3 litres of pushrod goodness. 

Opened the bonnet to find a spattering of oil about the place and the oil cap was missing. 

It's not a great design, it's just a push fit there's no twisting or locking action. So I fashioned a replacement with what I had to hand. 

That was pushed into the groove nice and tight with a screwdriver and was still there when I got home. 

Had a spare in the garage and as you can see it is just this rubber seal that provides the friction to stop it falling out. It's not a great design. 

And even this brand new one didn't feel that tight. 

Perhaps I should stick with the rag. 

[skoda_fan]

On 7/17/2022 at 7:21 PM, Yoss said:

It's not a great design, it's just a push fit there's no twisting or locking action. So I fashioned a replacement with what I had to hand. 

That was pushed into the groove nice and tight with a screwdriver and was still there when I got home. Had a spare in the garage and as you can see it is just this rubber seal that provides the friction to stop it falling out. It's not a great design.

I agree it isn't. I had this problem more than once. I solved it by building up the rubber seal by using thick tight rubber bands. Not very technical but it seemed to work.

[Yoss]

That's not a bad idea. Something I shall have to look into. 

[666jjp]

19 hours ago, skoda_fan said:

 I solved it by building up the rubber seal by using thick tight rubber bands. 

 

18 hours ago, Yoss said:

That's not a bad idea. Something I shall have to look into. 

Might you have a problem sourcing these 😁

[Yoss]

12 minutes ago, 666jjp said:

 

Might you have a problem sourcing these 😁

I might have trouble sourcing good quality ones. We have two types at work. The big ones you could pick up a car with but they are too big. The small ones are crap and last about about three days. I wouldn't want them breaking up and falling in to the engine. That would be a little counterproductive. 

[666jjp]

but the management say we can use the small ones multiple times 😄 (lucky if it is twice)

[Yoss]

Work on the Triumph ground to a halt when we had the heatwave as I couldn't be arsed to drag myself out there, even in the comparative shade of the garage, after being out on delivery in the hot weather. It's not like I have a deadline. 

But I have been getting on with it, of sorts, over the last week. First of all, I want to debunk a myth. Though it may only be a myth in the very small world of FWD Triumphs. 

Rotoflex couplings. Some books and guides can't stress enough that you must strap up a Rotoflex before removing the bolts or else it will expand out of shape and you'll never get the bolts back in again. This is bollocks. Sure enough new couplings come pre banded, like so. 

And if you remove that strap it will expand so you are supposed to fit it first then take the strap off. But old ones have plenty of flex in them and it's really not necessary. 

This is me sliding a bolt in to place, it has to be pulled outwards to clear the diff cover, which is more difficult if you've strapped it up. As you can see from the other bolts already fitted to the inner shaft, they are special bolts with a long unthreaded nose which helps locate them in the hole. 

Then with a bit of trial and error which also includes a variety of big spanners to use as levers and a trolley jack under the hub to change the angle of the driveshafts they will go in. 

So once it is in the spanner I've got my hand on below is being used to lever the bolt in until the threaded part meets the driveshaft. Then the ratchet spanner is used to do it up whilst the third spanner is merely holding it against the subframe to stop it going round. 

 

The ratchet spanner is an essential tool for the job. There's no room for a socket and only about sixty degrees swing room and a very long thread. And six bolts each side. So with a normal spanner you'd be here for days. 

 

This shows the full flex of the fitted coupling. 

I'd love to get rid of these completely and have normal inner CVs like modern cars but there we are. 

 

Work has been further delayed by the dog. He's taken to lying in front of the garage. 

Then I put this cardboard down so I could rest the bonnet on it and before I could even pick the bonnet up he'd bagged it for himself. 

So I had to go and find another bit of cardboard.

 

But eventually I got it all together enough to start it only to discover it won't select third gear which is a bit of a bugger. This means at the very least I'll have to take the back cover off the gearbox which means all the oil will fall out again. 

These are the selector rods on the old gearbox with third gear selected. 

