Zel's Motoring Adventures...Volvo, Renault, Rover, Trabant, Invacar & A Sinclair C5 - Updated 30/04.

[plasticvandan]

They were mounted on the deluxe versions out the factory on top of the bumper,usually with a reverse light on the other side,usual thing when they get imported is to swap the lights over to the UK side.only other reg I can think of is side repeaters and rear belts which I don't think we're until 86.

[Weird Car]

1 hour ago, plasticvandan said:

They were mounted on the deluxe versions out the factory on top of the bumper,usually with a reverse light on the other side,usual thing when they get imported is to swap the lights over to the UK side.only other reg I can think of is side repeaters and rear belts which I don't think we're until 86.

Also an option on later S models as demonstrated by my friends very highly spec’d 601 S

[mat_the_cat]

If you only want to fit one light (which I personally dislike due to lack of symmetry), you can get LED 'bulbs' which serve both reversing and rear fog light versions. I guess you could fit two lamps with clear lenses, and still be symmetrical, mind.

[Zelandeth]

Well I think I've found where one of the major rattles is coming from.

Both of the bolts holding the heat exchanger onto the manifold shouldn't be spinning.  That's what I get for reusing the old bolts with questionable looking threads.  Have nipped things back up for now, but I'll replace them when it all comes apart in the near future to fit the new exhaust once it arrives from Germany. 

Was back out here on Tuesday despite technically not needing to.  Can't believe it's been a year (and a month actually) already since last time.

Where @Andyrew's welding work got a glowing review as we kind of expected.

I was curious to get a second opinion on the noise I'd heard a couple of times from the nearside rear wheel and whether there were potential bearing issues there.  However it all seems quiet and there's no real play.  Given it was right after the car had been laid up for several months we both reckon it was just some crud floating around in the drum and it's since cleaned itself up.  If it does it again I'll pull the drum off and investigate further.

Twenty minutes later and after some head scratching on the part of the tester on several occasions when he noticed odd bits of engineering that were missed last year (apparently the spring actually serving as the upper control arm wasn't something immediately noticed), this happened.

I'll take that.

I've had another look at the plugs and it looks like we're closer on the mixture now. 

I will check again soon, but it was pretty obvious they were going to end up sooting up on the previous setting.

I do have a question for those of you more used to two stroke engines.  I know that running at high engine speeds and light throttle isn't good for them, so under those circumstances (i.e. cruising at 50-ish) it's good practice to periodically let the engine drop to idle and then give it a good blat of throttle to get some oil into the picture.  The thing I have no good picture of though is how often to do that when driving?  It seems especially relevant now as holding that sort of speed now requires really very little throttle at all, but the engine is obviously spinning just as fast as it always was.  Would just be nice to know I'm doing as much in the way of good practice as I reasonably can to hopefully stave off any avoidable failures down the line.

Another question for those of you who know these cars: How noisy is your gearbox?  Wasn't really obvious before the horrendous racket from the old engine was gone, but it sounds to me like there's a lot of noise most likely coming from the input shaft side of things.  Having some idea of what's normal on these cars would be useful there to know whether it would be wise to start keeping my eyes open for a box.  Hopefully being something less prone to needing rebuilds on a periodic basis one of those wouldn't be such a pain to find on the used market than an engine.  Also isn't very big, so just keeping one in storage in case it's one day needed isn't the end of the world.

Edited April 25 by Zelandeth
Correcting autocorrect (again)

[GlenAnderson]

Use the freewheel to “coast and burn”. Rather than trying to sit bang on 50, gas it to 55 then let it coast back down again. 

[Andyrew]

Excellent news on the MOT, that garage looks like my kind of place! 

When you get your new exhaust, don't go fighting with ants on the drive, just pop over and we can put it on the lift. 

 

[Bear]

8 hours ago, Andyrew said:

Excellent news on the MOT, that garage looks like my kind of place! 

When you get your new exhaust, don't go fighting with ants on the drive, just pop over and we can put it on the lift. 

 

Are those... Trab-ants?

Need a park and food based meetup for owners of these cars just so you can get Trabants at a picnic.

[Zelandeth]

Spot the difference...

Yeah, have finally started doing something about the large chunks of paint that are missing.

Few examples.

