Zel's Motoring Adventures...Volvo, Renault, Rover, Trabant, Invacar & A Sinclair C5 - Updated 13/11.

[Daviemck2006]

Autos don't do it as good as a manual. The only way I could get the bmw to do a wee drift was with transmission in 1 and left foot brake. Not that I did it a lot, it was only after getting an advisory for rear tyres during the mot it failed and getting replacement tyres before the retest. They may have been totally worn out by the time that 4 days passed haha

 

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[Zelandeth]

The Jag is trickier still as you can't fully lock it in 1st either.  There's a 5000rpm (I think) limiter after which it will kick into second.

Though from what I've seen while actually driving...that's when it's far more likely to break traction than when moving off!  If you're giving it full beans from standstill even on a dry road and heading in a straight line you often hear a chirp of protest from the rear tyres when it drops into second.  I've never dared do that on a wet road as it tries to slide around enough in the wet even when you're being sensible, and trying to provoke breaking traction at north of 50mph would just be asking for trouble.

She's quite tall geared as well - which makes absolute sense for the type of car it is, which is why she's not aggressively fast off the mark, but it's relentless.  Even though it's only a 3 speed auto with no lockup, 70mph is still well below 3000rpm.  Great for lazy continent crossing in the blink of an eye, not so great for burnouts.

I'm not saying however that I will be *entirely* responsible when I inevitably wind up with it at the FoD...I'll bet she will drift absolutely fine on grass if provoked...

[Daviemck2006]

The 540 would change up if you hit maximum revs too. Had to feather the throttle when I did manage to do it. All in the interests of educating myself to see what it did. It was murder in the wet until I put the goodyears on the rear. It squirmed about all over the place on even like 1/2 throttle. Enough to be called dangerous! The goodyears transformed it. My seat changes up itself too if you put it in manual mode and don't change up yourself. It will also kickdown in manual mode. Can be in say 5th out of 7 to pass a lorry, floor the throttle and it kicks down to 3. Kind of defeats the purpose of having a manual override

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[Tadhg Tiogar]

21 hours ago, Zelandeth said:

....  Even though it's only a 3 speed auto with no lockup, 70mph is still well below 3000rpm....

What ratios does your auto have?

[Zelandeth]

13 hours ago, Tadhg Tiogar said:

What ratios does your auto have?

I honestly don't know...and a quick poke of the internet didn't immediately reveal an answer.  I know these run a GM400 box and that this has the Salsbury Power-Lok LSD on it, but there seems to be conflicting opinions on what the final drive ratio on that is.

[Zelandeth]

Now the Invacar is back into regular-ish use I figured it was time to start trying to properly clean the interior a bit.  I'd got the very worst of the grime off originally, but there were quite a few areas which needed more detailed attention.  This is where we left off after maybe an hour or two.

At a glance not a huge difference, but a lot of the effort has been in some of the smaller areas.  Particularly the doors, both of which had quite a lot of rust staining down below where the windows had been leaking for decades.

This one was particularly bad at the front.  I'll need to put a touch of paint at the front there as it's actually stained the fibreglass below the runner, but it's a lot better.  I also need to get the thinners and remove that paint drip just forward of the door handle as that's driving me crazy.

Nearside door wasn't anywhere near as grubby at least.

The colour IS that different, I believe one of the doors is an Invacar made one, the other is AC made.  I *really* need to do something more elegant by ways of a repair to that rear corner.  The only reason I didn't glass it up originally was fear of getting resin into the door latch assembly.  Realistically I'll need to get the latch out to do this properly (or anything vaguely resembling properly).

In addition to the doors, the area between them and the rear bulkhead is looking a lot better now.

The access hatch really needs hitting with the power polisher and some cutting paste to try to get rid of some of the flaky paint etc on it but we're getting there.

Definitely need to look at getting the flooring sorted out because it is really letting things down - and I'm fed up of nearly faceplanting into the tarmac when climbing out.

