1973 AC Model 70 Invacar, Visitors & Occasional Distractions

Hi mate,
Sent you a PM,

Definitely. It just needs to be the centre of attention for a while. I need to thin the herd a bit and hopefully reduce the percentage of my cars which are highly complicated.

-- -- --


I'm pretty much knackered from helping a friend move house over the weekend, and reckon it will be a good few days before I'm back to my usual levels of productivity. I did manage half an hour in the garage yesterday...well about 15 minutes actually before my body made it abundantly clear that it wasn't amused at the idea!

I've started on the 2000 mile checkup on TPA. We're within 150 miles now and it's no biggie if there's a few miles between things.

First check was on the spark plugs. These have been in there since I first started reviving the engine in KPL.

Nearside:



Offside:



Nothing concerning there I feel. Gap was still perfect so they were put straight back in - will have another look in another thousand miles.

It looks like the collection mission for the new arrival will be happening this weekend, most likely driving up on Friday afternoon and coming back on the Saturday as that's just when my lift is available.

To be fair, I think the car(s) are just the final icing on the cake... 

For those wondering what the outcome of news of a new arrival mentioned earlier came to - here's the new thread for the new arrival over here -
Go say hello to the slightly shabby Merc W123 Estate I've just collected.

Ah, the old “how many spares does one man really need in a lifetime” conundrum…

As someone perpetually trapped in the indecision field between “sell it, it’s worth loads more than you paid for it”, “keep it, you might need it and then you’ll have a heart attack when you see the price they’re fetching” and “I know it’s in here somewhere, but I can’t move for stuff” I can report that it’s actually quite nice to clear some of the peripheral stuff out and recycle the funds into something else.

So, make a minty fresh one to keep, and a working one to sell, then splash the proceeds on more junk valuable collectibles. 

Or, make a minty fresh one to keep in a dark room, so it doesn’t spoil, and a working one to use, and some stacking boxes to put the other spares in. 

Hope that helps. 

👍👍

It's been a good couple of weeks since I'd last had TPA out, which just isn't like me...mainly because I'd buried her when getting ready for the vehicle swapovers happening with the Xantia moving on and the Merc arriving...so I had to spend about an hour sorting the garage out so I could actually get TPA out.

Quite rightly she was a bit irked at having been so unceremoniously buried, and made this displeasure known by getting a bit of gunk wedged in the idle jet. Thankfully this resolved itself after about half an hour of driving.



On the way home I managed to capture one of those odometer palindromes which please my sense of order.



Will have to make sure that it's not another three weeks before she's out again. Oh, and add "clean carb again" to the service to do list.

Progress has continued on the garage. Yesterday I got the shelf up for the compressed air receiver tank which finally moved that from the floor sticking out about 6" into the walkway.



Those brackets are screwed directly into the wall stud so strength should be fine, the tank isn't actually all that heavy (the compressor is remote), and I did go back and add another two just for peace of mind later on.

I had originally hoped to have the tank mounted up above the garage door framework nearer to the door, that plan though was scuppered by there not being quite enough height available. I had also been half planning to have the compressor up in the same area...right up to the point where I picked it up for the first time in a couple of years. Nope... it's staying firmly on the floor because it is downright obscenely heavy.


Today that corner continued to be developed with me starting to rebuild some old Dexion shelving a friend gave me a while back. Yes I fouled up the top shelf currently in there on the one corner.



The bottom one was the important one today though as the height of that was dictated by needing enough room underneath for the compressor to live, so I can now install the rest of the shelves at usefully spaced heights.

The eagle eyed among you will probably see that there is pipework running up the wall there too, that's the charge line to the air tank.

I was a bit worried that my tiny and ancient compressor wouldn't be up to the job, but it made it up to the set point and cut out in a little under five minutes from stone flat. About a minute seems to be the going rate to top itself back up when doing things like inflating tyres. Which in all honesty is what 99% of its work will be anyway. Especially with the two nearest garages to me now charging £2 to use the machine there.

