1980 Austin Princess mild custom - 1951 Lanchester LD10

That's one fine looking 414

"Chompy LOVED his old Rover and cleaned it sometimes 3 times a week, it was a very, very pampered car but the rust and parts availability put an end to all that love because he had driveshafts made of unobtanium."

Just replaced driveshaft on wife's 1995 Tourer with a brand new one from Driveshafts UK, in stock, very reasonable and fast delivery ...

@barry75: Cheers

rich: you've not steered me wrong yet so I shall thank you for the advice there. Nobody else had mentioned the colour coded cap labels to me and everyone had said OAT is a must in a K. Could well save me some grief there. They couldn't have just done blue for blue and pink for pink though could they? Had to make it just a bit less obvious than that.

westbay: I imagine the market could have changed in the past three years and the correct driveshaft may well now be available, at the time he tried everywhere and nobody had one, just one of those things.

concertocharlie: I shall bear that in mind for future wheel decisions. For now I'm sticking to trims and steels because I've run out of playtime cash for a bit. Not in any huge rush for new rims so I can take my time and find some I really like.

A little more Rover fettling was done today, not a huge amount because I wasn't blessed with much free time. This morning Bradford Auto Spares got a call so I could order a pre-facelift bonnet release mechanism from them for £25 delivered, then it was off to the unit to get on with some other jobs there. While waiting for paint to cure I decided not to be deservedly idle but to fettle again.

Decided to remove the rear panel off the boot, this is attached with 5 nuts from the back, two screws from the front and a further two screws through the number plate. The original dealer plate this car still sports is actually fitted off centre, which does annoy me, and one of the screws had to have the head drilled off. Other than that it was easy to remove the lot and get it cleaned up.


Inspected the boot lid and found it nicely free of any rust at all, just your typical dirt and moss.


The number plate light lenses need to come off to be cleaned, they're quite dirty inside. I was in no mood to do that today so it can wait for another time. The moss on the return lip came off easily enough.


There were two reasons for removing this panel. The first was to get it realigned properly because it didn't line up with the lights. That was quite important for the second bit, which was to give the thin red tape a go. I'm satisfied about this, it splits the big block of black up just enough. A nice twin exhaust pipe box or even a trim on the existing pipe once it's been shortened would make the back end just how I want it.




I still had some time and I probably should have just chilled out a bit. Instead, I carefully wet sanded the lacquer peel back on the top of driver's door. I had found a can of Rover Flame Red in my stash which I didn't realise I still had and this came in handy for where the paint was very thin.


Fresh coat of lacquer on top and when I next get chance I'll flat and polish that back to make it an invisible repair. The door handle will be done off the car, as will the bit of lacquer peel just under it. It's a fairly quick job really, and quite nice to eliminate one of the uglier bits I see every day on the car.


With everything done that I had time for I moved the car out of the way and heard a horrible noise. Turns out I reversed over the drill. Still works so we've just bandaged it up and continue to use it.

Acquired a set of three common not-Rover alloys for £1 recently, just trying to organise collection. Tried a donor wheel with the same important dimensions so I know they'll fit no bother, just no idea if they'll look any good so keeping it to myself for now.

Today, it was determined I'd get started on sorting out the clutch. Mike foolishly offered to help and my brother appeared too so we had a good pool of knowledge and tools and whatnot to get it done. Shouldn't be too much of a bother really, access to the gearbox and everything looked fairly good and I had all the parts I should need so we cracked on with it, optimistic we'd be all done before the sun went down. I mean really, how hard can it be?

Before we get into that, I had been doing some work on the front wing Joe supplied. I wasn't going to take it as I thought the one on the car was much the same, but after spending a bit of time with the dolly kit and flapwheel I think it's worth doing up and swapping onto the car. Both wings have this sort of warty rust bubbles.


Liberal application of the flapwheel makes short work of it. The steel is in reasonable condition. There are other methods to clean up rust but I'm going with one that has always worked for me and lasted for a long time. Clean everything back where you find the rust until you've got shiny metal. Some areas are trickier than others. You'll need to go a bit further than this, but this is how it starts. Be sure to chase the rust spiders back because otherwise they'll just emerge again when you repaint.


There's a small hole in the return lip. I will probably give this a quick blob of welding to fix it properly. However, Rover fitted a rubber U channel trim to the lip that would hide this well. I'm not sure if the trim is supposed to prevent or cause rust.