Small stuff in the grand scheme of things, but making the car a nicer place to be is important in my book.

[LightBulbFun]

28 minutes ago, Zelandeth said:

The colour IS that different, I believe one of the doors is an Invacar made one, the other is AC made.

indeed going by the fibreglass textures and colouring the door in the first picture is an Invacar door, where as the 2nd Door is an AC Door

from closely examining AC and Invacar Model 70's I have noticed that Invacar made ones the unfinished side of the fibreglass has a more "wet"/smooth-ish texture to it, where as the AC's have a much "drier"/rough finish to it

which makes sense since the 2 companies used different fibreglass layup processes/techniques) and I noticed the unfinished side of AC Fibreglass is greener in colour then the Invacar fibreglass which is a bit bluer

which you can see quite well in this picture of the engine bay side of Dolly (on the left and REV's (on the right) "bathtub" service hatch cover

REV also has one AC and one Invacar door, but opposite  sides IIRC (do wonder if I have one of dolly's doors and Dolly has one of REV's doors LOL)

 

[PhilA]

Fling some checkerplate down on the floor, OLLI, innit.

[LightBulbFun]

8 hours ago, PhilA said:

Fling some checkerplate down on the floor, OLLI, innit.

funnily enough im pretty sure the floor is already made of aluminium on TPA! LOL

[Mrs6C]

Pics to follow in due course, but there was a bit of an impromptu Model 70 jamboree today, when Zel swung by the FoD with TPA. We measured and compared the various M70 drivebelts and confirmed that the Dayco 43-5639 belt as now fitted to TPA and HP2020 belt are the same length at 39 3/8" (1000mm) while the STY801 belt as fitted to Dolly is 39 1/8" (994mm). The HP2020 is around 0.5mm more narrow than the Dayco 43-5639 but this shouldn't make a practical difference in service.

A big win today for Dolly was removal of her carburettor again, which is off to Zel's for another deep clean. To celebrate, we had tea and hot cross buns, then I finished fitting the rear engine cover hinges and hoop-style stay. Zel supervised the cleaning of the locking catch and it now works and opens with the key as intended. All in all, a very good afternoon. Thanks, Zel!

 

[LightBulbFun]

1 hour ago, Mrs6C said:

Pics to follow in due course, but there was a bit of an impromptu Model 70 jamboree today, when Zel swung by the FoD with TPA. We measured and compared the various M70 drivebelts and confirmed that the Dayco 43-5639 belt as now fitted to TPA and HP2020 belt are the same length at 39 3/8" (1000mm) while the STY801 belt as fitted to Dolly is 39 1/8" (994mm). The HP2020 is around 0.5mm more narrow than the Dayco 43-5639 but this shouldn't make a practical difference in service.

A big win today for Dolly was removal of her carburettor again, which is off to Zel's for another deep clean. To celebrate, we had tea and hot cross buns, then I finished fitting the rear engine cover hinges and hoop-style stay. Zel supervised the cleaning of the locking catch and it now works and opens with the key as intended. All in all, a very good afternoon. Thanks, Zel!

oh awesome, good to have the different belts measured up,  

and happy to hear Dolly's carb has been removed I was wondering what was happening with regards to that, would be nice to have it ready for the next FoD gathering if possible  

 

[Zelandeth]

3 hours ago, Mrs6C said:

Pics to follow in due course, but there was a bit of an impromptu Model 70 jamboree today, when Zel swung by the FoD with TPA. We measured and compared the various M70 drivebelts and confirmed that the Dayco 43-5639 belt as now fitted to TPA and HP2020 belt are the same length at 39 3/8" (1000mm) while the STY801 belt as fitted to Dolly is 39 1/8" (994mm). The HP2020 is around 0.5mm more narrow than the Dayco 43-5639 but this shouldn't make a practical difference in service.

A big win today for Dolly was removal of her carburettor again, which is off to Zel's for another deep clean. To celebrate, we had tea and hot cross buns, then I finished fitting the rear engine cover hinges and hoop-style stay. Zel supervised the cleaning of the locking catch and it now works and opens with the key as intended. All in all, a very good afternoon. Thanks, Zel!

