Full circle into a Marina again. My 73 Morris Marina Coupe

In the UK that lot would have needed paint before reassembly or it would have dissolved before the shoes wore out. 🤣

A real pleasure scrolling through this thread.

Beforehand I didn't know Morris Marinas existed, now I kinda want one.

Will come here more often ^^

Finally, it's been a long time in the making, but for the first time in many years the Marina has brakes.

In the previous post, I refurbed and reassembled the rear brakes, but in the meantime I had also been working on the rest of the system. Unfortunately, things like this take time and money, both of which are a sticking point for me at the moment (mainly time, I'm waiting over a month for parts from the UK).

Even further back I started to strip the front calipers, which after some creative work with my compressor, I managed to do. First, I reinstalled the old pads, with a pry bar between them and used that to restrict the movement of the pistons, whilst pressurising the caliper and tapping the caliper body with a hammer. Eventually the pistons moved a little, but what made the biggest movement was using a punch and hammer to drive the piston out of the bore. Obviously, this is super destructive, so don't do this to pistons you want to keep (but pistons you want to keep shouldn't be stuck like these)


Out came one piston, along with a lot of sludge


This allowed me to slip the old piston back in after greasing it up, and using it to block the bore, and drive just the other piston out. I tried clamps, but there wasn't enough space with what I had, so ended up using a hose clamp to keep the piston from moving.


It worked a treat, and I ended up getting all four pistons out of the calipers in this way.

Now, before I go further, heed my warnings. Playing with hydraulics, compressed air, and brake fluid, is a dangerous game. Make sure you wear all your PPE. If it's not the crushing force of a piston flying out, it could be pressured brake fluid spraying into your face.

I should know, at one point when forcing 100+psi into the caliper I ended up with a fine mist of brake fluid spraying into my face. Thankfully I had safety glasses on, which stopped me from taking an eyeful of brake fluid and being blind, but it still wasn't pleasant. I have now upgraded to a full face shield for work like this.

As well as spraying my face, I didn't realise the fluid had travelled a meter or so behind me and ended up on the front of the Honda. Unfortunately, this sat on the paint and headlight overnight. The paint seems to have survived with only some minor marking, but the headlight has stained badly and will need replacing.


So yes, take care of yourself and your surroundings. ALWAYS wear the correct PPE. Also remember that plain old water neutralises brake fluid, so that should be the go-to for cleaning it off. Hydraulics are dangerous, if you aren't confident in what you are doing, seek professional support for the job.

Anyway, moving on, this is why the pistons were stuck. Deep corrosion.



After scrubbing the calipers in the parts washer, they spent a couple of days in the Evaporust bath to remove the rust.




They aren't perfect, and I probably should have painted them, but at the end of the day they are clean, internally rust-free and won't be seen behind the wheels.


I purchased a seal kit to suit the Girling Type 14 calipers as used on the Spitfire, PN GRK5005, which worked a treat. These Girlock calipers are almost an exact copy of the Girlings.

In went the piston seals, with lots of rubber grease. Make sure these sit flat, and arent twisted or pinched.


Next it's piston time. The pistons I used are once again from a Girling Type 14, PN 516212. These are slightly different where the dust boot sits. The Girlock pistons don't have a retaining groove, just a lip. The Girlings have a recessed groove. I figure since the seals I'm using are for the Girling, the Girlings pistons will be just fine (and to note, the old Girlock seals are visually the same). The overall dimensions of the piston are the same. Girling on the left, Girlock on the right.


The Girling piston had a much bigger lead in chamfer, which helps during assembly.


Pressing the pistons in was easy enough by hand. Lots of rubber grease, place it square and press it in with fingertips. Once it seats a bit, I used a long spanner over the face of the piston to push down evenly with both hands (one hand on each side of the caliper). It should go in with minimal force.


The dust boot is a prick. The inner lip sits in the piston recess, the outer lip just rests on the lip around the piston bore. A retaining ring holds it in place by friction. Getting this ring in place, without it pulling the boot off, took a few tries.


