project Maestro, please.

[vulgalour]

I may be accused of being lazy with this next instalment on the Maestro because I paid someone else to do the work.  Three things I really dislike doing are wiring, exhausts, and tie rod ends.  This next write up includes two of those things.

 

When I got the car it would pull quite badly and the tyres showed uneven wear.  I assumed it was the tracking, all the usual hallmarks for it were there.  There was also a visual identifier that the tracking might be a little off.  Compared to others I've tried and often failed to do, these didn't look too bad.  Trouble was I didn't have any way of getting a lot of heat in here and while I could have gone and bought myself a torch I just really didn't want to do it at all so not having one was a good excuse to farm it out to someone else.

While I was under there I saw this rot.  Remember this for a future update, because I totally forgot about it and it came back to bite me later.

TREs are widely available and cheap for the Maestro from a host of different suppliers.  I used these.

Took it to the garage who were supposed to be doing the tracking as well but it turned out they didn't actually do tracking.  Never mind, they fitted them for me and I was happy enough with that.

Here's how the tracking looked before with the old TREs.  You can see just how far out the passenger side wheel is sticking which means it is out a lot.

The second garage adjusted it for me and confirmed that yes, it was out by A Lot.  The weirdest part of the drive home was realising I'd been steering into the pull the car had been making and had got used to it, even down to holding the steering wheel off centre going down a straight road.  It was now way more predictable coming off roundabouts and the twitchiness had, unsurprisingly, gone.  Well worth doing.  Or rather, well worth paying someone else to do it for me.

The other issue that plagued the car was an exhaust blow, it sounded really quite bad.  The flexi joint was the culprit here.  Then came the challenge of finding a replacement exhaust part.  Some of my exhaust is stainless steel, some of it isn't, and this bit isn't an off-the-shelf item so far as I could find out.

I couldn't find a 1.3 manual downpipe anywhere.  I could find lots of 1.6 automatic downpipes that looked very similar.  So I got one and chanced it and then got in touch with Bower Lane Exhaust and Tyre who did a sterling job of fitting it for me.  I'm actually really happy I didn't do this one myself, the studs that joined the manifold to the downpipe snapped, it bit one of the mechanics working on it, and required a couple of hours of labour to sort out.  The only difference between this and the manual pipe is that the tailpipe end is flanged in the opposite way so they just had to modify the new pipe I'd got to fit the pipe on the car, something I probably wouldn't have figured out quickly on my own.  The drive home after getting this done was a revelation, at times I thought I'd stalled because it was so much quieter.

Well, that was easy.

[grogee]

2 hours ago, vulgalour said:

that joined the manifold to the downpipe snapped

Oh, hai

[Matty]

Love that you're not only keeping this going but improving it too. Qudos 

[vulgalour]

It's simultaneously the best and the worst car I've ever owned.  When things are fixed/improved, they stay that way, it's very unusual.

[2flags]

It's great to see one of these get some love. They were a good car in their day, never great, but not bad. Family motoring for the masses. 

[egg]

On 16/02/2023 at 13:30, vulgalour said:

Bower Lane Exhaust and Tyre

Nice update. I think that's where Furious Driving got his Alfa exhaust done?

[vulgalour]

I couldn't say, but I wouldn't be surprised since we're in one another's general vicinity and do occasionally see one another driving about.

EDIT: Actually, a quick scan through the vid and it is indeed the same place.  They like their weird and wonderful stuff there.  Did my tyres for the Princess too and they'll be doing the exhaust on the Lanchester eventually.

[vulgalour]

Those that saw the Maestro at the Flower Farm meet recently already know the result, but here's the passenger arch being tackled which should have been the easier side to do.

 

[motorpunk]

Instead of starting a new Maestro thread, I thought I'd add to this one. I went to photograph something pretty cool today for a mag feature...

