1980 Austin Princess mild custom - 1951 Lanchester LD10

threads need more *enhance* tickatickaticka imho, that made me chuckle

racking my brains on the diesel pump malarky, is the injection pump a sucker aswell as a pusher ? (by that i mean is it lifting fuel from the tank as well as raising it to XXXX pressure to open the injectors ? or does it have a lift pump too?)

injector pumps are a mixture of being incredibly simple, but also really complicated due to fine tolerances and amount of parts in it. i tend to agree with glen re: the specialist advice and can also +1 the detling airport company. i don't know if its a lucas pump, but they are now (after several mergers and buyouts) trading under the delphi brand which will significantly increase your google results for parts if you are doing that. i went through the same maladies puttng my estate back into service, chasing O rings around the periphery of the pump, but anything more complicated, honestly let the job out.

That's fair enough

Spotted on the pistonheads 'badly modified cars' thread...

+1 that.

I always use gouache in a similar but different colour, then wash it off once holes are drilled. Good thing about gouache is you can mark the thing up and then leave it for ages and the guide marks will still be there. But it sponges off as soon as you've finished with it.

Looks like a couple of people have twigged it's a photoshop (or MS Paint as someone unkindly stated).

Weather cleared up today, wind was mostly not there, and I had my latest dye order so it was time to get on with this job before work. I'm doing quite a big colour change with this so I'm using a bit more dye than you might normally just to get a uniform finish. The passenger side door cards (from 1978 going by the date stamp on the back) are more sun faded on the top than the driver's side ones were, even though it's not as evident in pictures as in person. I bought some of the cleaner that vinyldye sell since I'd run out of the generic cleaner I'd been using and I have to say, I wish I'd used theirs from the start because it's very good. As per their recommendations I scuffed all surfaces with a green scourer before cleaning too and that helps provide a decent surface. Masked off the weather stripping and popped out the lock pin escutcheons and then hung the door cards on the stacking crates ready for dye.




The instructions call to use thin layers, with about 10 minutes between coats. The first door cards I did I think I put the dye on a little bit too heavy because this time around I used lighter coats and it went much better. It was also a bit cooler today so that might have helped.


The dye looks terrible for several coats and then all at once it doesn't and you're suddenly left with new looking door cards. It took just under two of the tins I'd ordered to do these door cards, which is about what I expected. Also took about 4-5 coats for a uniform finish, again as expected.


One thing I had learned is that you need to use up a partial can, if you don't then when you go to use what's left it comes out splotchy and messy and just doesn't spray right. That meant doing some more spraying so I hauled the driver's seat out of the car and set to with the masking tape. This was pretty awkward to do and finding a way around for the seat to go so that I stood any chance of a uniform finish took some thinking too. I was hopeful one can would be enough for the seat and fully expecting to need the two and a bit I had left since I was trying to cover black. First coat the dye was barely visible.


Six coats later, seven in a couple of stubborn spots, and I finally had a fairly uniform finish. I would have liked to do one more coat but I ran out of dye. That means I need at least two more cans of dye to do the other front seat. Still, for about £25 of materials it's a pretty impressive job and far easier than retrimming the whole seat.




I'm really happy with that result. To be on the safe side I'm not reinstalling any of this until they've had 24 hours to cure. There's a few spots on the black piping on the velour side that hasn't quite dyed as uniformly as I'd like, but that also isn't noticeable since it blends with the black seat facings. When I get the new dye I know I can go over the piping with a paintbrush and carefully touch in the dye where it's required. I probably won't since it's not really necessary, I'm doing a colour change not a show car.

So far it's taken 8 cans of dye to do all the door cards, one seat, and all the smaller bits of interior vinyl. I reckon another 4-6 cans of dye will do the rest of the seats. That combined with the carpets will bring the interior redo out at around £300ish which really isn't bad at all and hasn't involved any of the faff of unpicking and resewing seats. If nothing else, it's a good trial run to check I want this colour scheme without committing to the cost and time involved for a professional retrim.

The air ingress problem on the BX is a frustrating one and I've been avoiding it since my last post. I've had a suggestion of running the engine from a jerry can fed directly to, and sat higher than, the injection pump. This should in theory eliminate the possibility of air leaks further back in the system since it would narrow it down to the pump and everything ahead of it. I'm also advised that the not-running issue I'm having is unlikely to be injector related. The proof will be in running from a can and seeing what happens, if the car runs perfectly from the can then I know the air leak is further back, if it doesn't then... let's not think about that just now. Instead I've been trying to do some research, thusly. The following is copy-pasted from another forum.

Having gone over the various tips and advice, I was all geared up to try and do this and then realised I can't for one reason: I have no idea what I'm looking at. After much searching through the manual, the forum, the internet, I can find nothing conclusive about what the fuel preheater looks like, where its located, or how I might bypass it. All I can find is people saying "simply bypass the preheater".

