Rover P6 2000TC - there will now be a short delay

[N Dentressangle]

9 hours ago, Wibble said:

I thought he did great!

Yes, he was fine to be fair. Especially considering he's not used to manuals, and the Series 1 box in my car is a bit notchy.

At least it was the imaginary accelerator I was jabbing for rather than the brake 😉

He was a 26 year old new dad (of a month old me!) when this car was registered. The family cars were a succession of rusty 1100's - my first transport back from hospital in Manchester is likely to have been in one. As a young teacher married to a nurse, he would never have been able to afford something like the P6. In fact he'd never even been in one before.

[IronStar]

I can completely relate with your dad’s driving. After years of driving diesels with short gears, I need to make a conscious effort to remember that the fun starts at 4k in a petrol, as opposed to ending in a diesel. Sweet spot is not at 2.5k, and 50 in 2nd gear is normal. 
I can only imagine how much harder it must be for him to keep remembering that.

Lovely to see the car making people happy and being a talking point. Even more so that your dad got a chance to drive something he missed out on in his youth. 

[N Dentressangle]

Trip out today in the P6 to https://www.abergavennysteamrally.co.uk/

Parked in a side road a couple of streets away:

It's a small rally compared with S Cerney and stuff, but nice all the same. And being a bit further afield, some different stuff from the usual.

First (and probably most memorable) was this green Triumph Stag. As soon as I saw it I thought of this https://www.aronline.co.uk/opinion/i-was-there/working-with-harold-musgrove/ and wondered if it could possibly be the same one. Surely it couldn't.

It was!!!! Here's a close-up of the info boards if you want the whole story:

I know it's nerdy (maybe not to @motorpunk) but I thought that was rather special.

All the usual suspects otherwise. Especially for @SiC, a pair of ADO16s:

The sandglow one was very smart, and exactly like the one my grandma had. But without the terminal rust issues.

This Saab 96 V4 was very smart. I had one the same, but in India Yellow (bright orange to you and me), which has to count as my fave colour for any car:

This 1928 Austin was super cool, and looked a fine way to travel - a definite @HMC contender:

And here, as promised, is a really nice Beaver:

[Peter C]

No MGBs?

[Bmwdumptruck]

That yellow Saab looks like one that went through Mathewsons a while back, very low miles IIRC, made top money too.

[N Dentressangle]

6 minutes ago, Peter C said:

No MGBs?

There were loads, but I didn't want to overwhelm you with pics!

A good mate has a rather nice '67 BGT, so I'm not allowed to have one 😉

[N Dentressangle]

Also, 120 mile round trip today. Didn't miss a beat, temp steady in the middle, oil pressure good and everything happy. Mrs D even fell asleep in the front on the way home.

Keeping the revs down to 3k ish whilst the bearings and everything bed in, but will start to gradually increase that over the coming weeks. Even with that regime I'm still getting held up by atrociously driven modern tat.

[Matty]

Jumped on this in hope of some good beaver shots. Feel a bit let down. But still slightly aroused at an old Leyland.

Click bait I tell thee 😁

 

[N Dentressangle]

OK, time for the next small fix.

My mum had an American friend when she was younger. Not sure if she still knows her, but she did in the 70s. They were close enough to send Xmas presents for each other's kids. When I was very young I got a set of Lincoln Logs to build this:

which was ace, and which my own daughter enjoyed massively nearly 50 years later. I can't remember any of the other presents, apart from one book. I can't find it online, but it was a childrens' book of inventors and inventions. Predictably, everything in the world had been invented by an American - who knew? Some were true, like this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitcomb_L._Judson who invented the zip, but others were total bollocks. According to this book, television was invented by someone called Vladimir Zworykin when even the 7 year old me knew it fucking wasn't, and John Logie Baird was the man. But he wasn't American, so wasn't mentioned.

I believe the P6 was the first car with intermittent wipers, but when I google this I find that another fuckin American invented them rather than some dull men in Solihull:

https://thehustle.co/windshield-wiper-inventor-robert-kearns

Well, that article is balls, because they were fitted to the P6 from 1963, and I know this because I repaired mine the other day. I love the way that pre-electronics we found mechanical ways to make complicated stuff happen. Especially because those systems can usually be adjusted and repaired, rather than just thrown away like every other PoS broken electronic gizmo. So it is with the Rover system.

The delay is controlled by a knurled white plastic knob on the LH side of the column shroud:

Look closely and you'll see a black rubber hose running from the inside of the knob, under the column and behind the indicator switch. This then passes with the loom through the bulkhead. It's a vacuum hose, and ends up here:

It's to the left of the cluster of coloured wires leading to the wiper motor. The white thing it's plugged into is a little bellows / diaphragm which is actuated by the plunger you can see coming out of it on the right. Turning the wiper setting to intermittent brings this sytem into play. At the moment the plunger is out, meaning power can flow to the motor. Pushing it in with the cam attached to the wiper crank cuts power to the motor, so if vacuum is held in the bellows / diaphragm then the plunger stays in and the wipers stop.

The little white plastic knurled knob can be turned to release the vacuum generated more quickly or slowly, thus allowing you infinitely adjustable intermittent wipers. On my car, the system of pinholes in the white plastic tube wasn't working properly so some grease helped there. The biggest problem was that the final 1/2" of rubber pipe to the bellows had perished, but I was able to pull through some of the slack, cut it off and reconnect securely. Happy days.

And Robert Kearns can fuck off.