[Noel Tidybeard]

that zorst look fruity

[motorpunk]

10 hours ago, Noel Tidybeard said:

that zorst look fruity

Yeah. I heard him coming 2 streets away. Makes a change from the usual Audi/VW farts and pops stuff.

[Noel Tidybeard]

16 minutes ago, motorpunk said:

Yeah. I heard him coming 2 streets away. Makes a change from the usual Audi/VW farts and pops stuff.

my EFi sounded noice with a 3" pipe😁

[vulgalour]

Chucked the spare rear doors on the Maestro today, gave me a good opportunity to check the condition of the two pairs of rear doors I've got.  Annoyingly, the spare with the massive dent is in otherwise excellent shape while the door that looks good is rotting the whole way around the door skin seam and is actually worse than the original despite appearances.

I'm going to see if I can beat that dent out, the condition of the door really does justify making the attempt and will likely be less work than trying to repair the original.  For the passenger side I'll just repair the rotten corner because surprisingly the rest of that door is in similar condition to the badly dented one (sans dent, of course).  The spare doors don't really make it look any better as they are, and they don't make it look any worse, they're just going to make my life easier for doing the repairs.

[vulgalour]

Let's have another video, back to when I was having the welder woes and making some really quite astoundingly stupid mistakes to make sure I gave myself as much work as possible.

 

 

[grogee]

On 6/3/2023 at 9:40 AM, Noel Tidybeard said:

my EFi sounded noice with a 3" pipe😁

Mine has a stainless pipe of unknown origin. It's not 3" but I think it deletes one of the original silencers. 

To be honest it's a bit too loud but it does sound quite nice from the driver's seat. I'd like to apologise to the neighbours publicly.

Also it's stainless so it's one of a very limited number of things that won't dissolve at the first sight of rain. 

[Noel Tidybeard]

how many silencers are there

should be 2- only seen 3 on a montego once i think

[Remspoor]

On 6/15/2023 at 1:15 PM, vulgalour said:

Let's have another video, back to when I was having the welder woes and making some really quite astoundingly stupid mistakes to make sure I gave myself as much work as possible.

 

 

You are so calm about the situation. I would never have delved that much into trying to repair a welder.

I have learned something from that video. Use as much of the outer repair patch as possible.  Somehow tack it into position and measure  and make  the inner wheel arch. Bodge the inner one as much as possible.  Thank you.

Cant wait to see the new welder in action.

[vulgalour]

58 minutes ago, Remspoor said:

You are so calm about the situation.

The camera might never lie but editing can certainly bend the truth.

[vulgalour]

Repairing the Maestro doors isn't particularly difficult normally.  I should have been able to do one per free day, no bother.  It's been rather more than that due to the heat.  I can report that the ugliest blemishes were just stone chips that had been retouched Father Ted style so were very easy to rectify, no welding required.  The door corners while bad looking weren't actually terrible once the filler was knocked off and I got both rear doors welded up today.

Lots and lots of water, working in the shade, and breaks.  It's not a bad thing that I've had to take it a lot slower, it meant the panel had less opportunity to warp since it was cooling down between tacks.  I will still need to throw some filler on to get things looking their best, just not as much as I'd removed when scoping out the rot.  Both doors are now in primer waiting for me to fit them to the car, I'm going to do the filler and top coat when they're on the car since it will be easier to get a matching finish than doing them off the car.

The future of the Maestro is that it is going up for sale after its next MoT on the 20th of September.  First though, I want to finish repairing the doors, do some other minor cosmetic things, and a couple of generic mechanical things too.  New owner should get themselves a well sorted little car that's ideal to just use or improve.  Since everything is pretty well documented here and on Youtube, a new buyer knows just what they're getting.  I'll probably be asking somewhere around £800-1000 for it, which I know is more than I bought it for but I have put a fair bit of work into the car to actually make it a reasonable example and the general market place suggests this isn't a ludicrous valuation.  I doubt I could get more than a grand for it due to the high mileage and low trim level and that's okay.  It will come with some spares too, including anything I haven't fitted at the point of sale.