The middle of the three rods is in more than the others. For fourth it would be out. The bottom rod is first and second and the top one is reverse. I'm hoping when I take the back cover off there will be some reason why the selector isn't quite pushing it home properly. The selector forks are quite easy to remove and I have the old one to hand if need be. If its any more than that, then I have to go deeper and that'll be a bugger. Understatement. 

So I'm ignoring it for now and have moved on to MOT pre prep on green Favorit. 

 

In the mean time Chieveley is guarding it with his big stick. 

[Yoss]

First job probably not an MOT failure but an annoyance. When I first got it the gearbox mount was knocking. A new one might help but it's not really up to the job with almost exactly double the power of a standard car. Back in April I tried stuffing a bit of rubber in between the two sides of the mount and it worked so I thought I'd do it properly and cut these squares of rubber out with holes in. 

The idea being to slide the big bolt out of the mounting and drop two of these in (I made up three in two different thicknesses) and then do it up again. But I soon realised it wasn't going to be that simple as I was going to have to lower the engine/gearbox clear of the mounting. I couldn't be bothered at the time so just cut a slot in them. 

Like so and tapped it in with a hammer, until it looked like this. 

 

Well that was April and it was fine until this week when it started knocking again. I checked and one side had fallen out. Fair enough, it was a bodge and it lasted three months. 

So today I thought I'd have another go and made up some more squares. 

This time I had it jacked up with the wheel off then put a jack under the gearbox end. It was much fiddler than I was expecting. This is one piece sitting over the mount with the engine lowered. 

But it was very tight. I ended up removing the mounting bracket from the chassis rail to squeeze it over then trying to lift it back up but the holes for the bracket/chassis rail wouldn't line up so I ended up tying a rope from the starter motor to the strut brace to pull the engine backwards. Anyway they are in now. 

It's still a bodge but a slightly better one. 

 

Next jobs are to trace the non working horn and hazards. Chieveley is already on this. 

[Yoss]

I've refitted a cat to green Favorit. I did ask the seller how it got through the emmisions and the seller said it passed no problem. But then he was trying to sell it so I take that with a pinch of salt. I spoke to my regular MOT place and they said if it was built with a cat it should have one. So I looked at the original Polo front pipe and compared it to what I had under the car. It looked like they had cut the pipe just behind the flexi and welded in a bit of scaffold pipe. I meant to take more pics but forgot, but this is what I bought. 

It looks fairly straight with an offset for the cat so I thought if I chopped the pipe in the right place it should fit straight on. 

I bought this to join the two parts together. 

It was a bit tight on the front pipe but a few minutes with a file and wet and dry cleaning up the ends had it sliding on nicely. 

So I lined the old and new pipes up and clamped the flanges together to make sure they were in line. 

Which showed me where to cut. Then marked it with a cable tie and drew round it. 

Cable tie moved here just show the line more clearly. 

Then I cut it. That's when I found the old pipe was slightly thicker than the new one. I think the inside diameter was the same but it was slightly thicker metal. I had measured before cutting and thought they were the same but obviously not quite. Obviously I had to cut it to find this out and now I had a car in pieces in the drive and a Triumph sitting broken in the garage behind and only blue Favorit still working so I needed to do something. So I put the joining sleeve in the oven for a few minutes and put a bit of a taper on the end of the pipe with the angry grinder. Tried it again and it was better but not quite. So back it went in to the oven which was whacked up to full and I went and cleaned up the pipe a bit more, shaving a few microns off the outside, but more to clean the surface than actually make it thinner, then covered it in grease. 

Went back and got the sleeve which by now I could barely hold even with thick hide gardening gloves. Lined it up and just held on the end. A block of wood and a lump hammer had it most of the way on, certainly far enough for it never to come off again. Obviously it has now shrunk wrapped itself over the pipe so it is never coming off again. 

Won't need any gun gum here. 

The rest was fairly plain sailing and the cat sits in the hole almost exactly where it should which was good as obviously it had a different engine and downpipe originally. 

 

One difference is the Polo had two lambda sensors, one either side of the cat, as is normal now, but the Škoda only ever had one, so I found an old one to fill the hole. This is a temporary bodge, I have a proper blanking plug on the way. 

