1980 Austin Princess mild custom - 1951 Lanchester LD10

mmmmmmm....purple gloss metallic - you know it makes sense!

Today was all about the dirt and taking even more things out of the engine bay. This has been both fortuitious and annoying. I wanted to remove the scruffy steel coolant pipe that runs under the radiator both to tidy it up and for better dirt removal access. The first annoyance was the old wire clips which, as is usual, needed cutting off since they're were seized completely solid. I'll be replacing them with jubilee clips as I've done elsewhere when working on the car.
20180115-01 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

As soon as I removed one of the clips that clamps the pipe to the radiator support brackets, water started coming out. That's not a great thing to have happen and I knew what to expect. Sure enough, there's a big hole caused by corrosion. Even more annoying is my spare pipe I salvaged from the orange car has perforated in the same place to a lesser degree. I'll either get one of the originals repaired or a new one made up in copper or stainless, dependant on cost. I haven't got a pipe bender to DIY this so someone else can make it for me. It's a normal failure on a Princess this one, I've seen a few other cars with the same issue.
20180115-02 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

After that and moving a few things out of the way, it was the tedious chore of removing the grease. It did look like underseal until I started cleaning it off and found that it's very clearly old engine oil and road grime so at least it wasn't too tough going to remove. There's a few areas where the paint has come off and surface corrosion has started so I'll get those bits dealt with and repainted while I'm in doing the rest of it. I'll also go around with some thinners on a rag to get rid of as much of the rubbish overspray that's all over the engine bay which will go some way to cleaning things up and making it all that bit more uniform. Happily I haven't uncovered any horrors, just bits that need cosmetic fettling. I'll be sticking with beige for now since that's easier, but who knows, maybe we'll go lairy in the future?
20180115-03 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

20180115-04 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

20180115-05 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

20180115-06 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

It's look much nicer in there now and will be a more pleasant place to work once I'm done. Made a start on the clutch housing but didn't get far, that's fairly disgusting in comparison and will need a fair bit of effort to sort out.

A clean engine bay, particularly on a lighter coloured car, always makes it much easier to see what you are doing.

Regarding the coolant pipe, if you can use both and join them together, why don't you use both and weld them? Admittedly the hose 'N' clamp approach is easier, granted.

Neither pipe is in great condition overall, There's probably enough for me to salvage connection sections for the rubber hose idea, but that's it. I checked them over and there's a lot more pitting and perforation than I first thought so they're mostly scrap. Still useful to make a copy from in the same shape if I do go with a bent pipe, but not really any use beyond that.

No painting or anything at all at the unit today, we got some snow and temperatures were just too low to really do anything. I can't keep the temperature high enough in the unit for long enough to risk putting paint on so I'm hoping it's a bit warmer tomorrow.

Welded bits seem to rust really badly just at the edge of the weld so it's asking for trouble in a known trouble area.
Inside of blocks rust pretty well too, just they are thick enough to cope.Antifreeze is a good inhibitor as long as it's changed every couple of years.

There's still snow, but it's not snowing, and the snow was melting so I chanced a few hours at the unit today since I'm desperate to get the Princess mobile again. MoT is in April and I feel like I've barely driven it since the last one! Should be an easy pass then, right... right? Probably. I removed the air horns and the wiring loom that was in the way. Going to need some fresh P clips and screws to put the loom back in as the old ones mostly fell to bits on removal, at least removing them allowed me to get to the little rust blebs underneath them and deal with those. I remembered to take the car's original head in with me so I could get the little cam cover bracket off as the replacement head doesn't have one. Once I've cleaned it up I'll probably redo it in VHT silver so it blends in with the aluminium head nicely.
20180119-01 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Removed all the engine mounts, laid them out on the box lid so I know which ones go where, and they'll get degreased before being fitted. Apart from the big steel washer, nothing needs painting on these since they're lovely cast aluminium and big chunky rubber bushes. I'll just scrub them clean and repaint the washers black so they look nice and smart again.
20180119-02 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