I'm not in any sort of rush to sell it though, it's a great little car that does exactly what I need at the moment.  Main reason for selling is to turn my attention to the Princess.  I honestly thought the running costs of the Maestro would be less than the Princess when in actual fact they're slightly more due to having to pay tax on it.  Fuel economy is better in the Maestro but not by as much as I was expecting so the only reason for me to keep it at the moment is realistically that it's my only working road legal car.

I'll do a proper advert in the future when I'm properly ready to move it on, likely in the spring just before classic show season begins.  That should give me enough time to sort it all out and get the Princess ready to get back on the road.

[grogee]

How's your tailgate (oo-er missus)?

Mine is crusty and I've been trying to find a replacement but failed so far. I wonder if I'll end up doing a repair like yours on the doors. 

[somewhatfoolish]

Worth trying a different torch(like the one with your new welder) with your old welder; there are some less good torches lurking out there, mine's a Parweld.

[vulgalour]

1 hour ago, grogee said:

How's your tailgate (oo-er missus)?

Mine is crusty and I've been trying to find a replacement but failed so far. I wonder if I'll end up doing a repair like yours on the doors. 

The middle of the lip that holds the glass above the rear wiper is pretty bad and missing in a few spots.  I've got a spare half-a-tailgate that I broke the glass in trying to remove said glass.  The frame on that is much better and I'll use it as donor sections.  I need to get someone to remove the existing screen and not break it though, I don't think it's something I can do myself.  Refitting it isn't an issue.  Like yourself I've had real trouble finding a spare tailgate, not really sure why they're something you can't get when all the other panels are fairly easy to find.

@somewhatfoolish I might one day.  I wouldn't have minded the replacement torch being bad had it been cheaper, it was priced such that I expected mediocrity as a minimum and it couldn't even manage that.  I reckon an original style torch will be a better solution but the replacement welder is so much better I can't see me ever actually using the old one again, I should really replace it with a proper welding trolley as that would be a lot more useful to me.

[vulgalour]

Write up time for part 2 of repairing the rear wheel arch on the passenger side of the Maestro, do a little scroll up to find the video.

If there was a mistake you could make on a job, and a thing that could go wrong, it did.  In the previous episode you saw that the welder shat the bed so to resolve this after asking about on the forums it was determined the quickest and easiest solution would be to install a Euro torch.  Because I'd got a universal kit, it required a little bit of modification and that's totally to be expected, universal kits are always going to be a compromise and this one came with decent instructions.  Had to trim a bit of the screw thread off so it would fit, and trim down the brass wire guide insert first.

Also installed the bicycle brake cable sheath to serve as a replacement wire guide for the one that had melted.

Made sure to install the washers for the torch as instructed and hadn't realised at this point that I'd trimmed the brass guide tube too short.  I'd misunderstood the instructions for where the tip of the brass tube would fit and had trimmed it far too short, the main reason for this is that it was thicker than the original guide tube so wouldn't sit nicely in the groove on the clamp next to the wire feed wheel and I second guessed myself.

Unaware of that problem, I carried on and encountered my first proper issue which is that the plastic brace piece doesn't actually fit the front of this welder since it requires a vertical face for the mount and this one doesn't have that.  The original brace didn't fit over the Euro torch so I couldn't use that either.  I would have to figure something out to pack it with and I did try various options though none really satisfied.

Reassembly was a bit of a pain.  I'd had the front panel off the welder to clean it and knock out a puncture wound since it felt the right thing to do given I was installing new parts.  Unfortunately that's when I learned there was only just enough wire to reach these switch clamps and every time anything moved a little bit, they pulled out.  I got there in the end but it was a... job.

All back together and ready to test.  Initially it seemed to work pretty good and then I found out why the length of that brass guide tube was so important.  I realigned it so it didn't birds nest inside the welder and gave myself a new problem...