Close - The widths are backwards though - the HP2020 is 30.5mm wide, the standard belts look to range from 29-30 (the three I measured were all slightly different).  The take home figure though is "not enough to make the slightest difference" I reckon.

So as has been noted, TPA made another trip over to the FoD today - which honestly was a bit of an excuse to take her out for a run.  I wound up - thanks to utter complete navigational fail on my part - taking a huuuuuuge detour on the way home.  I can vouch for the fact that a Model 70 can actually be surprisingly fun on a road with nice sweeping curves - and that she was able to keep pace with modern traffic for the most part. 

Running the best part of an hour late by the time I got back to the house I then jumped into the van to leg it down to St. Albans to collect these...

Which were subjected to a bleach solution wipe down before they were allowed in the house or handled without gloves given the current situation.

Looking forward to getting those hooked up for a test run tomorrow.  Hoping they perform as well as I remember.  They're a bit cosmetically beat up, but so long as they work I'm not worried about that.

[LightBulbFun]

12 minutes ago, Zelandeth said:

Close - The widths are backwards though - the HP2020 is 30.5mm wide, the standard belts look to range from 29-30 (the three I measured were all slightly different).  The take home figure though is "not enough to make the slightest difference" I reckon.

 

im a little bit confused?

or are you saying this one was accidentally done backwards too?

 

On 25/08/2020 at 22:42, Zelandeth said:

This arrived this morning.

Along with this new oil pressure switch for the Jag - which was ordered a full 24 hours before the belt.  How Rock Auto get stuff here this quickly I've no idea.

This meant that I could finally get some actual measurements relative to the original Invacar belts, which I'd been wanting to for a while.  I'd hard a few mentions of the HP2020 being slightly longer so wanted to see how how much longer it was and whether it would be possible to take up the additional slack with the tension adjustment.

First up, an original Dayco 43-5639.

So let's compare that to the HP2020.

Unless I'm seeing things, those belts look to be as close to the same length as to be identical according to this tape measure.

How about width.  I measured the new belt I fitted a couple of days ago at 1 1/4" wide. How does that compare?

So it's fractionally narrower, but not by much at all.  The wear limit width wise according to the manual is 28mm.

So not a problem it looks like.  The slightly narrower starting width means we might not get quite as much life out of the belt, though at this point we're still trying to figure out what normal belt life actually is.  To be honest if it lasts a year of normal use and is an annual service item...it's a £30 current production part.  I can deal with that.

Of course this is theory at this point...while my measurements show that the HP2020 is all but identical to the NOS Invacar CVT belts, it may well behave quite differently in the real world.  My plan at this point is to get the HP2020 installed at some point shortly so I can get some real world testing done.  It looks really promising though.

 

 

[Zelandeth]

There were quite a lot of assumptions in the early days - plus I didn't have a new original type belt on hand when I took the original measurements.  Today's the first chance I've had to confirm what the width of a new belt actually is.  Ignore anything I did when the belt was on the car as that was done standing on my head while trying to read the tape from about three feet away.

[Zelandeth]

The new speakers have been deployed.  In case it's not obvious in the earlier photos they are a little larger than your average hifi speakers.  Here's a comparison to the Pioneer CS-585s which I have been using since 1999.

They're about three times the weight too.

Glad to report they seem to work perfectly.  Not quite as floor shaking as with the original system they were intended for, but I expected that really.  Still definitely an upgrade, though I'll need to rearrange the room a little as the tweeters are somewhat more directional than on the Pioneers. 

Back to the cars.

Quick and simple one on the Invacar today.  Back at some point in what now feels like ancient history I replaced my original seized indicator stalk with what seemed to be a reasonably close match, from a Series 3 Land Rover I believe.  This would have worked okay if it had a straight rather than cranked arm.  This makes it quite a stretch to reach compared to the correct stalk.

