'82 (NZ) Marina 1700 Estate

Sounds like an epic road trip to make the 'save'. Will look forward to seeing how this goes. My Grandad had a brown saloon in the early 1980s and compared to our family Fiat 126 seemed like the future had parked outside our house. Bookmarked 😎

Looks a good project, are the plates still live?

Battle commences.
The Marina has no crossmembers apart from at the rear of the gearbox, and that is removable, so the easiest way to get the engine and transmission out is to simply drop it on the deck.
After that the body can be raised and the engine slid out.
Removing the carbs, cables, wiring, propshaft etc takes all the time, and the engine is then out in minutes.







I use a piece of wood beneath the engine with a pair of small rollers under it, and the whole thing rolls easily as you keep replacing the rear roller to the front.
There is enough room between the hoist legs for the engine to fit into so the hoist can then be taken away.
Simples.







Now.
I shall digress a bit because a number of things now had to happen.
The yellow body got stripped out after the engine came out, and I want it to disappear. It has some scrap value but I cannot be bothered dealing with it, and as I need the suspension from it, handling the body would get much more difficult.
I have another Marina project about to begin in the form of a Leyland Australia Marina 6 Coupe.
It was an unfinished race car build which I acquired and came with a newly built 1800 B series engine, which I will be using at least initially.
The Marina 6 suspension is much heavier than the UK models have, plus it uses a different stud pattern (Ford) which means none of my other wheels would fit, so all the Leyland suspension needs to go.







My idea is to fit all the surplus bits back into the rusty yellow body and sell it as-is, so my problems all disappear.
I figure the wheels, suspension, sports steering wheel, sway bars and incidentals will make it attractive enough to fetch a modest sum, especially with the wheels being usable on period Fords.
So it all came out of there and went in here...







That rear axle feels to be about 50% heavier than the UK type, and the last thing I need is even more unsprung weight. It also has slightly lower gearing at 3.89 against 3.63 which I see as another negative.
The front suspension is also much heavier duty, with torsion bars of a massive 27mm, where the UK models used 19mm with an HD option of 21mm.
As it was not going to be a road car the front suspension had been made adjustable, so getting that complied for road use would involve 'money', so lets not. None of the parts are interchangeable between the two, although the shocks probably would have been if they had not been modified.







So with all that in place I could push the yellow car away from the work space and back onto the neatly manicured 'lawn'.
I will keep it around for the time being as I need it as a template. While the Leyland used a UK made body shell, the Australians wanted to use their own running gear and trim, so I am not sure that all the mounting points will be there for my UK interior and mechanicals. I may need to copy or liberate some parts from the yellow shell yet.







The next job is to tidy up the liberated engine so that it is ready to go straight into the estate when I drop the non-runner out.
I never know when another vehicle may decide it requires a repair, so I do not want any taking root in front of the garage where I work. Shame I cannot do so inside it, but that has motorcycles and stashed old car parts in every workable space.
Shame.

We're marina engines popular things to over bore in NZ? I remember fetching done paint for my marina van when I was in Auckland years ago and the guy behind the counter was telling me they had built a 2 litre engine using Audi (I think) pistons.

It was time to investigate the rear brakes.
The Marina Mk3 has manual adjusters on the rear of the backplate.
When I checked, there were none.
Hmmm.
Removing a brake drum with some difficulty revealed that the estate currently featured a rear axle from some years earlier, and these had self-adjusting rear brakes.







Needless to say, they don't, so later models (such as this one..) returned to using manual adjusters.
As it happened, I had a complete Mk3 rear axle nearby, having removed it from a sedan which had been written off in an accident, so I immediately swapped them over. I also fitted a new pair of rear shocks.
Then I gave the early axle away to a guy who had just spent $150 on a replacement rear axle for his estate only to find it was as bad as his own.
So that worked out well.
Removing a drum from this one showed things to be in reasonable condition considering.