I found the easiest way to do it was to line the ends of the ring up so they are touching (spreading the ring open), and working from the back (opposite the open end of the ring) work it around the boot, holding it in place whilst you stretch the open ends of the ring into place. It's hard to describe, and do, but will make sense after a few tries.

Two calipers with new seals, pistons and boots.


I cleaned up the bleed nipples, making sure they were clear (they weren't), and refit the hard pipes. That's the calipers done.

Next in the firing line was the front rotors. I measured them a while ago and they came out as more or less new thickness, and have no lips. I feel like they were replaced not long before the car was laid up. Because of this, I don't want to replace them, that would be a damn waste. I was going to just send it, and use the pads to scrape the rust off them when it drives, but thought better of that when I had a good look. Crusty.


The best thing in this case was to remove the hub and rotor, and send the rotors off to be skimmed.

Before removing the hubs, I measured the runout in them. There should be 0.0245 - 0.1270mm play. This is to allow the bearings to expand when they warm up in use. Too tight and they will bind and fail. Too loose and they will wobble about and fail.

Well, the Lh side had this much play


0.185mm play. Quite a bit above the maximum allowable. I'm getting an awful lot of use out of my dial indicator with these old cars!

The RH side had zero play, not a thing. So both sides were set wrong. Glad I looked.

The LH side split pin was.... split. It's missing a whole leg, and was only sitting in place. It also pays to loosen the rotor bolts whilst the hub is on the car, just in case you need to stop it spinning. The rattle gun did this with no effort.


With the hub nut removed, the whole lot comes off pretty easily. The stub axle looks in good shape if a bit dirty.


One hub with rotor.


As a matter of course I bought a wheel bearing kit, as the old grease looked horrible, and there were signs of wear on the outer bearing races. The outer bearing was an LM11949 and the inner was L44649.

The back of the rotor looks worse than the front


Unlike the TVR, the rotors on the Marina came off easily with only minimal tapping with a hammer. I drove the old outer races out with a hammer and punch and gave the hub a good clean in the parts washer.


The rotors were sent away to be machined and came back looking good. They could've skimmed a little more off, but I'm sure the pads will scrub them clean in no time.


Before the rotor goes back on, the new bearings were pressed into the hub. The new bearings.


The new race was pressed in with the old race, and a deep socket




The rotor was loosely attached. Note the markings on the hub reminding me the rotor bolts aren't torqued. This can only be done on the car, using a long pry bar to lock the hub from spinning.


The bearings were packed and fitted, along with a new seal.


Before fitting the hub, I quickly swapped the old blocked front hoses for the new ones. These are Land Rover hoses, PN BR0764


And on goes the hub.


Set to the correct runout


With the caps and calipers fitted


Both hubs had the rotor bolts torqued down, so the markings were removed


The last few pieces of the puzzle were the master cylinder (which I sent off to be resleeved and rekitted), a new brake pipe from the master cylinder (since I damaged the old one removing it. A friend helped make a new one), and new pad fitting kit (in transit from the UK).

The brake master and clutch slave I sent away to be resleeved came back looking lovely. Nice new stainless bores, as well as a good cleanup. Won't have to worry about these rusting up again.


Of course, I couldn't just fit the nice clean cylinder to the rubbish looking firewall plate, so that got a wire brush and a coat of paint.


It's hard to believe it's the same master cylinder, and the same cap. I cleaned and used Araldite to fix the crack in the cap.


The pedals got new clevis pins, since the old ones had seen their share of work!


And finally, the brake light switch was tested



Which revealed that it didn't work. The switch is easy enough to strip, these tabs on the side need to be pressed to remove the bottom of the unit and pull the guts out


How this switch works confused me for a bit. When you remove the top from the bottom, it actually moves where the internal contact is, and if you don't spot it during disassembly it can be confusing. It got to the point I purchased a cheap replacement so I could work out how it's assembled.