I'm not interested in making an invisible job of it, I just want the car to look cared for and presentable from ten paces.  So we're not going overboard.  Bit of paint in the right places will make a big difference though.

[Zelandeth]

Example of how much difference a little paint can make.

Primarily the rear panel I'm pointing at here.

This sticker I'm afraid will have to go.

I usually dislike stickers and the like on my cars, but when they've been there this long I'm always a bit conflicted - this one though is shedding bits of silver foil every time I lean against the car putting stuff in the boot and is looking really shabby, so it'll have to go.

It's going to be an absolute pig to remove though as there's absolutely nothing structurally speaking left of it - except the actual adhesive of course!

[paulplom]

I always thought these were grp or fibreglass.

[Weird Car]

41 minutes ago, paulplom said:

I always thought these were grp or fibreglass.

The main monocoque chassis is steel with Duoplast panels screwed and adhered in place on the sides, bonnet, roof and boot 

[Zelandeth]

4 hours ago, paulplom said:

I always thought these were grp or fibreglass.

Structurally kind of like a tiny P6.  It's a steel skeleton with plastic panels hung off it.

 

[Zelandeth]

The other thing I should have mentioned in that last reply is that Duroplast is actually quite a different material to fibreglass.  It really is its own thing.  From a "what is it?" perspective the best summary would be cotton fibre reinforced bakelite.  Though the way panels were made was closer to what you'd expect from steel than most fibreglass processes.

The resulting panels are quite different to fibreglass.  I don't have a huge amount of experience with GRP panelled cars outside of the Invacar and a couple of friend's Reliants, but the Duroplast panels on the Trabant feel a little heavier but much stiffer than most GRP panels I've any experience with.  

People like to joke about it, but honestly it seems to be a material which really is well suited to the way it's used here.  Aside from the bonnet (which in my case has been damaged anyway so may be more floppy because of that) you honestly wouldn't really know this wasn't a steel bodied car.  There's none of the frame flex and body rattling which usually seems to go with the territory.

You need to get the oft repeated jokes about them being made out of cardboard out of your head - It really is properly sturdy stuff.

-- -- --

Big old box was picked up from Parcel Force today.  Which has been through the wars a bit en route.

Though the innards were well protected and nothing had escaped.

This is what was fished out after about ten minutes of de-packaging.

It's astonishing how much pipe there seems to be in even a really basic car exhaust when it's off the car and inside the house.

It doesn't sound like a lot on paper, but you can definitely see it is bigger than the standard pipe when you compare them.  Doesn't look ridiculous though.

Apparently there are differences to how the innards of the heat exchanger/expansion box are set up compared to the standard one.  How much difference it makes in the real world remains to be seen.

It's actually only held on the car in four places, and they're all actually easy enough to get to.  Only two require crawling around under the car, the ones on the silencer.  I'll have a quick look at the state of those tomorrow so I know what sort of fun and games we're in for.  Everything else has been off recently so shouldn't be too much of a headache.

[plasticvandan]

The oily two stroke residue should work to your advantage in undoing bolts. 

I thought duroplast wasa great material,but it is only really suitable for panels rather than shells ala grp. The process to make the panels was very unpleasant for those who did it,but it doesn't start craze,delaminate or crumble like old fibreglass did.

[SiC]

Products are still made in it today! I spotted this in Lidl at the beginning of the year.

 

[Inspector Morose]

Having been and see the machines that made the panels that made the body that made the car that Vlad drove, I ca tell you some itty bitty factoids about duraplast.

BL experimented with it in the 70s and made a run of mini boot lids out of the stuff. Somebody also made suitcases out of it.

It doesn’t degrade. Ever. This is a very big problem as the only way to get rid of Trabbi panels is to grind them up into a powder. Many dead Trabi shells were dumped and buried at the waste sites around Germany after the wall came down. Unlike the rest of the waste, they will not decompose and are capapble of being dug up after many years and bolted back on to a car with no problems.

The stuff is made by first taking cotton waste and shredding it into something that loosely resembles cotton wool. This waste can be from clothing factories, old factory overalls, anything really as long as it was cotton. I once found a shirt button embedded inside a front wing of one of my Trabbis after a slight wallop necessitated a wing change.

This cotton waste wool is laid down into a mould and the phenolic resin is poured on top. Another layer of cotton, another of resin, and so on up to about seven layers or so.

