1984 Austin Metro City X

For you Metro lovers (myself included)
www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1987-AUSTIN-METRO-CITY-310-VAN-/120968498013?pt=Automobiles_UK&hash=item1c2a48cb5d#ht_596wt_1180

I love this little Metro :-) always wanted one but never driven one. HRT is an Ipswich registration too

I got a 1.3 mk1 3 door running on 10" mini wheels...

As promised, photos...

Looking rather sorry for herself now...


Repairs to the headlight surround, primed and painted.


From behind


The remains of the front panels, still need to cut back another few inches to get to sound metal.


The repair from last year has held up well. I've given it a wizz over with the grinder and tidied up some welds now it's more easily accessible and given it a fresh coat of paint to keep the rust at bay.


Beautifully unprotected repair and a small sample of the vast amounts of ally mesh/GRP that came out.


Small hole to patch. The inner wings are otherwise quiet sound.


Little bit of rot showing on the sill. It's the same on the other side, I'm hoping it'll just clean up and now leave a great hole...


Damage to the wing. There are signs of a poorly repaired low speed bump to the font, the bumper mounts were badly squashed and the bumper dented, and the panel work behind is deformed, but not too badly. I've got a NOS bumper to go on, just need to find some of the plastic side trims.

Lovin the project any more been done yet? Any updates?

Thread revival time!

September 2015, the car had been pushed onto the lawn for a year, sunk into the grass and then suffered from a seized clutch cylinder. Trying to free this in the standard way then blow the clutch damper. The cylinder was removed, honed and rebuilt. The damper was stripped down, the internals removed and replaced with an o-ring. The plate was drilled and the body taped to accept a retaining screw. Fixed.


October 2015, back on tarmac and given a good wash. A house move and a new job put stop any any further work for a while


Summer 2016, in a garage at last! A weldathon began..








Followed by some paint



Summer 2017; After yet and another house move! The repairs got painted (just rattle canned) and the underside stone chipped. Brakes got rebuilt all round with new pistons, seals and master cylinder topped off and braided hoses. I also fitted new front dampers. This lead to an advisory free MOT for the first time since 2011. Very happy with that.









Some Borbets got tried on that look great but need adapting as they are 4x100



So we ended up with some Turbo alloys to replace the ropey BBS style MG wheels



A good Christmas that didn't involve moving house was then had that resulted in this...











This is epic. The noise is Godly.

The Dolomite then came down to get ready for sale which pushed poor Metro into the garage for most of the summer until today. Next up is a new MOT and a trip to the rolling road.



In future I will try and keep the thread up to date!

James

Love these early metros my first car was an early base minimetro in cinnabar red.
Early y reg.
Unfortuantly it had more filler then metal so it met its maker!

Well finally an MOT has been obtained but it was a bit of a mission in the end...

Initially it failed badly on emissions which wasn't a big surprise, what was a surprise was how badly the engine was running when I went and picked it up. The garage had leaned the carb off to get the CO down enriching it didn't really help. Keen to get the car back on the road and not have to cough up for a retest I went for the supposedly easy option and swapped back to the HIF38 which sailed through the MOT last time (~1000 miles ago) and hadn't been touched since.

This wasn't completely simple because the Metro Turbo inlet manifold didn't clear the new exhaust manifold. Luckily I had been gifted a ported Howley manifold by a nevskills532 a few years ago which solved that problem. With the SU plumbed in it fired straight up and seemed to be running okay. The MOT station were excellent and put it in for a retest despite me turning up unannounced at 5pm on a Friday. To my surprise the CO and HC were still through the roof and the engine was just not happy. We leaned the carb right off and raised the idle and it just got through but was missing and coughing. We were pretty sure the carb was okay and there were no signs of air leaks so I was advised to go over the ignition system for faults.

I had renewed the leads and fitted a new Lucas Sport gold coil last year which seemed good so the finger of blame fell on the Accuspark points replacement ignition. Annoyingly I have managed to lose the original base plate at some point but did have a 65DM4 MG Metro electronic distributor so ordered a suitable coil (new old stock), rotor arm and cap.

I got it swapped in an evening after work, set the timing and went for a test run. Misfire. HUGE misfire that cut in like a hard limiter at 4k, up to that speed it ran okay but was coughing and missing intermittently. I figured it was leaning out from messing with the carb settings but no amount of fuel improved matters and I was starting to become concerned that the ignition module on the new dizzy was starting to let the smoke out. A final 'back to basics' check found the problem. The new rotor arm was cracked. Old part refitted and it was all go!

I have always been a bit paranoid about 'new' parts not being up to scratch compared to new old stock or good used because the quality simply doesn't seem to be there. This goes further to cement this view.

Obviously the only sensible thing to do after all these issues was a 60 mile round trip test run! I took advantage of the frequent laybys on the A3 to steadily increase the advance, read the plugs and adjust the carb. Oh, and thoroughly enjoy the popping on overrun! This certainly got it running better, probably the best it had run in years but still flat.

