1980 Austin Princess mild custom - 1951 Lanchester LD10

Update time again. Yesterday was a little North Shields chippy run and while the Princess made it there and back without drama, having someone new to the car behind the wheel highlighted some issues that needed attending. A hesitation and occasional misfire turned out to be a loose HT lead (a different one to last time) and pushing that home resolved that. The irritating noise that I had put down to the speedo cable (and which still might be that in part) got much louder on the drive over to the point that going over 60mph was horrendous to listen to. The timing belt tensioner pulley at fault here, which is NLA. The other issue was the headlight aim which was on the low side at MoT but it looks like they've dropped even lower, so I need to raise that up a bit so I can see where I'm going better at night.

Fortunately, I keep all sorts of rusty old rubbish and recently organised it all so I could dig out a spare set of headlight brackets in case I need to salvage the adjusters to replace any that might break when trying to adjust the headlights (a job for later when it's a bit darker), and I had a spare tensioner pulley. The spare pulley doesn't look great, but spinning it and comparing it to spinning the one on the car revealed that it was at least a bit better. The one on the car has a very slight wobble to it as you spin it, which is probably where the noise is coming from. Removal is fiddly, but easy, requiring use of a 13mm spanner on two nuts. You don't have to remove the belts to do this, you just have to be a bit patient with approach angles until the nut is finger tight.

20180812-01 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

The pulley looks worse than the one that came off because of surface corrosion. A test drive on my usual route revealed that while this pulley isn't completely silent, it is an awful lot quieter than the one that came off. It saves me spending £30 on a potential replacement in the form of a Ford Sierra pulley that does look remarkably similar and which, I'm told, is a reasonably good fit once spaced with a couple of washers.



I'll get one when I know I need it, for now the one on the car is adequate and not about to explode.

When I got the Rover, you may remember it had a couple of blobby bits on one rear arch. Perfectly normal for an R8, they all rust here. Three years seems like a lot longer ago than it really is.

20150721-03 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

I acquired the panel to fix this quite some time ago and have only now really had both motivation and time to get it done. Not a terrible job, as it happens, and certainly less stressful with the cabin stripped since I'm in no fear of accidentally damaging any nice interior pieces. Both blobs on the arch were fibreglass and it had genuinely stopped things getting any worse even though it didn't look the finest repair in the world. The cause of both of these rust problems are easily resolved, the top blob is down to a design flaw where the legs of the plastic trim trap water where it goes through the outer arch and touches the inner, simply glueing the trim on would prevent this (and is my intention). The lower blob is caused by the inner arches not getting hosed out, dirt and moisture then gets trapped in the inner arches, slowly rots through and allows moisture into the sill, rotting it from the inside. It's a credit to Rover/Honda that these problems take a good twenty years to get to a point where they need repairing, the quality of the metal and the factory protection on these cars seems surprisingly good. At least they do with this car. Anyway, first job to fix this was to cut out the modest amount of rust, as documented last update, and tidy up the inner arch. I had one tiny patch to let in at the bottom which took all of ten minutes to do and then the whole lot was cleaned up and doused in weld-through primer.

20180818-01 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

I checked the fitment on the replacement panel quite a lot since this is a complicated shape and I didn't want to have to try and remake it or order a new panel. Everything appears to line up quite well. Since the eye is drawn to the trim line and the sill-to-door panel gap, those were the areas I focused on most for fit and then massaged the panel where required to get it to fit the best with the other points. It wasn't actually that bad to do, but setting the clamps to hold it without things moving proved quite tricky since there weren't a lot of points you could really hold it in place, especially since I wasn't joddling edges on this repair.

20180818-02 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Tack, tack, tack. Wait for it to cool. Repeat. Gently tweak where things shifted a little on the door shut part of the arch, tack, tack, tack... this took a while. The metal is thinner than I've been working with so it gets hot really fast compared to what I'm used to. The welder seems to be having a bit of an issue keeping its settings too, the wire speed seemed to wander a little and the power level didn't seem very constant. It has bad days sometimes. That said, it was nice to not be chasing holes like I was on the Princess, the steel is a much better quality and much more predictable, even with a welder that's playing up a bit.

20180818-03 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

About an hour and a half later, I'd got the whole piece in, puddle welded to the sill rail and inner arch, and got busy with the flapwheel. I was very happy that there were no spots I needed to go back over and could see it just needs a little bit of filler before putting the paint down. Only trouble was, I couldn't find the filler and it was too late to go buy some. On getting home I of course found my filler, and Mike told me where the spare stuff was, so that can be tomorrow's job.

20180818-04 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

I finished off by giving everything a splash of primer so I can see where I need to apply the filler for the final stage. Once this is all in proper paint I can get the interior back in and then get the petrol tank back on. After that it's MoT time, which it should sail straight through.