This is whats inside the switch, and how it came apart


As it turns out, as seen on this replacement switch, the U shaped contact goes under the two legs.


It's a Normally Closed switch, so it makes a circuit when the switch is released. When the brake pedal is pressed it's releasing the switch, which makes the circuit, otherwise normally it's pressed in, which moves the U shaped contact away from the two legs. The spring sits under the U shaped contact which pushes it up.

The replacement switch was a bit cheap, so instead I cleaned up the contacts of the old one and reassembled it. It takes some fiddling to keep the contact under the two legs whilst you slip the base in to the top housing, but it can be done.

A test shows that when pressed, the circuit is broken


And released, it makes the circuit


The original Lucas Australia switch lives to fight another day.

The pad fitting kit finally arrived today, so I fitted the NOS pads, new shims and new pins. It's a bit of a pain with new pads and new thickness rotors, its all very tight, but it's there.


I then drew fluid through with a vacuum bleeder, until all three bleed nipples had clean fluid coming through. Then it was back to the old one-man bleeder to finish the job. The brake pedal is now firm, with good travel. The rear adjusters have adjusted up (can hear the shoes slightly dragging the drum), and the hand brake is working. Everything needs a good bedding in, but for now, everything is doing what it should, and there seems to be no leaks. I don't know when it last had brakes, but it may not have been in this millennium.

Now all I'm waiting on is a clutch master cylinder, which is en route from the UK, and a drive shaft that will be on its way to me tomorrow from down south. Once they arrive, we should be good for a trip up the driveway. Excite.

It feels like it's been a huge uphill battle getting a working tacho in this car, but I think I have finally mastered it.

Over the past few months, I have somehow ended up with a few different clusters, including two with the elusive tachometer module, and the one with the non-functioning clock I previously made a post about.

The first three dial with tacho I bought from Trademe.


It was the correct Aus cluster, with the lower 5500RPM redline, and a couple of other small differences as I would later find out.

Eager to get the tacho in and working I started to dig around the wiring diagrams to work out what I needed to do. I had heard rumours that the wiring was already in the dash, behind the cluster, and sure enough, after some poking around, I noticed a white wire tucked away with a joiner in the middle of it. This tracked with what I was expecting to find based on the wiring diagrams.


It was a big loop in the harness. I fished it out from behind the duct and unplugged it. A couple of quick checks and I was sure it was the coil trigger for the tacho. On the cars without tachos, this is just looped in the dash but needs to be connected or it cuts power to the coil. I guess it made it cheaper and easier, to just use the one harness.


The back of the tacho unit has corresponding bullet terminals


So I plugged it into the dash, and bam, nothing happened. Well, the alt/oil lights worked as they should, but the tacho was dead. I was a bit miffed

Nothing more to do then but to get to disassembly and find out what's wrong. The tacho unit is held into its housing by a couple of screws through the back, and the fascia/glass in the front.



This is what the module looks like removed.


Having already googled "why does my Smiths RVI tacho not work" I could already see something was wrong.

Those four holes in the foreground, under that red wire? Yeah, according to google there should be a transistor there, and it's crucial to the operation of the unit.

The solder pads had clearly been messed with too. It looked like someone had desoldered the component with a blowtorch.


I hit the seller up and asked if he knew why it's been molested, and he just pleaded ignorance and fobbed me off with a "oh well, it's an old part".

I suspect the capacitor or transistor had failed at some point (which is common) and someone tried to fix it. Failing to have the right parts on hand or something, they just chucked it back together and set it aside.

As fate would have it, a fellow classic car sufferer on a forum I'm on knew I'm suffering the Marina affliction and mentioned that he had come across some Marina bits as part of a garage clearout, and would I be interested in a cluster he found? Heck yeah I would! The legend donated this to the cause, so a huge Thank You.