See the issue?

Helpfully this was acquired in a recent collection of some parts.

If I'm not mistaken this is shared with the Triumph Herald.

The comparison shows how much closer to the handlebars the correct stalk sits.

Far easier to reach.

It was a little grubby from many years in storage though.

A quick scrub up had it looking like new again.

Here we go, everything back together and cables wrangled.

I figured it made sense to move the indicators to the left as your right hand is already busy with the throttle.

While I was at it I rerouted the throttle cable so it no longer gets pulled tight when turning hard right.

The windscreen washer hose flapping around has been bugging me for ages too.

Sorted.

Quick and easy job really, but should make driving the car more pleasant.

[LightBulbFun]

21 minutes ago, Zelandeth said:

If I'm not mistaken this is shared with the Triumph Herald.

sadly im not actually sure what its shared with, I googled triumph herald indicator stalk and they dont seem to match unfortunately 

googling the actual lucas PN of the Model 70's indicator stalk does not turn up much at all sadly (and STY581 is the DHSS store code so obviously aint going to turn up much unless someone else is selling one from ex DHSS stock)

would be good to know what its from tho, incase they are hiding under a different part number and are actually all over ebay!

[dollywobbler]

Good move. Made a big difference changing to indicators left for me. I need a new stalk though after breaking mine... (Detent for main beam broken so it's on permanently unless I hold the stalk).

[Mrs6C]

3 hours ago, dollywobbler said:

Good move. Made a big difference changing to indicators left for me. I need a new stalk though after breaking mine... (Detent for main beam broken so it's on permanently unless I hold the stalk).

Did you remember to take home the one that @LightBulbFun gave you at the last FoD gathering when you both went off in the JCB? It's one we had in the Stash and we thought it should fit.

[Mr Pastry]

14 hours ago, LightBulbFun said:

sadly im not actually sure what its shared with, I googled triumph herald indicator stalk and they dont seem to match unfortunately 

googling the actual lucas PN of the Model 70's indicator stalk does not turn up much at all sadly (and STY581 is the DHSS store code so obviously aint going to turn up much unless someone else is selling one from ex DHSS stock)

would be good to know what its from tho, incase they are hiding under a different part number and are actually all over ebay!

Widely used on BMC 1100/1300 family and others from about  1966.

[LightBulbFun]

13 minutes ago, Mr Pastry said:

Widely used on BMC 1100/1300 family and others from about  1966.

ohh good shout,

from a quick google they seem to mostly have bullet connections, where as the Model 70 uses a 2 row plug of some kind I think

but if your competent with a soldering iron or such, it would not be hard to splice the correct connector on  

still wonder where the Model 70's one came from exactly, I almost wonder if its a part made in this configuration specifically for the Model 70? "this style switch with this connector please"

but its listed in the parts which should be obtained through normal trade channels section of the DHSS parts manual, so if it was Model 70 bespoke I would not expect it there

but it is a bit weird how I cant seem to find it anywhere on the internet, you would think being a lucas part it would show up somewhere!

[Mr Pastry]

3 hours ago, LightBulbFun said:

ohh good shout,

from a quick google they seem to mostly have bullet connections, where as the Model 70 uses a 2 row plug of some kind I think

but if your competent with a soldering iron or such, it would not be hard to splice the correct connector on  

still wonder where the Model 70's one came from exactly, I almost wonder if its a part made in this configuration specifically for the Model 70? "this style switch with this connector please"

but its listed in the parts which should be obtained through normal trade channels section of the DHSS parts manual, so if it was Model 70 bespoke I would not expect it there

but it is a bit weird how I cant seem to find it anywhere on the internet, you would think being a lucas part it would show up somewhere!

IIRC also used on Mk 1 Escort which I would guess had different wiring colours and connectors, (plus Old Ford Tax obvs.,) don't know exactly. 

Edit- "available through normal trade channels"  probably just means you could order it on that part no. from a Lucas stockist (there were such places) so it may have been a special for the DHSS. 