Obviously, as far as I know it still works so I didnt want to chop the wires off so I've just cable tied them to the chassis rail. Hopefully the blanking plug will arrive before the MOT next Friday but I don't think they can fail it, it just looks a bit shoddy. 

Likewise this exhaust mount won't stretch to the peg so I need a longer one. It's is currently hanging on with two cable ties. 

But considering it's made for a different car it fits surprisingly well. 

 

I'm probably the only person buying a boy racer car and demodifying it but I'm glad I did. The exhaust is already quieter, the cat obviously has some baffling qualities and previously when driving with the windows and sunroof open you would get exhaust fumes coming back in to the car. Now you don't which is a definite improvement. I wanted a faster Favorit but I want it to be as smooth and quiet as the original Polo GTI would have been. Once I've got the MOT I may look at getting rid of the K&N cone filter. 

 

[Yoss]

Next job was a bit more frivolous. One of the side repeaters was very very dim,  in fact you could only see it at night. 

This might have something to do with it. 

On top of that the lens had gone opaque and closer inspection  showed lots of micro cracks. It looked as though it could dissolve at any moment. 

 

So I found a nice set of smoked lenses on ebay, complete with backplates and new wiring, and even the little grommet that goes in the inner wing. 

These look better. 

And match the smoked rear lenses. These were standard on later cars. 

Which are only slightly spoiled by the big orange blobs inside. 

These are actually separate orange plastic inserts. This seems excessively over engineered, I'm sure orange indicator bulbs were available by 1993. 

 

A few years ago I managed to get a set of clear side repeaters for the blue car. 

And these match the clear rear lenses. 

I don't just throw these things together,  it is all carefully planned. Though I must admit I'm a bit surprised that aftermarket lenses are available at all for such a niche car. These came from ebay in  this country but I suspect they are made in China for the Czech market where there is obviously a much bigger following. 

In fact a courier stopped his white van outside our house this afternoon  and said "you never see Favorits any more and you've got two of them!" in an East European accent. Turns out he was from Slovakia and he started telling me about buying a Škoda 105 back home for 50 euros. If only. 

Old and new(er) lenses compared. 

[Yoss]

MOT day for green Favorit today. It didn't pass but nothing drastic. I've been dreading this more than any recent MOT I can think of as it's the first one in my ownership and it's the first car I've ever bought blind on ebay, (something I swore I'd never do!). Today was the day I found out if I'd bought a lemon. And the gearbox work on the Triumph has pushed me back a few weeks and I've not really had as much time to look over it as I'd hoped. 

Four jobs,  I've done three already. I knew it was going to fail because I suddenly remembered this morning that one of the washer jets was weak and I going to clean it out with a pin. That was when I found they weren't working at all. A quick check of the wires and fuse showed nothing and I had to go so I left it. 

Back home I did the basicest of checks by running two wires direct to the battery. Still nothing. I dug out the spare washer bottle I had from the Felicia. I thought they were identical but turns out they're not. 

Favorit had two separate motors for front and rear,  Felicia just the one but with two outlets. Can't remember how this works,  I'm sure the rear washer came on automatically with the rear wiper. How did it know which way to send the water with only two wires? Anyway doesn't matter now,  I stuck it in and it worked. 

This might explain why the old ones stopped working. 

 

Then there were the number plate lights which was annoying because they too were working when I checked last week. This turned out to simply be one of these earth wires falling off. 

I put it back on and it was still loose so I crimped it a bit and put it back on again. I love it when fixes are this simple. 

Headlamp aim was too high but we'll do that when I go back for the retest. Favorits have lovely big easy to use knurled knobs for this. 

And the last job, and the only one I've yet to do, is that it failed the emmisions on the lambda sensor. I was going to put a spare one I had on wheen I noticed a broken wire going in to the plug on the loom side. I'll fix that tomorrow and go back for retest Monday morning. 

Neil went round it with his special hammer and found no rot at all so that's a relief. Looks like it's not a lemon after all. 

 

Motors by Tesla. 

