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1977 Princess 1.8 HL


phil_lihp

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Thanks - this afternoon I redid the outlet pipe with the self-amalgamating tape and that has worked a lot better,  still probably not the final solution but will do until I can find the 100% correct housing.  Also, the stat housing seems to have sealed itself up overnight, as there's almost no leakage at all now and I let it run up to temperature.  Again, I now have the proper stuff to seal it properly but it will do for a short while.

While doing all this, I prodded the clutch pedal a few times and actually got some resistance, so stuck it in gear and actually got it off the drive and up and down my road without drama before it lost pressure again - pumping the pedal provides enough for a few gearchanges so I think a careful drive one evening when the roads are empty will get me the 2 miles through town to the mechanic.  Watch this space.

In the interests of not taking this karmic self-healing nonsense too far, the wipers decided to pack up mid-sweep when I washed the windscreen.  That was fixed by reseating the fuse in the slightly shonky fuse box.  I am starting to believe that it's sulking because it's been mostly ignored over winter and felt the need to vent its frustrations yesterday - now it knows it's getting some attention again, it has decided to play along - sort of like a passive-aggressive British version of Christine.

It even looks semi-presentable in the sunshine, from certain angles. 

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@vulgalour Good suggestions but I'm not worried about the suspension, there's a local place I've found which will do it properly for £50 and I was told at the time that it was likely to settle and need a topup after a while.  It's fully driveable as it is and doesn't look ridiculously saggy, it's probably down about 1-2 inches on the passenger side so I will get it sorted once the clutch has been done.  It was booked in at the beginning of the month but that got scuppered when the stat issue came up. 

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Man it's fighting you, well done for persevering. On the cylinder retaining nuts, what size are they, and are you using a 12-sided spanner? Might be worth tracking down a 6-sided and/or a fractionally smaller size if applicable like a 17mm instead of 11/16 or whatever.

They shouldn't be done up to gorilla levels of torque anyway but I guess 44 years of corrosion isn't helping

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You can, but would you really want to?  Having done it with mine through the middle of Sheffield in stop-start traffic some years ago I know I wouldn't want to repeat the experience, especially if there was the option for having it transported to somewhere that can fix it.

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Yeah I can hopefully get away without the clutch if it comes to that, as you say.  I've never really practiced that particular skill.

Fortunately this car has been so easy to resuscitate so I can't really complain about a couple of minor setbacks - the clutch hydraulics are all untouched from 1977 as far as I can tell so it's not too much of a hardship all things considered.     

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This sounds very much like the gentle resistance to being decommissioned. The failure of things hanging on and working initially and finally succumbing after some use after 2 decades of inactivity.   At least now ther is the knwlegd and desire and most of the parts to keep them going.  10 maybe even 5 years ago it would have gone across the bridge.  It's all your own fault for not using it.. you are a very bad man!😁

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Well that can't be true, I just used it!  Yep, it made the short trip to my mechanic without issue, rev matching and a moderately cooperative clutch meant it wasn't much hassle in the end, despite every red light being against me.

To be honest I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop regarding recommissioning, as it's yet to throw a proper hissy fit about anything much at all.  In fact I reckon most of the work it's had done to get it to this point is pretty normally for a 70s car with just over 80k miles on it, it's just all being done at once to catch up on 27 years of stasis. 

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On 09/08/2020 at 21:19, phil_lihp said:

To cap it off, I think both plates are original, the front one is quite mashed up and I will probably replace it if I can find somewhere that makes accurate reproductions but the back one's decent enough, it was previously attached to the tow bar and I noticed today that it's got the supplying dealer name on it - not sure if G Kingsbury & Son of Hampton sold it new in 1977 or used in 1979 to the chap who then owned it right through until last year.  I'm pleased to see that they're still trading!  

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On 04/09/2020 at 20:24, LightBulbFun said:

I noticed I accidentally fell behind on this thread so as you may be able to tell by your notification box now full of "LBF liked your post" notifications, I have now caught up :) 

keep up the good work always very interesting reading recommissioning threads like this one :)

 

 

 im pretty positive those are Tippers plates, in fact the same make/style of plate as found on my own car! 