20180818-05 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

I have been jolly busy today and the Rover looks almost like a proper car again. Very first job was to put the all-important shiny 1994 1p back under the underlay. Now, I don't want to say I'm a superstitious sort, but later on 20p fell out of one of the seats.

20180819-01 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr


Bodywork was not going well today. I had problems with the filler curing far too fast and the paint curing far too slow, so that side of things was rather frustrating. It's weatherproof and tidy, which is what matters, but it's certainly not the standard I'm capable of. I'll redo this after I've moved house, I'm not stressing about it now.

20180819-02 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr


With the bodywork sorted and the paint eventually dry, I could refit the carpet which was surprisingly easy to do, and the bolt in the back seat which was also very easy to do. All of the boot trims and things have been reinstated too. I do need to trim down the moulded boot trims so they fit the new seat opening, I can't use hatchback ones because the boot on the hatchback is shorter so they don't fit. Rear seat was tested, and it's all functional, and being a 60/40 split-fold will no doubt be handy in the future. The plastic trims that go over the rear arches to the sides of the rear seat need trimming in a couple of spots to clear the parcel shelf and I may need to make a small slice in the bottom to pull the seatbelt through since the seatbelt lower bolts are stuck pretty fast and I don't want to force those since I haven't got spare relevant bolts, nor a tap and die set of the relevant size. Much safer and easier to trim a bit of plastic nobody will ever see.

20180819-03 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr


The carpet edges clip onto a pressing on the sill edge with some plastic edging that's part of the carpet. Over the top go the Rover sill trims, and because of the screw placement the fancy higher spec chrome trims are handed left and right. The rear trims are a plain plastic and look the same at a quick glance but they too are handed with a locating peg on the back that sits in a hole in the sill.

20180819-04 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr


The centre console trim just slots into place and is held by four self tapping screws, two each side.

20180819-05 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr



The arm rest console is slightly more tricky since that's held down with four bolts you have to remove before sliding it into place, and then bolt it down, and then put the cubby insert back in. I reseated the handbrake trim too as that had come adrift at some point. Gearknob was screwed back on, boot/petrol flap release levers reinstated and the foot rest was bolted back down. All of this helped the carpet sit much more flat.

20180819-06 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr


20180819-07 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr


I removed all of the wooden trim from my old door cards and the trim across the top of the dashboard so I can strip off the old cloudy varnish and refurbish them. This is a job I'm not in a rush to do because they can all be slotted back into place after I've fitted the doorcards, etc. very easily.

20180819-08 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr


20180819-09 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr


Then on to the tricky job, which was the front seats. When I got the seats I knew one seatbelt pre-tensioner was missing which wasn't a problem as I had a spare on my existing seats. It's a purely mechanical system on these and there's a little tab that you use to deactivate them, surprisingly, the one on the new passenger seat hadn't been deactivated. Anyway, this is the two driver's seats, my worn out velour one on the left and the nicely worn half-leather one on the right. I needed to undo a torx headed bolt that holds the seatbelt thing on, and a 17mm regular bolt that holds the pre-tensioner tube on.

20180819-10 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr


20180819-11 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr


They put up a bit of a fight to remove, as you might expect of safety equipment, but once off it was a simple matter of bolting them up super tight on the relevant seat and job jobbed ready to keep me in my seat in a crash.

20180819-12 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr


With that sorted, I could get both seats in the car. These seats are an absolute doddle to fit even though they're incredibly heavy for their size.

20180819-13 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr


20180819-14 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr


Then it was time to go home because I was very hungry, so I'll likely finish this job off tomorrow since there's not a great deal left to do now.

I don't know what the model number is but I can tell you it's backlit in a lovely 3-bar electric fire orange.

Did the flag have the word "Bang!" on it Darren?

Well joy of joys, I broke down in the Princess today. Just conked out when trying to get across a roundabout, which is just exactly where you want to be. Tried to restart and managed to flood it. Popped the bonnet and had a poke about to see if anything obvious was amiss and give it chance to un-flood. Restarted after much cranking and only with foot to the floor, very lumpy and then evened out so limped home and had a better look.

All the plugs are clean, leads are still attached, distributor cap in good health. Rotor arm was a bit dark and then I checked the points. Looks like the cause of my sporadic misfire is fouled points since they were covered in a sheen of oil. I suspect an internal seal in the distributor is not doing its job. Cleaned everything up, put it all back together and the car started and idled happily for a while and then you could hear it was just hunting a little, almost but not quite misfiring.

I reckon it'll be a simple O ring that's failed so it should be a cheap fix. It's the same distributor as used on Land Rovers so it shouldn't be a problem to get bits and pieces for. What a nuisance though.

Electronic is the way to go - fit & forget.

Around £60.

rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.co.uk%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F253178025602

A lot more than an O-ring, granted.

😃

Good luck with all of that it can be a ‘mare
James

Edit it can also go really smoothly and be a great new start !hope it goes this way for you!