Last week I used it a couple of times for the commute (65 miles!) which was good but highlighted the lack of very low down performance. The engine pulled well over 3500 but was really flat below that. Confident that the timing and idle fuelling was right I figured that it was almost certainly down to the needle.
I did some research and downloaded the free version of winSU www.winsu.co.uk/index.html. I concluded that I needed something in the vicinity of a AAA needle to replace the ADS. Wanting instant satisfaction rather than buying one I pulled an ABK needle from a spare SU and put it in the pillar drill. www.teglerizer.com/suneedledb/ provided the profile at 100 thou intervals along the length of the needle so with those figures to hand, a micrometer and a rule I found I was able to pretty accurately match the desired profile. I found that I needed to use 240 grit paper to remove any meaningful amount of material and started at the tip working up. The top of the needle had to be buried in the chuck so to reprofile the top portion I wrapped the tip in electrical tape and held it that way. I was also careful to not touch the top 200 thou to maintain the idle mixture. Care and regular measurements were taken but all in it took less than an hour and wasn’t difficult to do.

Profiling the lower half

The results – superb. The flat spot is certainly reduced and the car pulls well from low down.

In celebration this happened.




I used a Mountey Classic Mini boss kit and the centre badge is an eBay special from this guy


Next on the agenda is induction. I’m currently running the stock air box with a K&N element but I think a trumpet suitable filter with ducting is in order. Any advise on that matter is most welcome, it looks like a potential money pit!

Thanks

James

I must work harder to keep this thread up to date! A lot can happen in 18 months...

Since the last update the Metro has been in and out of daily service and has performed pretty well generally. Driving thru the winter last year soon made the non functional heater pretty dull so I dropped it out and found the flaps had turned to dust. They are a metal frame with a foam sheet spread over it to direct air, or were when new. I had metal frames that did nothing but draw cold or very cold air in.





The flaps at the front were still mostly intact



The rear looked like this. I have managed to loose the rest of the photographs but covered the gap with heat proof ally tape and ran some tape backed foam draft excluder around the edge as a seal which made the world of difference.

Then a bad thing happened. I was in traffic driving home from work, mid January so it was dark, when I noticed some smokey haze in the rear view mirror. I tend to keep an eye out as it can be a good early warning of things starting to go wrong so looked for somewhere to pull over. I found a side road and was glad I had because the brake pedal suddenly had a lot more travel... A glance underneath revealed a cracked brake line. Nothing I could do about that on the road side!



Fixing this took ages because it was cold and raining. It turned out the line had been replaced before in copper. Don't use it. It's rubbish.



A new kunifer line was made up and fitted (the bias valve looks far less rusty in real life!) and the little Metro was back on the road.



Fast forward to Christmas 2019 and the MOT was due again. Also another fail, this time on the rear sill which had been an advisory before and two track rod ends. I was surprised about the sill because I thought I had done a pretty good job of ignoring and forgetting about it for a year.

Scabby metal work and some scabbier photographs.









Now for the not so fun part. My Portamig was residing 2 hours away at my dad's with the Mini. I had this:



Cheap, local and on Facebook marketplace. For a reason. What an appalling machine, made 10000000000% worse by a non-automatic helmet. I am not a great welder by any stretch but I've done enough to sort of know what I am doing and how a machine is meant to feel. This SIP Migmate 130 was dreadful, mostly the wirefeed. I knew this was a weak point but frankly out of the box it's just unfit for purpose.



Hopeless. However, I was not the first to have these problems and it turns out there are some really good guides online that show how to make the machine a lot less **** for very little money. I went with the "net curtain wire" metal wirefeed guide mod which replaces the plastic tube the wire feeds through and greatly reduces the friction, and also added a little aluminium bracket to the wire feed wheels. This resulted in some passable welds.

*EDIT: Just to be clear - that pigeon poo was cleaned back and redone.*





The MOT tester agreed and we were back in business!









Little Metro then proceeded to perform brilliantly for several weeks while the Mercedes was in the paint shop having new wings fitting and the rot cut out and repaired. That is until the dreaded haze in the rear view mirror appeared again. This time the brakes were fine, unlike the temperature gauge which started to rise. Rapidly. I love breaking down on the way home from work, mid winter, in the rain and dark... So much so that it's the only time I do it.







Ballsocks. I didn't quite manage to get the head off before the recovery truck arrived but it was close.

Spark plugs 1 - 3 were normal but 4 was looking suspiciously clean.





The failure appears to have been the fire ring on cylinder 4. This just about overhangs an obsolete and blocked water gallery in the 998 block which I had plugged with a grub screw. I suspect that either the gasket wasn't supported well enough or the screw had leaked a small amount of coolant that had then expanded and compromised the joint. Either way, I cleaned it all up and found the head and block were perfectly flat still.



I smeared some epoxy over the screw and made it as flat as possible with a blade. So long as the gasket holds the epoxy isn't exposed to combustion and will only be working in compression here to help support the gasket. The old one had lasted 7 years so it can't have been that bad.

On reassembly I did find that the cooling system wasn't bleeding perfectly and there didn't seem to be a return to the header tank. After a bit of poking about I found the small outlet from the thermostat housing was completely blocked. Clearing the blockage immediately relieved a good amount of air (and pressure) from the system which proceeded to bleed perfectly. The engine runs at the same temperature as before but I can't help but wonder whether this is what cause the problem all along?

Since then all has been good in Metro land with some potentially exciting developments in the wings...

Thanks for reading!

James