Edited September 6, 2020 by Mr Pastry

[Noel Tidybeard]

looks like the stalk from my 1973 mini 1000

[Zelandeth]

Having moved the indicators to the left and having the right stalk fitted has definitely made TPA more pleasant to drive. 

Things have been pretty quiet with my fleet in the last few days as I've been concentrating on getting some jobs ticked off on the Trevi as documented over on Six-Cylinder's thread.

Figured it was worth mentioning that TPA ticked over a milestone today though.

If memory serves, that's about 700 miles since I got her going again - though the rate of which miles are covered has definitely increased in the last month or so, so we should be over the 1000 mark pretty soon I reckon!

 

[LightBulbFun]

Woo Go TPA  

im curious do you know how accurate the speedo is against GPS or such?

[Zelandeth]

3 hours ago, LightBulbFun said:

Woo Go TPA  

im curious do you know how accurate the speedo is against GPS or such?

Astonishingly accurate.  According to the GPS speedometer app on my phone, 60mph is an indicated 61mph on the dash.

Far more accurate than anything else in the fleet!

[dollywobbler]

On 9/6/2020 at 1:25 PM, Mrs6C said:

Did you remember to take home the one that @LightBulbFun gave you at the last FoD gathering when you both went off in the JCB? It's one we had in the Stash and we thought it should fit.

Oh crap. I reckon that's still in the JCB!

[dollywobbler]

On 9/6/2020 at 2:09 PM, LightBulbFun said:

ohh good shout,

from a quick google they seem to mostly have bullet connections, where as the Model 70 uses a 2 row plug of some kind I think

but if your competent with a soldering iron or such, it would not be hard to splice the correct connector on  

still wonder where the Model 70's one came from exactly, I almost wonder if its a part made in this configuration specifically for the Model 70? "this style switch with this connector please"

but its listed in the parts which should be obtained through normal trade channels section of the DHSS parts manual, so if it was Model 70 bespoke I would not expect it there

but it is a bit weird how I cant seem to find it anywhere on the internet, you would think being a lucas part it would show up somewhere!

I spent some time at Holden Vintage and Classic once trying to find the right stalk. The basic stalk was used in a great many cars, though with different configurations and wiring - headlamp flasher on some, not others for instance.

[Mrs6C]

35 minutes ago, dollywobbler said:

Oh crap. I reckon that's still in the JCB!

I will rescue it and keep it safe for you!

[Dick Cheeseburger]

10 hours ago, Zelandeth said:

Having moved the indicators to the left and having the right stalk fitted has definitely made TPA more pleasant to drive. 

Things have been pretty quiet with my fleet in the last few days as I've been concentrating on getting some jobs ticked off on the Trevi as documented over on Six-Cylinder's thread.

Figured it was worth mentioning that TPA ticked over a milestone today though.

If memory serves, that's about 700 miles since I got her going again - though the rate of which miles are covered has definitely increased in the last month or so, so we should be over the 1000 mark pretty soon I reckon!

 

I wonder if that's a genuine 12k from new... I can't imagine the average mileage during the life of these would have been much - similar to a scooter I'd have thought?

[LightBulbFun]

9 hours ago, Zelandeth said:

Astonishingly accurate.  According to the GPS speedometer app on my phone, 60mph is an indicated 61mph on the dash.

Far more accurate than anything else in the fleet!

ah cool! I know @dollywobbler said the one in TWC was similarly accurate so I was curious how TPAs one was

im futher curious how accurate REV's one is, given she has the post March 1976 style larger speedo (still the same 1504TPM for what thats worth, I remember when talking to someone about smiths speedos as you do and he quipped "did not realise they made them that accurately!" in regards to the TPM LOL)

as a side note I did wonder how the supposed 82Mph top speed figure came about when the speedo only goes up to 80, but then I realised from your picture the small speedos technically go up to 86Mph! if you count the little minor markers after the 80Mph Major marker