So, this was the second tacho cluster I have. It came in a tidy surround, but it was brown, not black. No issue, They are easy to swap, and I only really needed the guts.


Differences to observe. The silver rings around the dials, instead of the black the Aus cars have, the 6000RPM redline on the tacho face (ignore the askew tacho, I had already started to disassemble it), and the different markings on the fuel and temp scales (0 instead of E, and adding the N to temp). One final difference I didn't notice initially, is the warning lights are different, with some either doing different functions, or in the case of the indicator telltale lamps, not there at all. The UK cars seem to use one single green light to show the indicator is on, whilst the Aus cars use the two spaces above the center dial as left and right signals.

*removes anorak* Right, so this cluster. Excitedly I plugged it into the car, and we had some success. The tacho moved!


But it barely exceeded 1000rpm when revving the engine. I think this one may have been suffering from the known issues Smiths RVI tachos suffer from (bad capacitors), but instead of messing around with the old inductive RVI style guts, I spent a hefty whack of cash on the Spiyda RVI-RVC conversion board.

The original RVI tacho is current sensing, so it intercepts the power feed to the ignition coil, and by some wizardry senses the pulses and creates a signal for the tacho to output. The issue with this is apparently the tacho only works with points, and in the future I want the option of upgrading to electronic ignition without having to replace the tacho again, so it had to go.

The Spiyda board removes all the existing guts from the tacho, and replaces it with a new board that reads the signal from the negative terminal on the coil (like 90% of tachometers). Heck, it can even be fed a signal from an ECU. It's pretty swish stuff.

I stripped the second tacho out of the housing, and you can see the missing component of tacho one here; the silver can is a special transistor.


I started with the guts of the first tacho since that one was dead in the water anyway. Spiyda has extensive instructions on its site, here, so follow those, but this is how I went about it.

The first step is to remove the needle. You don't need to mark where the needle sits, just make sure the mechanism is against its stop when you refit the needle. To remove it I used an old business card with a notch cut in it, and a sturdy fork. The business card is to reduce the risk of damage to the face.


A swift lever upwards popped the needle off.


Two little screws secure the face. The kit comes with a tiny screwdriver to remove these.


Now cut the power feed wire, and the two thin wires to the mechanism and remove the two screws holding the circuit to the frame. It should pull off the front.


The new board then gets screwed in place


Now solder the wires in their respective places (in my case the black and red wires had to be swapped). and you're ready for testing and calibrating.


Now, I did make a mistake in the above photo. It turns out that the video I was following, made by Spiyda, was out of date, so you no longer calibrate the unit by putting the red clip onto the tacho feed (which I made from the old RVI tacho feed, by cutting a section off and soldering it to the board). Instead, you need to clip the red clip to the solder pad on the far right, closest to the big chip (on the other side of the board), or solder pad number 4.


With 12v connected to the spade terminal on the back, the red clip on the solder pad and the black clip on the metal frame, it's time to calibrate.

Now, this was a real ballache for me. In the end, I don't know why it suddenly started to work properly, or what I did differently, but it was chaos.

The instruction and files to download for calibration are on the Spiyda site, here.

Basically, you play a square wave audio file at a certain frequency through the cable at full volume. That frequency should correspond with a certain RPM reading on the tacho. Since I was using a low revving 4 cylinder engine, I used the 100 and 200hz files as this should read 3000rpm and 6000rpm on the tacho.


I had various levels of success depending on what device I was using. My Macbook, no good. My phone, initially average. My windows based Dell tablet, good but with some issues.

I could get it to read 3000rpm, but doubling the frequency would either make the needle drop or only increase by a small amount. There was also a big jump in the needle at the start and it kinda crept down. This Gif shows the issue I was having. This is the 100-200 sweep, where it starts at 100hz and then shifts to 200hz. You can see the 100hz once the needle settles down, but then when it changes to 200hz the needle drops to just under 2500RPM.