The mould is part of a steam heated press. The two halves of the mould are bought together and put under large pressure and steam heated. Bake for a few hours or so then hey presto, when the mould is separated, one panel to be trimmed and fitted (usually by the Turkish workers. There was a lot of Turkish at the Trabant factory as no sane east german would want to work in the incredibly dangerous and life shortening parts of they were mainly to be found in assembly and testing.

This process took a ridiculous amount of time and was a) quite toxic work and b) the many machines needed to produce what was really only a modest number of panels was huge. In other words, great for low volume but not very scaleable. Luckily the Trabant was not being produced at Japanese levels of production and so a 24 hour shift on the panel production lines could just about keep up with the rest of the factory.

 

[Zelandeth]

2 hours ago, Inspector Morose said:

Having been and see the machines that made the panels that made the body that made the car that Vlad drove, I ca tell you some itty bitty factoids about duraplast.

BL experimented with it in the 70s and made a run of mini boot lids out of the stuff. Somebody also made suitcases out of it.

It doesn’t degrade. Ever. This is a very big problem as the only way to get rid of Trabbi panels is to grind them up into a powder. Many dead Trabi shells were dumped and buried at the waste sites around Germany after the wall came down. Unlike the rest of the waste, they will not decompose and are capapble of being dug up after many years and bolted back on to a car with no problems.

The stuff is made by first taking cotton waste and shredding it into something that loosely resembles cotton wool. This waste can be from clothing factories, old factory overalls, anything really as long as it was cotton. I once found a shirt button embedded inside a front wing of one of my Trabbis after a slight wallop necessitated a wing change.

This cotton waste wool is laid down into a mould and the phenolic resin is poured on top. Another layer of cotton, another of resin, and so on up to about seven layers or so.

The mould is part of a steam heated press. The two halves of the mould are bought together and put under large pressure and steam heated. Bake for a few hours or so then hey presto, when the mould is separated, one panel to be trimmed and fitted (usually by the Turkish workers. There was a lot of Turkish at the Trabant factory as no sane east german would want to work in the incredibly dangerous and life shortening parts of they were mainly to be found in assembly and testing.

This process took a ridiculous amount of time and was a) quite toxic work and b) the many machines needed to produce what was really only a modest number of panels was huge. In other words, great for low volume but not very scaleable. Luckily the Trabant was not being produced at Japanese levels of production and so a 24 hour shift on the panel production lines could just about keep up with the rest of the factory.

 

Thanks for that.  I'll add a bit more detail on that on my webpage on the subject when I get a chance.

Went out to have a look at the exhaust on the Trabant.  The intention was to just see what was going to be involved in removing it.  Yeah, less than ten minutes later...

Total of six fasteners - four 10mm bolts on the hangers and two bigger ones on the manifold clamp, and the jubilee clip for the heater outlet and the whole thing just drops off.  The exhaust doesn't go up and over anything, and there's plenty of room under the car so it can just be pulled off intact.

Turns out the silencer was in pretty poor shape so I definitely made the right call to replace the lot.

It's definitely perforated somewhere around the inlet side.  Plus a black spot on the underside I originally thought was a splash of underbody sealant actually turned out to be a hole.

I'm kind of curious to attack this with the grinder to see if the internal structure is any different to a "normal" one to optimise things for the two stroke application.  It also rattles...so I'm kind of curious to see whether it's full of carbon crud - or the bits of metal which escaped from the original engine.  I'll need to cut the main pipe down to take it to the recycling centre anyway as it's unwieldy with it being so long at the moment.

It's basically impossible to judge the condition of the front box because it's hidden away inside the outer shell - but it externally looks pretty rusty and given that it's most likely as old as the rest of the system I'd not want to trust it long term.  Especially as there's very much a safety aspect here as a failure can result in combustion products being pumped into the cabin.

Less than an hour after I started we were done.

That is the easiest exhaust swap I have done, ever.  Okay, maybe the rear engined Skodas are possibly easier - assuming the fasteners hadn't rusted away to nothing and/or the manifold to downpipe studs decided not to snap anyway, though that always seemed to be a gamble.

I was planning to do this on a ramp, but it just seemed so simple I just got on with it.

It sounds way different.  Will take it out for a proper test tomorrow, but a very quick run round the block shows it sounding far sharper, and it is definitely a bit louder - but not obnoxiously so given the car we're talking about here.  

 

Excuse the portrait video.  I'll try to get a better one tomorrow and a proper test drive.

[Noel Tidybeard]

this has all the hallmarks of "never dare an idiot!"

49 minutes ago, Zelandeth said:

Went out to have a look at the exhaust on the Trabant.  The intention was to just see what was going to be involved in removing it.  Yeah, less than ten minutes later...

 

49 minutes ago, Zelandeth said:

Less than an hour after I started we were done.

🤣

[Zelandeth]

On 30/04/2025 at 23:20, Noel Tidybeard said:

this has all the hallmarks of "never dare an idiot!"

 

🤣

That totally could be one of my catchphrases!

Though it's usually "I promise, whatever I do I won't get distract...Oohshiny!"

[plasticvandan]

It should quieten down when it gets some carbon in there.Theres some great DDR footage of an ersatzteile shortage in the trabi story documentary,and exhausts were one of the things in demand. It definitely was designed to be quickly replaceable. On bikes of the period it was part of the maintenance plan to decoke the silencer with caustic and to clean out the ports,often wondered what the solution was with 2t cars (bike engines micros aside) as they will gradually block up with carbon.

I did have some success on an mz using the fire method,essentially stick a blow torch into the downpipe and keep it going until flames come out the back,once the carbon ignited it basically kept burning inside untill the carbon had been burnt off,then shake out all the soot.

[Bear]

2 hours ago, plasticvandan said:

It should quieten down when it gets some carbon in there.Theres some great DDR footage of an ersatzteile shortage in the trabi story documentary,and exhausts were one of the things in demand. It definitely was designed to be quickly replaceable. On bikes of the period it was part of the maintenance plan to decoke the silencer with caustic and to clean out the ports,often wondered what the solution was with 2t cars (bike engines micros aside) as they will gradually block up with carbon.

I did have some success on an mz using the fire method,essentially stick a blow torch into the downpipe and keep it going until flames come out the back,once the carbon ignited it basically kept burning inside untill the carbon had been burnt off,then shake out all the soot.

Particulate filter, 1960s style...

[LightBulbFun]

6 hours ago, plasticvandan said:

I did have some success on an mz using the fire method,essentially stick a blow torch into the downpipe and keep it going until flames come out the back,once the carbon ignited it basically kept burning inside untill the carbon had been burnt off,then shake out all the soot.

until your tuned expansion chamber turns itself into a lockwood pulse-jet?

[plasticvandan]

19 hours ago, LightBulbFun said:

until your tuned expansion chamber turns itself into a lockwood pulse-jet?

The 2 stroke expansion chamber,pioneered by Walter kaaden at MZ,he actually worked on the v1 and V2 doodlebug pulsejets (not by choice,it was that or get shot) and is where the idea came from

[Mrs6C]

On 29/04/2025 at 00:18, Zelandeth said:

I usually dislike stickers and the like on my cars, but when they've been there this long I'm always a bit conflicted - this one though is shedding bits of silver foil every time I lean against the car putting stuff in the boot and is looking really shabby, so it'll have to go.

It's going to be an absolute pig to remove though as there's absolutely nothing structurally speaking left of it - except the actual adhesive of course!

How about preserving it in situ with a few coats of clear lacquer painted over the top?

You could touch in the missing bits of the sticker too, to tidy it up. Touch-in would be hard to spot for something in that location.

[Zelandeth]

On 03/05/2025 at 10:41, Mrs6C said:

How about preserving it in situ with a few coats of clear lacquer painted over the top?

You could touch in the missing bits of the sticker too, to tidy it up. Touch-in would be hard to spot for something in that location.

I've made sure to get several high resolution photos so a replica could be made in future if someone wanted to.  If I'm honest I'd personally rather not have it taking up a bunch of space on the rear panel - I'm just not a fan of visual clutter.  I just don't feel so bad removing it when it's already falling apart.

Few photos from...whichever of our local classic car clubs it is, I honestly can't keep track of which one's which...get together a couple of days ago.

Not really been much to report this weekend as I've been busy with boring household stuff. 

I do note that the new exhaust on the Trabant is now thoroughly internally rust proofed.

Definitely a different school of thought in the two stroke world where seeing oil here is a *good* thing rather than a sure sign of utter doom.