My best guess is that it's the silver square-ish box to the bottom right of this image.


But also that the one on my car isn't going to be that design because it's older, so it's more likely this black one in the same location.


The reason for me thinking it's that piece is that's the side of the engine the fuel lines run, and more people say it's "on the back of the engine" as the location than anything else. Some people have told me it's near the fuel tank, but that doesn't line up with anything I can find. Unless I'm being spectacularly blind, I can find no reference to this part at all in the Haynes manual, and a search online to try and find anyone stocking a replacement (so that I can at least see what the part looks like) has been equally fruitless.

So, how do I "simply bypass the preheater"? What does it look like? Where is it located? I've looked under the car and while I can see something that looks like it might be that thing, without knowing if it is that thing I don't want to go unplugging stuff until I know at least a little bit what I'm doing.

In that case, it doesn't have one. I replaced that line and it's uninterrupted from filter to hard line under the car.

Update time then. I've been shown a different kind of fuel preheater that goes on the return line (or at least it's on the return line on my car) which even if it was letting air in I'd struggled to see how it could cause the running problem I'm having so, just for the moment, I'm ignoring that because of what I found elsewhere.

I'll come back to the leak finding in a moment because one thing that arrived today was a new washer spray bar that was kindly donated by another forum user since he had a spare. Optimistically I thought this would be a straight swap, instead it needed a little adjustment. This is the aluminium type rather than the original fitment plastic hose type. My original spray bar had already been given some gaffer tape on the bend by a previous owner which had worked okay, but now it had split in another place and wasn't doing its job so well. Removal is straightforward, it's held on with three plastic clips to the wiper arm itself. Here they are side-by-side.


The aluminium one is slightly thicker in diameter and because of how the end is capped off, it won't fit through the plastic clips. I couldn't reuse the end cap from my original spray bar as it was incredibly brittle and would probably have broken up if I just trimmed off the and of the aluminium pipe and inserted it. I didn't have any other suitable end cap so I looked for an alternative option.


The answer was to use a fine tooth saw to carefully cut a slot in the side of the clip. I chose the side since it would line up with the squashed end of the new pipe and it shouldn't compromise the strength of the plastic clip too badly. The clips didn't seem very brittle, so I felt confident they'd be springy enough to push the new pipe into place and not break.




Yep, that worked okay. The third clip is a U shape so didn't need any modification, the only issue with that one is that the outer diameter of the aluminium bar is fractionally larger than the original spray bar so it was a bit of a fight to get the clip to lock in place on the wiper arm. It was otherwise fairly plain sailing.


I'm happy to report the new spray bar works much better than the old one, putting screen wash down of sufficient quantity for the whole length of the blade that it no longer drags the blade along a dry screen when you hit the washers. That's a satisfying little job to have done and since I had some more lunch break free I thought I'd see about tracking down that air leak. What I did learn is that my car doesn't actually have a fuel preheater, which is the item I've been told repeatedly is what's likely at fault. I had a right job trying to even find a picture of what one of the preheaters looks like since it's on the side of the engine hardly anyone photographs and it's not even mentioned in the manuals I've got. Anyway, my car not having one rules out that being the problem doesn't it?

I did eventually get the car to start with a big cloud of smoke and it stank of veg oil, something it hasn't done since I first got the car on the road and which was a bit surprising. I just about got the car to idle long enough to start looking and listening for the air leak and found I was having to use the fuel primer button almost constantly just to keep the engine idling while I was looking for the issue. Eventually I noticed the diesel appearing under the pump again so I hoped I'd see some diesel from another location to show me where that was coming from.


I knew the diesel leak was no higher than the injection pump, I knew it was on that side of the engine, and I knew it was at the front of the engine, just from where the diesel was present. Then finally I saw where it was coming from. Every time I primed the fuel with the button to get it idling properly I noticed the top of the injector pump where the throttle bracket fixes was wet. Some tissue at the joint after drying it off confirmed the suspicion of a leak.


It's not a big leak, but when you get this area to actually start leaking diesel you can then trace the route it takes which is to go down the spring under this bracket, down the front of the injector pump, underneath it to the bracket, and then down the block on the timing belt side. It then runs down the sump, to the engine mount, and drips on the floor. Interestingly, with the car turned off, when you prime the fuel system you can hear air being sucked into the injection pump, presumably at the same location, and when you stop hearing the air and go back to the primer button there's absolutely no resistance to it until you reprime and the symptom repeats.

I hope this is actually the air leak and that there isn't another one waiting somewhere. I'm hoping that I can redo the seals myself with one of the kits that you can get for just this purpose rather than having to try and arrange getting the car to a specialist to sort it out. The pump seems a fairly straightforward mechanical thing providing you heed the warnings on setting it up correctly if it does need to come off the car to be done. I also suspect that this issue is down to the car having been run on used veg oil in the past without the proper care taken over filtration.