The brass tube was just a tiny bit too short leaving a little gap between the Euro torch and the socket.  This meant any time the wire feed wasn't perfect, like when you get a blob of weld on the end of the tip because you're welding in awkward places, the wire just backed up inside the torch.  This was very frustrating.  To the credit of the welding torch supplier they sent out a new brass tube free of charge which I then trimmed and fitted correctly, resolving this issue.

Now I had a fully working welder again, it was time to remove my composite wheel arch that I definitely hadn't been driving around with or had cleverly hidden in the editing and recording of the Double Trouble video where I compared this Maestro to my friend Pete's far nicer red Maestro.

Experience has taught me to do the least fun looking bit of welding first, so that meant the disappeared bit where the arch joins the sill.  The welder was terrible.  The trigger kept sticking and the more I welded the worse it got.  This meant that it just wouldn't stop feeding wire or gas and trying to control that in a tight space where you want to weld a very specific area meant this was a frustrating lesson in anger management.  The welds also ended up looking like absolute poop.

I did dismantle the torch handle to see if it was just a plastic flashing or mould issue, sometimes you can just scrap a mould line off and things are fine.  The odd thing was that everything moved perfectly fine, the switch was good and even though I did trim a little off some edges that looked to be chafing the problem persisted.  The more you welded the worse it got and I never figured out why.

Oh well, seam sealer to rescue.

Then I found out my next mistake.  I'd followed the shape of the filler and rot that was the former inner arch.  Rookie error.  I had offered the outer arch up at some point in the process and totally missed that it didn't actually line up properly at all, probably because there wasn't really much of anything for reference points.  I edited out my reaction to this discovery.

Of course, I'd also cut out the original outer wing to the shape of the repair panel that I'd aligned to the incorrect inner arch.  There's another problem because now the hole is bigger than my repair panel.  I tacked the repair panel in place to show just how far out I was.  More editing required to keep things family friendly.

On the bright side, I hadn't cut through the wiring that goes behind here or set any interior trim on fire or got welder splatter on the glass.  You've got to look at the mistakes you didn't make on a day like this.  I could have gone out and bought another replacement torch in the original style for the welder or I could use my savings and invest in a really good welder instead.  In a rare moment of spending money, I went with the latter.

The next episode goes live tomorrow at 3pm, so watch this space and the Youtube channel for that.  I do all this nonsense so you don't have to.

[vulgalour]

Fresh video time.

 

[vulgalour]

It's time for another video, one where we finish this never ending wheel arch repair job.

 

[vulgalour]

Yesterday was video day and I covered upgrading the mirrors. This also eliminated a rattle I'd been hitherto unable to locate.

Today, I used up the very last of my welding gas to sort out the worst corner of the front doors. The other corners will just have to wait until I order some more gas. This became necessary when the corner that I'd resisted poking just sort of... fell off.

All the corners on the front doors are like this under the ancient filler, this one just made a bid for freedom first and is by far the worst.

Or rather, was. Now it's all metal again.

I ran out of daylight to finish the job and since I'm not sure exactly when I'll get chance to get on with the filler, sealer, and proper paint I just hastily sprayed it up with some weld thru, regular primer, and top coat to keep the worst of the weather out. Not a bad job all told, took me about 2 hours (including taking video as I was working). I shan't belittle my efforts here, anything was going to be an improvement over what was there and what's there now is definitely good enough for what this car is. It'll do.

[vulgalour]

So much for an easy MoT pass and sell.  I've now got some thinking to do on this one because I'm not sure what I want to do right this minute.

Brakes, rust, and emissions were the failures.

There's several little holes along the driver's side outer sill right at the bottom where the pinch weld is.  Another in a similar location at the back of the passenger side sill.  A small one at the leading edge of the passenger sill where the wing has trapped dirt.  These are all very doable providing we don't get a can of worms situation.