Some areas cleaned back to shiny metal and discoloured blackness where the rust was.


After everything was cleaned up, including the dent I dressed out on the top of the wing, it was all treated with Jenolite brand rust converter and left until tomorrow when I hope to have time to clean this up and get some fresh paint on.




A couple of days ago I made a start cleaning the engine bay but didn't have much patience for the job so let it be at this. Tidier, but not as good as I want it to be yet.


So, onto the clutch job then. First up was to remove the battery and air filter again. Then the starter motor came off which in hindsight probably wasn't necessary.


Gearbox is pretty oily and grimy, it looks like it has had a spill or come back through the vent or something in the past and never been cleaned up. It's all fairly old oil.


With the car up on stands, Mike and I set to removing things like the front partial undertray and disconnecting the gear selector rods and all that stuff. It should have been a simple matter to disconnect the lower arms. The inner bolts (two each side) were almost impossible to shift but did eventually relent. The castle nuts on the lower balljoints, however, were a different matter entirely. Now, it is possible we didn't need to disturb these and could have done the job leaving them in place. Unfortunately by the time we realised this we had also discovered both nuts, split pins and bolt threads were just collections of rust and attempts to remove any of these items just made matters worse. We wasted a lot of time on this part of the job.


Unfortunately we had to resort to cutting through the threads and removing the arms. Since you can't just get the ball joint and have it pressed into old arms, a new pair had to be ordered which won't arrive until Monday now. Really disappointing but at least there's the reassurance of nice new parts going on.


While the passenger side hub came off nice and easily when we got to removing the driveshafts, the driver's side needed a little help. The wheel nuts this side were also done up so tight the rattle gun struggled to shift them.


One driveshaft out and another derp moment - it was one of those days - when we realised neither of us had remembered to drain the gearbox oil. There's supposed to be two litres in there, at best 1.5 litres came out and it had a distinctly burnt smell and look to it.


With the driveshafts out we found the passenger side one was nibbled and leaking and the driver's side one was deformed so we'll have to get a pair of those ordered, it was by now too late in the day to place an order for them so it has to be done tomorrow. Yet more expense that I hadn't expected. Removing the gearbox was a chore too, finding all the bolts wasn't too bad but then getting access to some of them was annoying, like this one. You couldn't put the ratchet directly on the socket because it was too close to the casing and you couldn't use a spanner or similar because the bolts had been overtightened, just like pretty much every bolt we'd encountered.


Eventually we got the old clutch out. There was quite a bit of meat still left on it and it all looked fairly new apart from the release bearing which looked quite old and was a different manufacturer to the rest of the clutch. The friction plate had also been installed the wrong way around. This may explain the issues I was having. There was also signs of hot spots. I had been expecting a paper thin clutch with shiny rivets, not this.


We were quite puzzled by this to be fair, it looks like someone had taken the time to change the clutch in the car but had done it wrong which in turn had led to the symptoms of a dead clutch. While my brother and I cleaned as much of the oil as we could off the gearbox - I like to clean things when I get them off the car, helps me see where I've been and makes things look nicer - Mike quietly got on and reinstalled the clutch.



Then we called it quits. We'd spent way too long on this, mainly because we were fighting bolts that were on so tight they were bending the breaker bar and we were all pretty fed up with it. Tomorrow I'll be going in with Mike to get the gearbox back on and do any other small jobs I can find (and there's still plenty of those) just to make sure the car's time inside the unit isn't wasted. I'll go in again on Monday to fit the new parts, providing they arrive and are correct.

My Coupe is Flame Red and there is more than one shade of it, if you don't get a perfect match try getting it matched by a paint shop rather than Halfords. I think there's at least 3 different shades, my mates '92 is a totally different shade than my '93.

You can see the difference here.



If you need a lighter shade try :

Doing more great work here sir....intrigued by the wheel choice??

Corsa b wheels! Anthracite would work well on those wheels against the red.

I've been scouting around and I think I want copper wheels. Bit of an odd choice and not one everyone will like, but after seeing a few different bright red cars with copper wheels I'm sold on it as an alternative to silver. This demonstrates pretty well what I'm thinking.




As a colour, copper seems to neither shrink nor grow the size of the alloy in much the same way as silver tones.  Gold would be a bit much.  I may go for a slightly darker shade than the above and a gloss finish rather than what looks like a satin finish there.  I'll get a picture with the wheels actually on the car and play in Photoshop for a bit first which will have to wait at least until tomorrow.