[Zelandeth]

Those washer motors with two outlets work by spinning the motor different directions - there's a poppet type valve on each outlet so whichever side sees the most pressure will open.

Unless it's duff - like on the Corsa I had which resulted in both front and rear windscreens getting washed when you went for either control.

Quite a clever way of reducing the component count and doesn't seem to really cause any more issues than washer motors in general in my experience at least.

[Yoss]

Seems obvious when you say it,  but that would never have occurred to me. 

[High Jetter]

37 minutes ago, Zelandeth said:

Those washer motors with two outlets work by spinning the motor different directions - there's a poppet type valve on each outlet so whichever side sees the most pressure will open.

Unless it's duff - like on the Corsa I had which resulted in both front and rear windscreens getting washed when you went for either control.

Quite a clever way of reducing the component count and doesn't seem to really cause any more issues than washer motors in general in my experience at least.

As I discovered, same on R75 / MGZT. Clever, really. 

[Yoss]

Obviously as the Favorit loom has four wires and the Felicia motor only has two terminals I can only make it work on the front washers but that's all I need for the MOT.

 The rear washers haven't worked since I've had it anyway. Eventually I may be able to find replacement motors and put the Fav washer bottle back in. 

[somewhatfoolish]

On 7/19/2022 at 5:04 PM, Yoss said:

I might have trouble sourcing good quality ones. We have two types at work. The big ones you could pick up a car with but they are too big. The small ones are crap and last about about three days. I wouldn't want them breaking up and falling in to the engine. That would be a little counterproductive. 

Put a turn or two of self-amalgamating tape around the cap, will be more durable than rubber bands.

[artdjones]

8 hours ago, Yoss said:

Obviously as the Favorit loom has four wires and the Felicia motor only has two terminals I can only make it work on the front washers but that's all I need for the MOT.

 The rear washers haven't worked since I've had it anyway. Eventually I may be able to find replacement motors and put the Fav washer bottle back in. 

There are universal motors available cheaply. 

[Yoss]

So now the green Favorit has its MOT I've moved back to the Triumphs gearbox. As mentioned before I was having trouble with 3rd gear on the new* gearbox. I've had the back cover off and can select 3rd and 4th easily by pushing and pulling the selector rod but when turning the engine over on the key (there's no oil in the box so I'm not starting the engine) there is still a noise like it is not quite engaging. The front wheels are turning so it is engaging but it sounds a bit like the synchro sleeve and gears are still slightly touching. 

 

So the plan is to strip down the old gearbox and understand it before I tackle the one in the car. This is to make sure I know how to put it back together again. It is handy having the broken 'box alongside the car. 

I shall detail that in a later post. In the meantime have some pictures of an utterly utterly fucked gearbox. 

This is the main idler gear. I've never seen anything like this. 

This is the gear above the idler that the input shaft sits in. I mean it's fucked but it doesn't look that bad compared to what it was running against. 

 

And this is fourth gear that sits under the idler. 

 

Then I pulled the layshaft out. The book says to use a slide hammer. I have a home made slide hammer that a friend knocked up for removing the input shaft but the layshaft has a smaller hole in so I just screwed in a 7/16 bolt put some mole grips on the end and wiggled it and it fell out. 

But this is the far end of the layshaft, the opposite end to the fucked idler. 

Several chunks of teeth missing. 

Once this was out I could see in to the back of the box. 

It looks like a cave full of rocks.

A bit closer. 

That's not good is it? 

 

[Zelandeth]

That's pretty impressive in terms of a gearbox that hadn't ejected significant amounts of itself through the side of the casing!

What the heck happened in there?!?  Guessing manufacturing defect in the idler given that everything else seems pretty much untouched (likely would be fine if not for bits of shrapnel from that floating around).

[Yoss]

It started making noises a couple of miles from home and I managed to drive it back. It had been noisy for years, I mean at least a decade, and I was assuming it was one of the many bearings in there. I've done many thousands of miles including three Club Triumph round Britain runs which is 2000 miles in 48 hours and it never got any noisier. Then bang. 

Maybe one tooth fell off got caught in the right place and took the rest with it? I really don't know.