What I find is that while things can look ok, if the car has not been in use for some time, the wheel cylinders will invariably be seized solid.
These were, so I stripped the whole assembly and wire brushed everything to within an inch of its life.
I figure that there is really no advantage in painting inside brake housings, so I simply replaced the cylinders.







Having reassembled that I moved to the front suspension.
Surprise surprise, it was also from a much earlier model Marina. My guess is that all that suspension was from the same car that donated the engine and gearbox.







The earlier suspension featured rubber bushes between the top swivel joint and the shock absorber arm, which forms the top arm of the suspension. The rubber bush introduced some vagueness into the steering and was eventually replaced with a tapered pin that directly engaged with a revised shock absorber arm.
That meant this lot would need to go.
So out it came.
Most of it was fit for another tour of duty, so I hoped to find some later model shock absorbers and swivel joints which would convert it all back to the correct parts for this car.
The lower parts of the upright need a good supply of grease, and these had not seen any for a very long time.
Perhaps since 1982. People stopped doing regular maintenance about the time Japanese cars began appearing on the local market, so the neglect set in.







A rampage of wire brushing and numerous coats of engine paint soon had things looking a tad more cheerful.
I had some difficulty removing the trunnions from the bottom of the uprights, as they were pretty rusted together in the absence of grease.
That might explain the heavy steering.







With nolathane bushes fitted to the radius rods it all went back together without drama, and the shock absorbers I used felt to be firm yet compliant.
It is a bit of an art compressing the lower suspension to the point where it can be reconnected to the shock absorber, but a small degree of lowering makes it easier.
So thats nice..







So it all came together minus the brake calipers.
I enquired about having them rebuilt. The local brake specialists wanted $220 per side to do that, so I decided to do it myself.
I did not pull them apart, but cleaned them all up externally and moved the pistons up and down their bores until they moved freely enough to not drag.
I found a set of pads that were all about half worn as I wanted the pistons to sit at that part of their stroke rather than out where they had been beginning to rust up.
It worked very well and after refitting them I bled the whole brake system, after which I had good pedal pressure as well as brakes which operated nicely but did not not drag at all.
Win.







While the car was still in the air I fitted the secret weapon.
This is a factory option in the form of an anti-swaybar of no less than 1+1/8" diameter, which completely cures the old Marina tendency to behave like a sled, and which gave rise to the UK club magazine title "understeer".
There was also a rear anti-swaybar, but it was not fitted to estates as they had much stronger rear springs.







That marked the completion of both suspension and brake rebuilding until such time as test driving might bring anything else to light that required attention.
I did not check the wheel alignment as it looked to be fairly close at a glance, and I would need to ascertain where the steering wheel sat before I adjusted anything.
I did know that I had equal turns to left and right before full lock, so my job would be to make sure that straight ahead steering wheel equalled straight ahead travel.
Only road testing can prove that.

It was far from properly assembled and all the engine mount bolts were only finger tight.
It seemed that someone had thrown enough parts into it so it could be deemed 'complete', but it was certainly far from roadworthy.
I have always treated any Marinas I acquired with the utmost suspicion, as most of them came for free anyway, and that often meant that the previous owners had simply given up, and quite likely at some stage of an intended repair process.
The only way to ensure that the car would not let you down was to go through absolutely everything.
Mind you, it was very simple technology, and once in order, it would reward with thousands of miles of reliable service. Hopefully this one will do likewise...

That looks really smart! Were they ever badged as Itals in NZ, the last of the facelifted ones in the UK were.

Hey Ken- fantastic thread and great read ! Thanks so much for taking the time to share it. I love seeing a car get rescued and reading all the little in and outs of the process. Its a smart looking car that. Glad to see you're still kicking about playing with these!

It would be neat if you could copy and paste this thread over into Oldschool as well- always nice to see more pommy cars and your story telling would go down well there

Alex

I had to push the car across the yard to turn it around, then push it back to operate on the other end to fit a rear bumper and connect the wiring for all the lights.






It is always easiest to have the car in the air so it is easier to operate underneath it.
So it was when I decided it might be time to see if it would actually run.
As you do.
So this was that...





A positive note.