Rover P5B Coupe - MGB V8

Absolutely!

Sad news about the owner though.

There was a mk2 Escort that came up for auction in Chesterfield the other year. South African import but had been gone through nut and bolt.
The owner had bought it and had it all done up only to promptly die before he'd had the chance to relive his youth. Very sad indeed.

got all excited then...thought i had missed an update. :-(

Not much work done on the Rover as i am very busy with the steering wheels and dashboards. Its almost ready. The coach lines are not done but i am considering to not do them as i do not like them. This weekend i removed a fair bit of dust from the car and wanted to get it running as in 2 weeks i need my workshop for some spray painting and therefore i do not want the Rover to be there. The first attempt to get it running failed and then i realised the Facet fuel pump kept on ticking which means the tank is empty. After filling it up with a can of petrol, it started instantly and it was good to hear it runnning again as its runs so smooth and sounds great After that i smelled petrol and there was a small leak of the fuel filter. As the Rovers have a reserve it is pretty crowded there

It drives oke but it simply is not my kind of car because there are no V8 sound but it has tax advantages. Last weekend we attended a weight lifting contest of my son 190 km from home and as some friends of my son were joining us, we drove with both the Tesla and the P5B to the event. The Tesla had to be charged when we arrived as there was not enough battery capacity for the return trip so we had to bring the Tesla to a charging point some 5 km away from the event and the good old Rover was needed to bring my wife from the charging point to the event and later to pick the car up again.
The daily Rover is clocking up the km without much trouble. I only needed to replace the horn as it was not working anymore.

In the spring some work is required on the sunroof. It is not leaking yet but soon will, especially as the spring and summer sun will attack it



It still amases me how reliabel this almost 50 year old car is in daily use and living outside.

Also did some work on the project Rover. It had to be removed from  the workshop as i needed to spray some wooden panels and steering wheel.
When i drove it outside, it became clear that the brakes did not work although the pedal was very hard.
After spraying, i had to drive the car back into the workshop, with some poor adjusted carbs (high revs) and only the hand brake which lead to some scary moments.
Underneath a picture of my 2 P5Bs



The project rover sat lower then the daily P5. These Rovers have torsional front springs with an adjusting mechanism. I like the look of the lower car but grond clearance is not enough so i set it as high as my daily rover

After having the car in the workshop, i had a look at the brake booster. This was new so should not cause problems. Soon it showed, i had made a stupid mistake by interchanging the brake lines. After correcting this and bleeding the system, the brakes worked fine again



Next step was to adjust the carbs as i could not get the revs down enough and it is not good to put the car in drive with 1500 revolutions
Took some time to figure out what was wrong. I had rebuild the SU some time ago and all linkages were correctly adjusted so i removed the carbs from the manifold and opened them up again and after some investigation, i found out that i had forgotten to fit the jet bearing washers (pos 16)



After fitting these, the car refused to start. There was a spark, so i thought the carbs caused problems. After some time and a lot of thinking, i had a look at the spark plugs which were sooted badly. After cleaning these, the car started instantly and i was able to lower the revs. The forgotten washers clearly gave a very rich mixture

Also found a supplier of small stainless self tapping screws as a few were missing on the stainless trim. These were packed in boxes of 200 but only costed 4 or 5 euro per size



All the trim is now fitted with the correct size of self tapping screws



There still is a list of to do things which i will work on the coming weeks

Peter

Looking good but a bit overdone

Did some small job from the "to do" list. When i drove the car out of the workshop, i noticed a scratching noise from the front wheel. Had a look underneath and saw that the steering ball joints lightly touched the rims on both sides and touched the balancing weight which were chiopped off.

This was partly caused by fitting Jensen Interceptor alloys but these were also fitted to my daily Rover P5 without problems. I soon noticed that there are 2 ball joints diameters and i had fitted the larger one to my project P5B. Had a look into my assortiment of spare ball joints.



and found one with a smaller diameter. All the ball joints on these Rovers are kind of bulletproof. When i bought my spares car, i also was offered a spare subframe with front suspension which had been in a field for several years and was covered in weeds. As there was room in the van, i took it. After coming home, i dismantled it to find all ball joints and wheel bearings in good condition.




All the others had the larger diameters. There are 4 fitted to a Rover P5 and luckily my daily Rover had 3 with a smaller diameter so i could swap one of those.

After replacing both grease nipples by a bolt, cleaned both with a rotating wire brush



and gave these a coat of 2K primer with a brush



After a coat of 2 K black paint, both ball joints were fitted and the wheel balancing weights which i found on the drive, were glued to the wheels

.

Also roughly adjusted the mixture screws on the LPG system so that the car now starts and runs on LPG

Peter, it's interesting to see the Webasto removed and in pieces.
The bracket shown above, pop-riveted in place: is that original from Rover, or installed with the sunroof?
Thanks, John

All the pop riveted brackets come with the Webasto roof. None of these are standard Rover. It looks slightly overengineered as most of these are 2mm thick

Did some more work on the daily Rover. The rust on the loose parts was removed, threated with Hydrate 80, a coat of primer and a coat of black paint.



The front of the sliding part has a wooden bar which houses the open and closure mechanism which was in a pretty poor condition as a lot of the layers were loose and the outer top parts were very bad as very rusted bracket had damaged the wood so i renewed some pieces



All the loose pieces were glued together in a few sessions



All the screws were very rusty and had damaged the wood and was not a good base for new screws. All the holes were drilled to a larger size and wooden dowels were fitted






Gave the finished bracket a coat of epoxy



In the meantime, the headlining material arrived from the UK. A friendly P5B owner which happens to be a professional car trimmer supplied me the original material and gave some usefull advices although he believed it was a job for a professional and also mentioned it was a 2 men job.

So with a bit of  i started alone as due to the Covid situation, i could not ask a friend for help. The Rover has a frame for the headlining but because of the sunroof, the connecting bars have been removed and this leaves a fragile frame



The friendly trimmer advised to fit the frame to car and in the car fit the headlining. It is not posible to fit it in the original position because there is no room to glue the headlining to the frame so i lowered it a bit by using longer self tapping screws

Then fitted the headlining with clips to the frame to get an idea



Then pulled it all straight and glued it to the frame



Pretty happy with the result. The front corners are not perfect so will see if i can adjust it a bit

Then marked the cut out for the sliding part from the outside



Glued the parts to the roof but have no picture of that.

It is a time consuming job but pretty happy with the result so far

Peter