I know, I know, she’s riiiiiiiiided a few times in her many years in my ownership, but today, following some help from my awesome friend Nikki (who kindly put aside her EV journalism for some of the day to come help) Rebecca is sporting a ‘new’ diff and actually, for the first time in months trundled up, and down, the private road outside our garage (without me having the fear that she was going to emit a ghastly ‘crunch’ noise and stop dead).
Today has, in fact, been a bit of a slog though. Indeed whilst fitting the differential went very smoothly, nay, incredibly smoothly (at least, assuming I don’t get down there tomorrow and find a huge pool of oil under the car, or that a rending metal noise does not occur when we’re enroute to the garage for the MOT).
If you’ve never worked under a car before, a way to simulate it would be to crawl under your bed with some 2kg bags of sugar. Now, whilst an assistant sprinkles you with bits of mud and grit, and ideally whilst rubbing your head in a mixture of mud and oil, hold the weights up at the most inconvenient angle you can until you’re whimpering from the pain.
In actuality, most of it wasn’t that bad today, but it had its prime moments, those moments when I desperately wished that we were in a fully equipped workshop. But working in a garage is a definite improvement on working outside. Having cleaned out the broken old teeth and grit from the bottom of the axle casing, RTV’d and put a new cardboard gasket in place, the new diff snicked into place, the halfshafts were slotted back in with new oil seals, and the brake drums slipped back on.
The wheels were replaced and, with only a little encouragement, she started and ran. Indeed she ran and we trundled her up the road and back. Shiny.
The next job on my notional list was installing a headlining. The headlining was taken out when she was restored, and not put back in as a cost saving measure (it’s apparently complicated, longwinded and difficult). Now, the theory was that I would replace it later, and I assumed that any bits not included in the headlining kit would be left in the car… To be honest, I’d not really considered that anything would not be included in the kit. I was wrong.
It turns out that the kit does not include the rather important bits of bendy wire that support the headlining.
And they’re not something you can buy. The clips, yes, you can buy. The tensioning wire, yes, you’re meant to replace it. The supporty bits of headlining wire? No, not available. Not quite sure what to do about that. I’ve e-mailed Jon to ask if they’re still kicking around the workshop (unlikely), otherwise it’ll be another plea on the Minor Owner’s Club messageboard.
Nikki had to head off then anyway, but having realised that the headlining wasn’t going in today (*sadface*) the list of other jobs that need doing popped into my head and I set to on the seats. Whilst the bases were still springy having been repaired in the past, the backs of them were painfully collapsed. Having taken the first one to pieces, it quickly became apparent why they were so uncomfortable:
I’ve actually got new bases as well as new backs, and new foam too. Unfortunately, no new vinyl, which is a shame, because one of the bases is ripped. But at 50 quid a section for new vinyl that wasn’t happening (and they’d probably then not match the rear seats… and then I’d have to recover that… and oh, the pain). The driver’s seat was also broken (long ago) and repaired by the simple expedient of riveting strips of aluminium to it to hold it together. It astonishes me that the seat’s survived this long…
…so I took down the ‘spare’ seat frame, drilled it to take the new rubber membrane base springing, applied new webbing to the back of the seat, took the new foam (which irritatingly seems to be slightly larger than the old foam), cut and fit the heated rear seat elements, and then attempted reassembly. There was some swearing. There was the phrase ‘Why do you hate me so?’. I’d forgotten how unforgiving vinyl is as a seat trimming material. I’d forgotten what an absolute bastard the squishy pipe that holds the vinyl on the base into the metal frame is. All this had escaped my memory, until that moment. It has also, sadly, suffered from being overstuffed in the past. It came overstuffed, and I’d left it overstuffed, and I think the vinyl has stretched.
The driver’s side seat is next up, but as I considered refitting the seat I realised I was about to make a grave error.
I realised that, in fact, fixing the selection of other issues was probably wise before putting the seats back in, and so I set to on the two other dash-related jobs; the replacement indicator stalk and the heater matrix. The heater matrix leaked when she was being restored, and Jon replaced the matrix with a second hand one from a scrap minor. Whilst my matrix had been fairly thoroughly cleaned out and descaled, the replacement came (as mine originally did) with 40 years of gunk and crud and neglect. To say it wasn’t ‘terribly warm’ would be perhaps the understatement of the year. The car was bloody freezing. Only when stationary did the heater emit enough heat to entitle it to such a name.
And with our (previously impending) move to Nova Scotia on the books when I was deciding on parts, I ordered the super dooper, extra hot, modern replacement matrix rather than the standard one. This is the modern one:
This is what an OEM one looks like:
Now, what I didn’t twig when I ordered it (because I’m not always the brightest candle in the box, and I’d never actually looked at the new one next to the old one), or indeed until I had the heater in bits in front of me, is that they’re not the same. Indeed, it turns out that the new heater core won’t actually fit in the standard heater box. You have to cut holes in the standard heater box to allow it to fit.
Now I don’t have a great deal of metal working tools. So this did not make me happy.
However, the new matrix is now in the heater, and the heater is 2/3rds of the way reinstalled. Also, whilst I’ve had the car in bits I’ve realised that there’s a nice place for all the electronics hardware to be hidden away when we convert her to an EV. Loads of space in them-there-dashboard, there be.
The indicator stalk is also dangling off, the difficulty being that my replacement left-hand-drive dashboard is not particularly conducive to removal, so I’m not particularly looking forward to tomorrow’s game of switch the lucar connector with your hand wedged through a tiny, tiny gap whilst trying to avoid chipping the paint on your shiny shiny dashboard, but I am looking forward to having an indicator stalk that doesn’t occasionally ‘flop’ to an on-state, actually does self-cancel and isn’t held together internally by tape.
Once those jobs are done we’ll move onto the nicey nicey job of fitting the quarter panels with speakers so I can actually listen to the radio. Then back to reinstalling the seats, adding the wiring for the heater elements (because obviously, heated seats in the summer are vitally important), and then we can go for an MOT!
Yay.
So that’s tomorrow sorted out then ;)