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who still make plates today :) https://www.tippersvintageplates.co.uk/phdi/p1.nsf/supppages/tippers?opendocument&part=4

so you may be able to get new plates made in the exact same style still or have your existing ones refurbished by them 

(I have noticed the pressed style plates they show at the bottom of the link above have rounded inner corners where as yours and mine have squared/90 degree inner corners, so I would check with them if they still do the "hard" corner style still however)

 

 

 

@phil_lihp I was just talking with Stuart good friend of mine also an Invacar nutter etc, who is also a number plate enthusiast (he collects and researches all the different styles and fonts of number plates there where etc)

and we noticed that the Number plate on your princess and my Invacar the styles are not the same, if you look at the R specifically you can see they are different

so my friend was wondering if I could kindly ask you for some close up pictures of the rear number plate or if you could find any manfuctuers markings on it anywhere? :) 

(look at the black boarder thats often where you will find the plate makers name stamped)

if you could that would be most helpful! :) 

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On 2/28/2021 at 1:24 PM, phil_lihp said:

The cylinder bolts are little more than rusty lumps and are too close to the body of the cylinder to get a socket on them, although I do have a seal kit waiting to go on.

Dremmel/grind the heads off, remove the slave cylinder, unwind the remaining headless bolts and replace with new ones from your handy* local* fasteners supplier.

... although not now of course, as you've already taken the car to a mechanic.

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4 hours ago, LightBulbFun said:

So my friend was wondering if I could kindly ask you for some close up pictures of the rear number plate or if you could find any manfuctuers markings on it anywhere? :) 

(look at the black boarder thats often where you will find the plate makers name stamped)

if you could that would be most helpful! :) 

The car's not here at the moment and I'm about to be up to my ears in house move shenanigans but I will try and remember when it arrives back home.

4 hours ago, Talbot said:

Dremmel/grind the heads off, remove the slave cylinder, unwind the remaining headless bolts and replace with new ones from your handy* local* fasteners supplier.

... although not now of course, as you've already taken the car to a mechanic.

Yep, you're probably right, however it had to be moved ASAP and I don't possess a grinder.  In hindsight, I should have pushed that issue further up the priority list but meh, where's the fun in that?  

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  • 2 weeks later...

Minor Princess update, it's become a genuine garage find.  As in, I've moved house and have a full-sized garage which it just about fits in.

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It looks quite at home in a flat-roofed, slightly dilapidated garage - not surprising as the garage was built around the same time as the car.

I've made a monumental decision and ordered a new front numberplate from Tippers, they can't match the pressed metal in that font so we're going with a period-correct raised letter option instead.  The old one will of course stay with the car.

It came home last night after a spell camped out with my mechanic, it took him a couple of weeks to get around to it which suited me just fine, as it gave me time to move house and fill the garage with crap, then sort it all out.  He's fitted the NOS seal kit and honed out the cylinder so it's all working nicely now.  Next job in early April is a hydragas topup and I need to sort out the middle exhaust join, the bracket is partly missing so it's not supported so it rattles and has a bit of a leak at that join.  Oh, and I need to re-seal the stat housing now I have the correct gloop, it has a tiny dribble at the moment as I had to used incorrect gloop in a hurry in order to get it roadworthy.

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15 minutes ago, phil_lihp said:

@LightBulbFun there's some sort of mark at the top but it's so corroded I can't make it out.  Maybe some CSI image enhancement will tell you more but this is the best I could do.

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ah awesome! thanks for remembering to grab those and grabbing them for me :) 

I have forwarded the pictures to Stuart and ill keep you posted if he is able to figure them out :) 

I sadly cant make much out, other than a couple letters here and there, (is there anything more legible on the front plate per chance?)

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7 hours ago, phil_lihp said:

I'll take another look at the weekend, I can't get to the front at the moment as the car's squeezed in pretty tight.

my good friend Stuart got back to me and he says the rear plate is a Tucker Radiator Services of Bristol, Tucker "Moto-Plate" number plate,  of a rare slightly revised style he did not know about before a sort of Mk2.5

which is why it threw him initially as its similar to the Mk2 style but slightly different , but he was was very pleased to have discovered a new revision for his research :) (the front plate is a much more common Bluemels plate apparently, didn't notice it until now but yeah the front and rear plates are different!) 

he says Many thanks for grabbing the photos etc :) 

(also one for @MorrisItalSLX feel like it would be rude if I did not tag you in the this slightly in depth number plate post :) )

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6 hours ago, bobdisk said:

Is that "G Kingsbury..." a stuck on label. I remember dealers sticking their own names over original dealers names instead of making their own plates when they sold a car.

Yes it is - not sure what's under it, would be interesting to see where it came from originally but don't want to destroy the top label either, it would probably be the place that sold it to the long-term owner in 1979 after it'd had 2 years as a Rank Leisure Services company car. 