That yellow hose will be getting routed along near the ceiling to next to the door. I'll probably mount a regulator and water trap on a quick connect fitting there. The regulator actually on the tank is awful and I'm basically just leaving it there because I'm too lazy to remove it! I really do want a hose reel (so I can reach all the cars without having to coil/unwrap 25 metres of hose every time), but we'll see how long it takes me to justify the cost. Or I could try to build one...I do have a couple of dead wheels floating around.


The power supply to the compressor is wired through the original pressure switch so it cycles just the same as the original one from that tank.

Once I've finished messing with the shelving I'll probably put some mesh around the bottom to make sure nothing can get tangled up in the belt. Given there's no integrated cooling fan on the compressor I will probably arrange a electrically operated one to help keep it from overheating issues. It didn't seem to be doing bad though after filling the tank from empty twice in a row though. Once I have a fan in there I might enclose one side to help cut down on noise a little bit. Though it's really not bad...plus volume level aside having something chugging away like this is far less grating than the old direct drive one was, which sounded like a cross between a jackhammer and a chainsaw and really did require ear protection if you were in the garage with it running for more than a few minutes.

I *do* need to find some rubber feet for it though...I can feel it going *dug dug dug dug* through my feet despite the floor being concrete - so I'm sure everyone else in the house can as well. I think some broken Invacar engine mounts I still have in a box for some reason will be perfect for that job.

I'll get a few better photos when I've actually finished and tidied things up a little. It still looks really shonky just now.

You know you want the coiled up phone line type, so it can do the coiled up phone line thing and tangle incomprehensibly.

Two updates in one as I ran out of time yesterday.

I needed to get TPA out of the garage to allow me to put up a ladder to route the compressed air line along the side of the garage. So this was an excuse to use this particular car to run the errands I needed to.



Which meant that this happened.



That's us ticked over the 2,000 mile mark. Second one rolled around a lot quicker than the first did!

Having air on tap in the garage meant it was time to replace the horrible cheap tyre inflator/pressure gauge with something a bit more fit for purpose.



The 220psi scale on the old one meant that you really couldn't aim for anything better than "roughly to about +/- 5psi" on a good day - not great when I'm aiming for 17psi for the front tyre on the Invacar. New one actually has a proper scale...and has shown how awful the old one was! It was overreading by about 5psi.



In a hobbyist garage setting that should last basically forever.

I also made a start on routing the supply hose around towards where I'm planning on the hookup point.



The compressor now has "feet" made from a few old engine mounts. This has reduced the noise level in the garage when it's running by a good 50% I reckon.

Sadly took a couple of steps backwards today. I knew I had a tiny leak from one union on the charge line and had planned to just tidy up a couple of minor things like that. However the system apparently had other plans.

You may recall I mentioned that my intention was to remove the regulator that's on the tank outlet as it's sufficiently inaccurate enough as to be useless plus with the new tank location I need a ladder to get to it. Apparently it heard me.

While rummaging through the toolbox I heard something bounce off the ceiling, land on the roof of the Invacar then roll off and disappear behind it. Now I'm quite used to hearing things falling over now and then in the garage, but something randomly bouncing off the ceiling was a new one.

Turns out that it was the pressure adjustment knob from the regulator.



The threaded section in the body has completely stripped out, this allowing the spring pressure to launch the knob off the top of the regulator.

Cue a run round to Toolstation to grab a replacement. Which of course is far larger than the original one so I couldn't just screw it in the same place as the original to stay there until I had finalised the pipework layout etc. So for the time being it's just been hung off a random screw in the wall in roughly the same neighborhood of the target location.



The supply line will be larger than that one long term...it's just what I had laying around with the right fittings on...I'll need to pick up a few more bits and pieces to finish this off.

I've now got a 30 foot hose reel on order (thanks for the suggestion) so this is probably roughly where the regulator will live, most likely just moved a foot or two up so it's a bit further from elbow bashing height. The reel will probably be fitted up above shoulder height so I can reach around to the far side of the Invacar when checking tyres without falling over it. Also to keep it just generally as out of the way as I can as it will otherwise eat into the space there otherwise.