1953 Morris Minor - 20/03 *zombie noises*

Any progress is good progress. It may seem hard for people who whinge about the cold to understand, but working in 35+C temperatures isn't a barrel of laughs. When I landed back on the Gold Coast after being in Japan, it was 24*C at 6am, and the sweat was immediately pouring out.

Keep going with the welding though. The more practice/less time between doing it, the better it gets. I'll have to get back on with my caravan project after not touching it since late November.

Gah! Stupid browser! Time to start over! 

So, I have been plodding away over the last couple of weeks, snatching a few evenings where I can in between my busy study/work schedule.
I even took today off work so that I could study, I'm just taking a break so that the tedium that is my current course load doesn't melt out my ears.

So last time I updated this there was one bit of fresh metal on the car, and there was talk of making a cradle-like device to roll the old girl over.
Some curved tubular steel was sourced from somewhere out the back of the workshop, cut to an appropriate length, and mocked up with some angle to see if it would work.
All appeared well, so before that went much further, it was decided that a bit of this would happen.
This facilitates much lightness of the car and ease of tipping, and gives me a chance to address some issues with leaks around the motor.

Much more disconnecting of the things, a whole lot of hassle with the trans tunnel bolts (24?? really???) and then this happened.

This immediately highlighted the grave nature of the leaky bits, for as soon as the motor was close to vertical, the contents of everything decided to end up on the floor.
So car ready for rolling over, I decided it was a good idea to check the main seals as they were the most likely culprit of such voluminous discharge.
We cracked the box off, dropping a lot more oil in to an evergrowing puddle, which made me suspect the box might need seals too, but still need to check that out.

The puddle of oil was trapped in a large pile of sawdust, and most of the rest of the coolant drained from the block via Extreme Motor Angling Via Engine Crane (EMAVEC).
The box was stood up to let it drain what seemed to be mainly engine oil from the bellhousing so that's kind of promising I guess?
Do not be worried by the chunky coolant in the drain pan, Jono was curious to see how well the sawdust soaked up the coolant. Turns out, it soaked up the oil in the pan first and barely picked up the coolant at all. Interesting!
Anywho, here is the mighty 1.2 in all it's vaguely greenish glory. Despite the terrible lighting in the workshop, that's actually not that far off the colour of the block.
At the moment, I'm not really that worried about repainting the motor, I think I'll just give it a quick degrease and scrub before I do seals. But, I'm sure I'll find an excuse to procrastinate and give it a lick of colour at some point before it goes back in.
Tiny ports, heehee!
Also, the water pump is missing here as we wanted to take a look and see how it was inside. A new one will be obtained even though it wasn't particularly bad, as the backing plate was glued on proper bad, and the heater outlets had been brazed closed. I will also need to sort something out with the alternator as it's difficult to get enough tension on the belt. Whether this ends up being a shorter belt or a different bracket, who knows.

Anyway, now that I have access, time to check out those seals! We figured the rear main was gone, and I decided to check the front main as well. But first, the clutch!



The flywheel is surprisingly heavy for such a small motor. It's way thicker than I was expecting it to be.
Anyway, eventually I managed to get at the rear seal by myself. I hadn't even split the box from the original Minor's motor, so this was yet another first for me.
And here we have a relatively new seal!

Doesn't look to be in too bad condition and would probably be okay for now, but for a few dollars, I will change it now while it's accessible.
But, that's not the source of my leak! Must be the sump, then? So off with that dust cover.


Not the best photo, but here's the cuplrit! You can sort of see the weep at the left corner of the arch where it meets the rest of the sump lip. This turned in to a torrent when tipped upright and further prodding shows a good 3mm hole in the corner. There are actually 3 different sump gaskets for this motor depending on when it was made. So this will help me tie down when the bottom end was made, at least. They all look basically the same to me, though so I'm going to pull the pan and take it in to work, haha.
Might as well check that front seal, as well!

Some careful experimentation with a pair of long screwdrivers later, and I managed to lever off the pulley without bending anything. The seal:

Also seems to be reasonably new, but has gone a bit hard so will be doing this one as well.
So on the shopping list this week is a front and rear main seal, a new sump gasket, manifold and intake gaskets, and a new waterpump and gasket. I have a thermostat and gasket floating around somewhere, too, ready to go on. But I might try and see if I can find a new housing first as the old one is pretty crusty.

I have some exams coming up this week, so after that I should have a bit more time to get the Minor on her side to do a bit of melting.
Cheers,
  Matt

I think the sump gasket is probably either installed wrong or just plain the wrong one, as I think it would be pretty easy to get the wrong one. I will upload a pic of the variances when I order the replacement. As for the seals, like the rest of this build, I'm not really sure what the PO was aiming for. It's all sort of thrown together in a way that kind of works but with not a whole lot of forethought, so I'm guessing the seals were probably necessity more than preventative.

I am looking forward to the end of next week when hopefully I'll be caught up on study and have time to redo seals and have a better look.