G Kingsbury is still going!  https://www.gkingsbury.co.uk/

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I had no real intention of working on the Princess this weekend, I have an entire house that needs dragging out of the 70s*/early 2000s into this decade but the sun was shining so I got stuck into fixing a couple of long-standing niggles.
*No, not the good kind of 70s, the dodgy wiring and woodchip wallpaper sort.

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Loving my flat, spacious driveway, one of the main reasons I went for this house.

First off, the driver's front window is the easiest one to open but still somewhat reluctant, the interior door handle seldom actually operates the latch and the door doesn't shut very easily.  I stripped off the door card, sprayed everything that moved with oil and grease, greased the window channels and reassembled.  The window is better, the interior handle now works properly and the door shuts more easily.  The other 3 will need doing in due course but for now, this one gets all the use so was more of a priority.  

Second job, the exhaust middle bracket is mostly missing, the unsupported joint blows a bit and the remains of the bracket knock in a most irritating way against the exhaust.  Seeing as I have very little hope of ever finding the correct bracket, I thought: What would BL do?  The answer was clear, so I set about lashing something together out of random bits I had lying around.

One mini spanner, some foil and an assortment of nuts, bolts and washers later:

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The result is a quieter exhaust and no more rattling.  I unbolted the remaining piece of the original bracket and found a mini spanner of the sort that comes with furniture in a corner of my toolbox, bent it into a suitable angle and it could have been made for it.  Now I know this is not 100% ideal as it has no bounce in it for absorbing vibration but it's better than nothing.

While I was under there, I took the bottom cover off the gearbox selector and gave it a severe greasing.  I went for a test drive and this confirmed the gearchange is now much improved.  It's still crap of course, it was when it was new, but it's a lot less stiff and awkward.  Always makes me smile driving this thing around, lots of people smiling and pointing, plus an enthusiastic wave from a young guy driving a lightly modded 80s BMW 3 series.

It's going to a local classic car specialist in a couple of weeks to have the hydragas topped up, they're not far away but are in the middle of nowhere so I needed a way to get to and from the garage.  I have a rather clever towbar-mounted cycle carrier which it turns out works just fine on this car - I will need to sort the electrics out as they're not yet wired in but it should do the job nicely.

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 It was pretty dusty and grimy from sitting around for weeks, so it got a good scrubbing as well.

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It was around this time that a neighbour I'd not yet met walked past with his dogs and got rather excited - he's in his 70s now, back in the 60s he worked at a local garage supplying and fixing Jaguar and BL cars - he PDI'd a lot of Princesses and said they often found rubbish hidden under the carpets when they went to fit seatbelts, which weren't installed from the factory.

Nonetheless he's a huge fan and was made up to see this one, he reckoned he hadn't seen one on the road in 20+ years.  We've agreed that when things settle down he can take it out for a drive - and he'll let me have a go in his late-model MGB which it turns out is hiding in the garage, and which he has owned longer than I have been alive.  He's recommended a local welder who should be able to sort the rotten bit around the driver's side rear door and arch  plus the holes in the C pillars.

They say if you want to meet people, get a dog.  Turns out a tatty Princess has a similar effect.

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We just had our first fail to proceed.  Can't really blame the car too much though.

As it was blocking the daily Skoda in, I took the Princess a couple of miles across town for the weekly supermarket errand.  Apart from deciding to bring back the shrill belt squeal out of nowhere, it drove fine but as I left the car park on my way home I thought the fuel pump sounded a bit busier than normal.  As I drove past the petrol station I thought, hmm, maybe it's low on fuel - the gauge doesn't work so it's a bit guesswork as to how much is in the tank but I remembered putting fuel in it not that long ago, plus it'd hardly done any miles.

I passed another petrol station and thought, hmm, that pump is a little bit busy.

You can see how this ends.  On the last steep hill up to my house, it abruptly conked out and a quick check confirmed the fuel filter was empty.  Sigh.  At least I was close to home.  The petrol can I'd thoughtfully stowed in the boot was...also empty.  

Once I'd walked back with a can of fuel it took a while to work out why it wouldn't fill the carb, turns out these electric SU pumps need a prime when run dry, I had to disconnect the pipe from the fuel filter and run it into a container for a few seconds.  It still wouldn't fill up the fuel filter so I bypassed it and went straight to the carb which worked and we made the final 0.2 miles home, albeit not running very well.  I've got some new filters on order so will fit a fresh one when they turn up.

On reflection, the last refuel was probably a) a lot longer ago than I first thought, possibly not even this year, and b) May not have been a full tank anyway.

Conclusion: I am a muppet.

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