I had been in contact with Spiyda support for a while, since even before calibration issues I had issues getting the unit to respond in the first place, and they had been very helpful in getting to where I was, with prompt replies, but then the support suddenly went cold and I heard nothing further from them.

It even got to the point of stripping down the second tacho and seeing if the issues were limited to the first one; they weren't.


I persisted with various things, and eventually I had great success using my phone. I don't know what changed, or why it worked now but didn't earlier, but suddenly I had 3000RPM at 100hz and 6000RPM at 200hz. It needed a small tweak of the calibration pot on the back, but it was rock solid.

With much excitement, I rushed to the garage and reassembled it into its housing.


And with a temporary wire run outside the car from the coil negative to the cluster, I fired the engine up. Nothing. *Sigh*

And then I remembered there were options for the input. There was a high voltage and low voltage signal option. In hindsight, if I had paid attention initially I wouldn't have wired the input to the high voltage "sports coil" option, and should've used the "normal coil" option. Oops.


It was easy to fix once I removed the guts from the cluster and moved the white wire one pad to the right.


I reassembled the cluster and plugged it in.



Success! I've run the car a couple of times since, and the tacho seems to be fairly accurate. It doesn't need to be 100% accurate, just within the ballpark is good enough, and better than Leyland would've done. It responds quickly and is very stable.


I still need to run the tacho wire inside the car, but that's easy enough to do. I should probably fit the surround back on the gauges too since they are more or less done now.

One part I neglected to address in my previous post about the driveshaft was the sliding yoke. It was seized, and no amount of pretending it wasn't was freeing it up.

The sliding yoke sits at either end of the diff half of the drive shaft. Sometimes it's on the diff end of the shaft, or in my case, it's in the middle near the center bearing, depending on where BL felt like assembling it. Either way, it's a crucial part of the driveshaft.

As the rear axle travels up and down in normal driving, the rear section of the driveshaft has to raise and lower with it. The problem is that the axle travels in an arc, which means the distance from the axle to the center hanger bearing increases and decreases slightly as it moves through its travel.

To account for this change in distance, the driveshaft needs to be able to change length. This is done with the sliding yoke. Inside the yoke is a series of strong splines, which mate with another set of splines attached to the end of the driveshaft. This allows the shaft to transfer power through it via the splines, but also slide in and out to account for the movement. A cap, spring and seal stop the spline from coming all the way out.

My yoke didn't slide at all. It was completely compressed at its shortest length and would not budge. I tried many things to free it up, including filling it with penetrating oil and hitting it with various hammers. Nothing. I even tried hanging it and seeing if gravity would free it up (it didn't).


I tried a few other things with no luck, but the one thing I was lacking was tension on the spline. Hitting it to shock it was fine, but if there was no tension pulling the two halves apart then I was only going to get so far.

So I had a brainwave (it hurt).

Two ratchet straps and a very sturdy workbench later, I had this contraption


I ratchet strapped each end of the shaft to a leg of the bench and put tension on the shaft. With one hand I grabbed the yoke and leaned back, putting even more tension on the shaft. With my other hand, I hit the flat of the driveshaft with a hammer. Sure enough, after a few hits, I saw movement and then with a POP it fully extended.


I unscrewed the cap at this point, which reveals the cork seal and washer. The cork seal is known for being pretty chewed up and is unobtainable new now. Thankfully mine was in mint condition.


And for the first time I could see the splines. The old grease was black and disgusting, and the splines had obvious signs of surface corrosion.


One thing to make sure of is that both halves are clearly marked so it is reassembled in the same location. I scribed lines into the yoke and driveshaft and then marked it with a white paint pen.


The spline isn't keyed, so can fit many different ways. The main thing to take care of is that the UJs are in phase, which means they both have to be in line with each other.

With the spline removed it was time to get cleaning. All the old grease was cleaned off with brake cleaner and a toothbrush.


Which revealed why it was seized together. All the teeth had surface rust to some degree. This was binding with the internal splines in the yoke.