Emissions is probably because I took the car in cold and haven't driven it a lot lately.  I should have warmed it up first.  It's pre-cat and carbed, worst case I can lean it off for the test if I have to I suppose.

Brakes are worn out fronts, which is entirely on me as I've new discs and pads to fit and just haven't.  It also snapped a handbrake cable while on the rollers, I do have replacement cables I just don't want to do this job.  It also has a chafed brake hose, something I didn't think to check for since the brakes hadn't actually been giving me any issues.

 

It's all repairable, it's all doable.  I just can't make up my mind whether or not its worth it for me at this point.  I do need to sell it regardless.  I'll have a bit of a think before I make up my mind, right now I feel like if I have to do a bunch of this sort of work I'd rather do it on the Princess which is the car I'm keeping and write off the loss with the Maestro.

[grogee]

They sound like easy fixes for a man of your cal-iber. I say that without knowing as much as you about welding and your particular Maestro. 

I'm amazed it failed on emissions! I didn't even know it needed a sniff test, I thought carb + non-cat was just 'make sure it isn't belching out smoke'. But yeah, you could throw in a clean air filter and tweak the mixture screw a bit to sneak a pass. Perhaps an Italian tune up too. 

I remember being pleasantly surprised that the handbrake cable wasn't a total bastard. Saying that don't do what I did and fit a too-long cable to the rear, my wheel chewed through it in short order. Think I'd fitted a van part by mistake. 

Are small sill holes a definite failure of they are more than 30cm from a suspension or seat belt mount? 

[vulgalour]

Decided to get some photos, have more of a prod.  I've got no argument with the holes discovered, I think they must have found one and then gone looking, that's sensible really.  I should have been more dilligent.  Anyway, they are very small holes so I might just get away with some little patches.  This is what I'm dealing with on the driver's side.  Simple shapes, great access and doesn't actually feel particularly crunchy.

So I can probably sort that fairly easily.  Passenger side is a similar story, the outside hole at the front is a really easy fix.

The inside hole at the back is a little trickier.  I'm wondering if when this had underseal on it perhaps I mistook it for a drainhole and that's why I didn't do it when I did the arches.  This might also be an old repair, it predates my work at any rate.

The brake hose at the back is a bit of an odd one, it doesn't look damaged to me but I do agree that it looks far too long and does need replacing with the correct one.

Lastly, there's no arguing with the snapped cable.  I've got some cable that while not new, is in better shape so I can just swap that over in theory.

It's all doable it really is and I know it is.  I'm probably just being a fanny about it because I've got so much other stuff I need to resolve at the moment that I didn't really need this adding to it.

[Matty]

16 minutes ago, vulgalour said:

Decided to get some photos, have more of a prod.  I've got no argument with the holes discovered, I think they must have found one and then gone looking, that's sensible really.  I should have been more dilligent.  Anyway, they are very small holes so I might just get away with some little patches.  This is what I'm dealing with on the driver's side.  Simple shapes, great access and doesn't actually feel particularly crunchy.

So I can probably sort that fairly easily.  Passenger side is a similar story, the outside hole at the front is a really easy fix.

The inside hole at the back is a little trickier.  I'm wondering if when this had underseal on it perhaps I mistook it for a drainhole and that's why I didn't do it when I did the arches.  This might also be an old repair, it predates my work at any rate.

The brake hose at the back is a bit of an odd one, it doesn't look damaged to me but I do agree that it looks far too long and does need replacing with the correct one.

Lastly, there's no arguing with the snapped cable.  I've got some cable that while not new, is in better shape so I can just swap that over in theory.

It's all doable it really is and I know it is.  I'm probably just being a fanny about it because I've got so much other stuff I need to resolve at the moment that I didn't really need this adding to it.

I'd probably do it tbh. Otherwise your trying to sell it not just without a valid mot but also with a refusal on the system. Bound to knock the money you could get.