Cheers for the continued interest.
Matt

So this afternoon after I finished my exam I shot down to the shed and dropped the oil pan on the little 3KC motor to work out what gasket I needed.
Here is the offending bit of gasket that's doing all the leaking. Sorry for the amazing light display that my phone is currently capable of, I think the last drop did some proper damage.

Right in the join where the arch rolls up from the main face of the pan. I thought it might have been the wrong gasket that was causing the leak, but this was obviously the real cause.
The gasket itself is the J018 pointy corner one from the previous post, by the looks of things. Which is not listed under the 3kc motor, I double checked and only the other two are!
But it shows up in that diagram, and the rest of the gasket is the same shape, so I guess that's what I'll go with. Which is good, because I ordered one already. :\
Turns out the supplier I'm using for every other part in this round of ordering doesn't do the J018 gasket, so had to pay an extra set of shipping.

Ah well, the things we do for non-leaky bits, eh?  (Finally got around to fixing the leaky bits on my daily after leaking for a good year, but most profusely since the last oil change.  -_- )

So while the pan was off, I took a closer look at things. Doesn't seem to be any angry bits of metal in the bottom, although it hasn't run much since I changed the oil last. Had a look at the underside.

Look! The crank even tells me it's for a 3K! How helpful!
To my untrained eye, it looks pretty good in here. I will get a second opinion tomorrow afternoon, though.
One spot I noticed was a few impact marks on the main pot part of the pickup, but without turning the engine I couldn't see whether or not this was an issue still. The filter on the pickup had a bit of crud on it, but it wasn't metal, seemed more like paint or plant matter. But I shall look at this all again tomorrow with a more experienced eye by my side.

So, sump gasket determined, I threw a few nuts back on to stick the pan back to the underside and checked a couple of other things I needed to order.
Swung by work on the way home and ordered a new waterpump (being shipped up from down south), a water outlet/thermostat housing as the old one is pretty cruddy, and a bunch of gaskets.
Job jobbed for the day, I went home to discover that a package full of delicious booze that I ordered from Melbourne had apparently been checked as delivered to my house, but was no where to be seen!
Have logged it with the shipping company, maybe they failed to read the instructions and they'll deliver it tomorrow? I sure hope so, as that rum isn't cheap, and nor is it in plentiful supply! >.<

Anyway, that's enough rambling for now. Tomorrow I shall hopefully post pictures of the Minor on her side, all going well!

Cheers,
  Matt

That's what I wanted to know! I paid insurance on it, so we'll see what happens. Being a $150 bottle of rum, I'm not really that willing to let it just slide...

I find Ron Zacapa kind of boring now, to be honest. It's how I got on to real rum, but now that I've sampled so much else, I think Zacapa doesn't have that good a flavour profile. I usually pick some up when I go through Singapore airport, though, as there's nawt much else for sale there unless I'm in the mood for particular whiskeys.

In car related news, the cradles are built and tested, and I have lots of new bits for the motor. I went down today to tidy up ready to move the car but it was about 40 degrees inside the shed so decided I'd take my headache home and sit in air con instead.

Well, hopefully it's a bit cooler down there, today.
About to head down and shift a pile of curse word and some cars about.
I shall endeavour to get the new seals in and reattach the sump.
As I won't be rolling it on it's side yet, I might have a look at giving the engine a good scrub as well.

Cheers,
Matt

Good stuff, any progress is good progress. Those seats look very 80s Mazda, couldn't tell you what model and I'm probably really wide of the mark, but that's what they put me in mind of.

Okay, quick update before I head to work.
The other day I got the Minor up on her side, using the rockers and the engine crane to lift her the last few feet. Then I did this:

Which resulted in this:

It's quite sturdy, I swear! I will probably add a bit of length to get it a bit higher so I'm closer to vertical, it'll just make things a little easier.
All the weight is in the floor pan, so as long as that's before the pivot point we're good.
Anyway, that done, I pulled the rear main seal off and put a new one in, which involved going back to work and refunding the one I had bought as it was 4mm too thin.

Rear main installed, I put the motor on the engine stand to give the crane a break, and then did the front main seal as well.


I had purchased a new thermostat housing, but wasn't sure how much use the old sub assembly for it would be.

The barb plug on the right was plugged up with something like resin, and it took me 600mm of leverage and all of my body weight to crack it, and then most of my weight to unscrew it.
But got it out in the end.

Yep, that's not going to be much good. Neither was the thermostat.

Oh wait...
Anyway, removed the temp sender as well, then removed the assembly so I can clean it up. As disgusting as it is, it looks like it should be okay with a good scrub and sand blast.
It looked much like this:

Anywho, that off, I decided to continue pulling things off the motor so I could clean it easier.

So off came the engine mounts, the alternator brackets.
The distributor and leads after I'd noted what went where.

Then I plugged up some holes and wheeled it outside for a clean.

Then I left everything to dry off and went home, and was going to go back yesterday afternoon but was rather tired so slacked off instead!
That's all for now.
Cheers,
  Matt