I gave the thinners a go on what paint was left to remove and it made the job a bit quicker than what I'd done already, mainly because the remaining overpaint was very thin. Dosed up the freshly cleaned areas with rust converter which stopped me being able to paint the front sections today. It already looks much better, just for being cleaned of dirt and flakey paint.
20180119-03 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Temperature was touch-and-go as to whether or not I could risk repainting the bulk of the engine bay once I'd finished the laborious task of masking off the brake lines. I decided not to mask off the displacer adaptors since they're bare steel and a little extra protection certainly wouldn't hurt, but I did mask off the schrader valves so at least it looks like I give half a hoot about this job. Then it was a tentative spraying of zinc rich primer (which I've found is great at slowing down rust on BL stuff compared to regular primer) to see if the temperature was okay before risking some top coat. The paint behaved fairly normally going down but the temperature had dropped a lot by the time I was finished so I may come to this tomorrow and find it's all a mess. Time will tell.
20180119-04 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

20180119-05 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

20180119-06 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

It looks so much better now. When I unbundle the newspaper from that corner it's going to stick out like a sore thumb, I'm just not prepared to dismantle my braking system to do that area at the moment, especially since it can be done once the engine is back in.

Well done looks fab

I did many hours of work yesterday so I could get a larger chunk of time in on the Princess today. Pretty worn out as a result. First job was getting the clutch fastened in place properly once it was aligned. The clutch alignment tool we have is too short for the Princess' clutch so I improvised with various suitable diameter tools to get it in the right place.
20170123-01 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

A lot of time was spent between Mike and I scrubbing off grime and grease and scraping off old gasket material to prepare the gearbox housing components for reassembly. To make sure all was healthy, Mike wanted to make sure the bearings weren't dry and followed instructions in the manual to set about removing a bearing to repack with grease, before realising it could just be oiled because of how everything works. We then couldn't get the bearing to seat back in fully and don't have a press, so he's going to sort this out tomorrow. The parts all look lovely and clean now at least, we just couldn't get the gearbox back together because of this. Rookie error because it's a weird gearbox and we're both new to this particular design, the manual makes it very easy to get *too* involved in a job.
20170123-02 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

The cold air feed bracket I'd previously repainted now has the rubber insert refitted and the cold air intake pipe in place. I need to replace the rubber insert because it has some historic damage and that pipe could do with being replaced too because someone in the past has brush-painted just the top surface with silver paint. It's a bit too fragile to clean and since it's spiralised ducting I'm hoping I can just buy a length of generic replacement in black or silver.
20170123-03 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Some of the old wiring loom wrap had come undone so I re-wrapped that. I then did some wire tidying and used some tiny cable ties just to get everything more respectable. This has to be the first time the engine bay wiring has ever actually looked tidy in my ownership.
20170123-04 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

When we measured up the rubber radiator hose to replace the damaged steel coolant pipe we found it was too short. Instead, I chopped out the worst part of the old pipe, repainted it with some VHT silver and bridged the missing section with the radiator hose that happened to be exactly the right diameter for the job.
20170123-05 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

20170123-08 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Ah yes, and the radiator went back in! It's not in the way of the engine when fitted and I reckon it will be a lot easier to put in now than when the engine is in. Before fitting, the Rover 400 fan (bubble type, not R8) it was wearing was removed (but not binned, because it still works really well and is a good back-up). Before that, the spare original radiator fan was tested and found to be working well, the fixings were a bit stubborn and since I want to get the radiator refurbished in the future I decided not to fight with it and just get it back in the car for now. One very odd thing about the radiator - which was salvaged from the orange Princess I broke a few years ago - is that someone had chopped the plug off and twisted the wires back together to reverse the fan. This would mean the fan was pulling hot air out of the engine bay, through the radiator, and trying to expel it out of the front of the car because the fan was fitted in the factory location when I removed it. That's UTTERLY baffling. Mike corrected it and resoldered the joints properly. He had to use loom wrap as we'd run out of heatshrink.
20170123-06 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

There was a bit of faff figuring out which side it went to and getting the bolts to line up, the radiator and fan together are a very tight fit but the dipstick and distributor are much more accessible with the factory fan installed.
20170123-07 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Frustratingly close to done now.  It is at least just a case of bolting things back together, there's very little cleaning to do and only one engine bracket left to paint. One more long afternoon and it should be sorted.
20170123-09 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr