vulgalour
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 7,256
Club RR Member Number: 146
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Jul 16, 2019 14:24:54 GMT
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Neato, Princess popped its head gasket today after I replaced a single heater hose. Super, smashing great.
But how do you know, Vulgalour? Could it be...
There's oil and bubbles in the coolant, there's coolant occasionally spitting out the exhaust and you can watch the coolant level drop while the car is idling. The head gasket has gone. I'm not even going to bother compression testing this one, I'm just going to fix it.
However, it's not all bad. I have a spare head (the car's original one) so I'll get that rebuilt, skimmed if necessary, and the waxstat housing replaced with a suitable metal pipe to accept a radiator top hose. I'll then split the current radiator top hose to accept a universal in-line thermostat holder and relevant temperature thermostat, thus curing a problem this car has always had since the waxstat is a troublesome bit of design and quite fragile because of the poor quality metal its cast in. Many birds, one hefty stone.
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jamesd1972
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 2,916
Club RR Member Number: 40
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Jul 16, 2019 14:45:03 GMT
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Bumhats. Looking at the positive side an coming out with a better solution for the long term James
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Last Edit: Jul 16, 2019 14:45:22 GMT by jamesd1972
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Jul 16, 2019 15:20:36 GMT
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Bumhats, get head ported and valves opened up for more power
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vulgalour
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 7,256
Club RR Member Number: 146
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Jul 16, 2019 15:22:44 GMT
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Meh, it's got enough power for me. Shan't be fitting wheelie bars just yet.
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Jul 16, 2019 15:24:08 GMT
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The head gasket is dead, long live the head gasket!
Bummer indeed, but you've got a good plan for moving forward. As I heard once, even if you're limping, you're still making progress.
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vulgalour
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 7,256
Club RR Member Number: 146
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Jul 19, 2019 17:57:25 GMT
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A proper picture update on this, since I've made some progress today. It all started when we noticed a pinhole in a heater hose, simple enough to replace it once I'd acquired a relevant pipe online after finding all my real world suppliers were out of stock of what I needed. Easy peasy job, quick top up of the coolant and everything was back to normal. The old heater hose had gone all spongey and weird and was steadily disintegrating from the inside out. I checked the other hoses and they all seem okay. After that I did my errands for the day and nothing untoward presented itself. Because we'd done a few miles and got the system circulated I checked the coolant when I got home to see if it needed topping up and the contents of the overflow bottle were not good. Before I set off to do my errands, the coolant was a nice pale blue so something had definitely gone wrong while I was out. Just in case, I topped it up and let the car idle for a bit. Very quickly started getting bubbles in the expansion bottle, an oily film on the top of the coolant that was steadily dropping in level and the slight smell of coolant out the exhaust along with the occasional spit of water/coolant too. Strangely, the oil hasn't appeared to emulsify so perhaps I caught this early enough that there's not been much mixing of fluids. Suffice to say, I see no point doing a compression test on this, it wouldn't tell me anything I can't already see. The last time it popped the head gasket it went coolant to exhaust and the water came out fast enough that it would expel it faster than you could put it in. At the time, I removed the original head and fitted the spare I had from a '79 car and it's been running on that with no bother since. I've decided to have the original head tested and rebuild that if it's good (it should be) so that I can deal with a couple of other issues it has a bit easier without totally disabling the Princess. This way, if I need to move the car a short distance for any reason I still can. The head is incredibly easy to strip down on these since they're only 8 valves. Everything is numbered as it's removed. I also knocked out the old waxstat housing which, predictably, snapped in the process. This is no great loss, the top of it is badly damaged with a big piece missing and it has heavy pitting in several places. I do have a spare housing to go in if need be. I am planning to replace the old waxstat housing with a straight pipe instead and have a modern thermostat in a housing in-line with the top radiator hose. This should work fine and be a lot easier to maintain. I've always filled from the overflow bottle anyway because of how fragile the waxstat housing is, so it's no hardship to modify the system this way. Camshaft and bearing surfaces still look really clean with no noticable wear and all the bolts that needed to come out did without any fight. The head on the O-series is slightly unusual since it serves as a camshaft box as well and has no separate rocker cover. It's a very lightweight and robust unit. This one has been given a bad coat of silver paint as part of that bad historic restoration, and I'll be stripping that all off back to bare alloy before it goes away for testing and skimming if required. I only have one item left to remove and that's an old exhaust manifold bolt that's had the head sheared off well before I got the car. There's nothing of obvious concern in any of the parts I removed. No excessive carbon build up, scoring, or other obvious damage. I'm hopeful it will return from the machine shop with a clean bill of health. Rebuilding and installation is incredibly easy on these heads, it's pretty much impossible to get it wrong. I haven't had a lot of free time lately so I'm snatching an occasional hour outside of work to do this, I'm hoping I make much better progress on it all over the weekend.
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jamesd1972
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 2,916
Club RR Member Number: 40
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Jul 19, 2019 18:07:48 GMT
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But it’s a BMC it can’t have good engineering ?! Assume they have hardened inserts as alloy so trip to machine shop for quick skim / pressure test to ensure all good James
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Rich
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,317
Club RR Member Number: 160
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Jul 19, 2019 18:42:36 GMT
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in regards to your coolant filling 'conundrum', a lot of modern Asian cars use a filler adaptor inline of the top radiator hose. Maybe you could utilise something like it for quick and easy refilling of the coolant system when you make your changes?
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Last Edit: Jul 19, 2019 18:43:58 GMT by Rich
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Jul 19, 2019 19:57:39 GMT
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There is a bx on flipping bangers at 9 on blaze
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vulgalour
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 7,256
Club RR Member Number: 146
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Jul 19, 2019 22:52:42 GMT
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jamesd1972: That's very much the plan. A friend of mine has informed me he has the proper cam locking tool and a bunch of shims to do the job properly, so I'll be making use of that too so we can ensure the valves are set perfectly. Rich: That's just the sort of thing I'm looking at fitting, only I hadn't realised there was one with a filler built in, so that is really the perfect solution. tineca: What's blaze? What's flipping bangers? I'm going to assume it's something on the telly, and I don't have a telly.
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Jul 20, 2019 22:02:26 GMT
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Blaze is a free view channel and flipping bangers is a low budget but entertaining car program. Some poor bodges but worth a watch. No telly? I guess quite liberating 😊
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vulgalour
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 7,256
Club RR Member Number: 146
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Jul 21, 2019 15:42:04 GMT
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I've had telly and all I ever did was turn it on, flick through the channels, realise there was nothing to watch and turn it off. Get more entertainment from Youtube these days, so I suppose I do have a telly, just not in the traditional sense. I barely ever listen to the radio for exactly the same reason. I don't even have internet on a mobile device.
I dunno, the world just seems so busy and stressful I've looked at what I can turn off and do without while still enjoying life and it turns out I can go without an awful lot of the online social experience. Seems everywhere you go now people want you to sign up, leave a review, give them your phone number, allow tracking, enter a competition, link up to your Facebook, share, subscribe, tweet... it's all a bit intense and, for the most part, utterly pointless.
So I've stepped away from a lot of things. It gets a bit awkward sometimes. There's been times when the only way to get a thing is to download an app to your phone, which I can't do. There's been the odd occasion when I've been asked to do something online with my phone which, again, I can't do. Overall it's not been massively detrimental to the way I live my life. I really don't like that mobiles are now almost like some sort of ID card, without a mobile number some couriers won't deliver (a landline isn't good enough, for some reason, though that's never plugged in either these days because of cold callers), some companies won't allow you to place an order online, and so on.
I'm going off topic here aren't I? Oh well. Suffice to say I can do the modern world, I just prefer not to.
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Jul 21, 2019 16:49:08 GMT
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Don't blame you.in fact envious. Life seemed simpler when were in the seventies
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Jul 21, 2019 18:12:12 GMT
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Liberating!
I have a moby but it only makes calls & texts. Like you I don't want to be constantly connected.
I agree about the constant need for signing up/logging in etc though I do have a telly,computer & a tablet.
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vulgalour
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 7,256
Club RR Member Number: 146
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Jul 22, 2019 16:22:04 GMT
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Head dropped off at the machine shop today. I did my best to clean the paint off that a previous owner has afflicted it with and while I did ask the shop if they could clean the rest off when they tested the head, they were quite reluctant to do so, I expect I'll have to do that myself. Explaining what I wanted with the waxstat housing replacement I also felt a bit like I was asking for something very complicated. Perhaps it's the way I describe things? Hopefully they can just insert a suitable pipe to clamp a hose to. I believe I've found a good in-line thermostat housing as used on Land Rovers which is the type that can be split so you can fit whatever rating thermostat you want. It's also a lot cheaper than any aftermarket in-line housing I could find and much easier to get hold of. The only issue with the Land Rover one is that it has three pipes, and I only really need 2, though since the whole thing is basically T-shaped, I might be able to modify/adapt one of the legs to take a generic filler cap. I'm still looking to see if I can find something better, but that's the closest I've managed so far.
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Last Edit: Jul 22, 2019 16:24:32 GMT by vulgalour
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jamesd1972
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 2,916
Club RR Member Number: 40
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Might be worth a look for what's used on K series elise's as they did this. Could well be the same bit. James
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vulgalour
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 7,256
Club RR Member Number: 146
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Jul 23, 2019 12:42:24 GMT
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The Elise uses the same housing as the R8 Rover. The trouble with those is that they're a Y shape so you've an in and and out and then a feed back for the heater circuit (I think, might have the feedback route wrong). Trouble is they're usually sealed plastic units so you can't change the stat without changing the whole thing. The two-part plastic versions that were used on the R8 have a habit of leaking when disturbed, so it's best to try and find one of the early alloy ones to the same design, this is something I did on my R8 to cure a persistant coolant leak from the plastic one it had fitted. The main advantage of that Land Rover one is that it was used on Rovers and MGs so is widely available and, in theory, easy to replace should the worst happen. I also found this listed as a repair/upgrade for BMW and Freelander which would probably do the trick too. I found two variations of this design out there, one is very expensive if you're not in the US and has a large nut type fixing so you can screw the two halves together instead of having fixings or bolts to clamp the two halves together. Those seem to run in the £120 price range which is a bit steep for this particular solution. The other variant I found was listed for MG F and was a very square looking design, anodised in a bright colour, no price listed for it. One of the early suggestions was to use a Renault 5 thermostat housing and I was shown one that would do the trick, a nice in-line unit, not too expensive. Do you think I can find it now?
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Jul 23, 2019 13:17:07 GMT
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Something like THIS any good. All depends on the hose diameter I guess. Often used on the Rover 75 to replace a duff thermostat.
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vulgalour
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 7,256
Club RR Member Number: 146
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Jul 24, 2019 12:53:18 GMT
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One to add to the list, thank you for the link. It should do the job at least as a temporary solution until I can get exactly the part I want, so it's a good backup.
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Jul 24, 2019 16:23:24 GMT
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^^^ that would be a perfect permanent solution.
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