A good wiring brushing quickly got rid of most of it, showing the splines to be in good shape otherwise.


The splines were then slathered in grease ready for reassembly.


The internal splines in the yoke also got a good clean


Once I was satisfied with the condition of the splines I packed the yoke with grease and slid the driveshaft back in.


And wound the cap back down over the seal. A quick wipe to remove the grease ejected out the breather, and we're done. The joint slides freely so should do the job nicely.


With that done, the driveshaft had been completely overhauled now and is finally 100% ready to go back in the car.

If you can get leaded solder, it'll make life easier on repair for older electronics

With the driveshaft all fresh and clean, all I needed to do was crawl under the car and refit it. While under there though, I thought it prudent to replace the last remaining fluids.

Refitting the driveshaft was easy enough. I reused the old bolts but invested in some new locknuts to secure them.


It turned out that the new center bearing has different sized captive nuts, so the old bolts wouldn't work. I got fed up with having to guess and buy bolts one by one, as all my stocks of spare bolts are of course Metric, and the Marina is Imperial, so ended up buying a kit of various sized Imperial nuts, bolts and washers from Trademe.


With the driveshaft completely refitted I moved on to changing the driveline fluids. Both the gearbox and diff call for a GL5 EP90, which as it turns out, is a bit harder to find locally. I chose to go with a Castrol Axle EPX 80W90 instead, which is a GL5 spec EP oil.


The gearbox was easy to drain and fill. The fill plug, which you should remove first, is on the RH side. Just a normal imperial square, as is the drain plug on the bottom.


The old fluid, which has been in there for at least 25 years, wasn't as bad as it could be. It had a few years to settle at the bottom and was thick with a dark grey hue, that later changed to a dark brown. No chunks though, so that's a win.

I pumped some fresh fluid through to help shift anything sitting on the bottom, and refit the drain plug. Just a smidgen over 1L was pumped into the box, and when it started to dribble out I refit the fill plug. A quick clean and that part of the job was done.


Next was the rear diff. This was a bit of a pain as there is no drain plug, only a large fill plug.


I tried a large syringe but it was taking way too long, so not wanting to be defeated, I grabbed the handheld vacuum bleeder.


And I'll be, it worked a treat. Still slow because the waste fluid bottle is only about 100mls, but it flowed easily after a few pumps of the handle.

After getting as much as I could out, which was about 10 bottles of gross, almost black, stinky fluid that had likely been in there since it was built almost 50 years ago, I filled it with about 1L of fresh new fluid.


Once again, refit the fill plug, clean it off and done.

Now that I had the driveshaft in, I could do something that hadn't happened in a VERY long time.... see if the driveline works.

The first step was to install the pedal rubbers


Mmm fresh. I did that now, because it's way easier to do without the seat installed, which was next on the list.


What does having a seat installed mean? Sitting making vroom vroom noises of course!


Then I fired the engine up, put it into gear, and eased the clutch out.



It works! For the first time in 10-25 years, the hubs spun under their own power. Ignore the angry tractor idle, I really need to warm it up and give it a decent run, but I can't do that until we are out of the garage.

So, when is that I hear you ask. Well, the wheels need to go off and be blasted and powder coated, and then the new tyres can be fitted. Once that's done, on the car they go, and the car can FINALLY come down off the stands it's been on since I got it.

For now, I'll just be here reading my original Leyland Australia parts catalogue from 1975


Which is pretty handy really, since it shows me how things like the heater/vent ducting go together since currently it's all in a box and I had no idea.


It's completely different to the Uk cars, and the heater box is actually the same as the Aus built Mini Clubman of the time.

Soon.

Thats the strange thing, the Marina owners manual from 1973 literally states GL5.

Practical Performance Car March 2020 issue 191, has an article on a Marina similar to yours, with a twin cam head from the BMW bike engine fitted to the A series engine. I've taken a picture and tried sharing it here but can't figure out how on the phone.