Princess 2 - 14/12 Lotus ON

[Vulgalour]

Today has been spent in the company of three delightful 60s/70s Alfa Romeos, I even got my mitts on them helping with some of the jobs that needed doing. The trade off was being able to make use of tools and space to do a little patch on the Princess. This, unfortunately, is the only picture I got of any of the Alfas. It's nearly finished now, just having interior fitted the engine tweaked for optimum performance and a finishing clean and polish.


My camera was playing silly buggers so I didn't get much of my progress shots. There had been a small hole in the rear wing since getting the car and I finally got a patch welded in. My welds were nice and strong but they weren't the prettiest. I did make sure you couldn't pull the patch off with tools and that it was tacked on as much as necessary, it's only a cosmetic area but I wanted it sealed up so that water couldn't get into the wing and rot it further. Ideally, it needs the bottom two or three inches of the whole quarter replacing to totally eliminate the rot, but it should do me through the winter which is the important thing.

I did put some filler on to hide the worst of the job but I'll take this back again at a later date.


Then it was just a case of applying some gloss black paint to keep the area weather proof. Again, I'll tidy this up when I get home and make it nice again.


I'm not really getting on with the workshop MIG, I find the stick welder easier to work with, but you need really, really good metal to use the stick properly whereas the MIG allows you to work on thin stuff. It's one little job off the list at any rate and while I don't condone bodges I'm hoping this will at least tide me over for 6 months. I won't make the repair too tidy so that I am aware of it as needing to be redone properly.

[Jonny69]

That filler in the doors looks pretty typical of 1990s 'repairs'. We were all told that these miracle two-part fillers, glass loaded resin filler and sheets of aluminium mesh meant the rust was gone and no welding needed. I remember properly wagging up my 100E after digging out all the old grot with nothing more than an old screwdriver. How foolish we were!

[Vulgalour]

Normally, I only really expect to see wob-restoration on a rusty old bucket but what's weird about this one is that someone has taken the time to weld in good metal, so why go wob-crazy afterwards? There's probably two stages of work, one that's done right and one that's bodged and it's my job to unbodge it all I guess.

----

Thanks to her continued sterling service, I decided to treat the Princess to some maintenance. I reckon the car has more than earned it, especially after our recent adventures returned a very satisfactory 37.8mpg.

To that end, I hastened to Autosupplies and purchase some antifreeze, some glass polish and some wiper blades. They didn't have a timing belt in stock and I forgot to enquire about an oil filter, driveshaft oil seals or a thermostat. I'll have to do that tomorrow since I have errands to do.

New wiper blades were Lucas jobs and they showed just how knackered my old blades were, one of which had started to judder across the screen irritatingly. Usefully, my neighbour needed a fresh blade to see him through until he scraps his car and mine were the same size and swapped in, an improvement over what was on his car and saved me throwing them away and him buying a new set. Old wiper on the box, new on the car. The new blades have a very flexible grey-ish blade that seems to sweep much smoother than the black blades I had fitted.


Next, I flushed out the coolant... I mean tap water. There was no antifreeze in the car at all, I thought there might have been a smidge, but no, the car survived last winter and for however long before that with 0% antifreeze in it. I flushed the system out until it ran nice and clear and then topped up with blue.


That should see me through the winter safely. The thermostat looked okay and my brother managed to remove it without it smashing into a billion tiny bits, but I plan to change this when I find a replacement as I don't know when it was last done or how well it actually works.


Next I wanted to try and source that oil leak. I want to put some fancy oil in, but not if it's just going to squirt out of a bajillion different bits of the engine. Since putting 15/40 in instead of the 10/40 I topped up with last time I noticed the oil leak was much reduced, but it's still there. The main culprit is, I think, the passenger side driveshaft oil seal, it's quite wet.


Especially so when compared to the driver's side.


The passenger side engine mount is also wet with oil.


As is the same side of the gearbox/sump area.


I already know that there's a leak on the rocker cover when the distributor is and another where the fuel pump is, but this should be resolved by resealing the rocker cover, at which point I'll do the timing belt too.


I can't do anything about this for now, I'm going to have to do some parts hunting to resolve it though I suspect it won't be expensive to sort out. In the meantime, I decided to get on with fitting my lovely new mirrors that arrived just before I got home. I was hoping I might be able to drop them through the same holes the purple mirrors were fitted through, but no such luck.


After asking all the neighbours, I finally managed to borrow a drill for the job - still haven't got a replacement drill yet - and just buzzed a couple of fresh holes to fit the new mirrors.


They look a bit odd, but I don't think they look too much out of place because of the grille and light set up. Sold as fitting a Datsun Stanza/510 Truck they were something of a fluke find when link hopping from a set I think I saw in a Micra build thread and they really are very nice. Great rear visibility in them and the driver's mirror appears to have a blind spot type magnifying edge to it. They adjust just like the purple Reguvis mirrors they replace and unlike chrome ones I've used in the past, they don't seem to have much in the way of vibration.

I think I might need a new digi-cam though, this one has started doing some very odd things lately.

[tone_depear]

Apologies if I missed an appropriate post, but did you ever find a thermostat housing?

(also apologies if i imagined that whole thing, which is entirely possible)

[Vulgalour]

Still looking for the thermostat housing. The one I've got is okay, but the chemical metal a previous owner has applied to it doesn't fill me with confidence.

[Vulgalour]

Since painting that rear wing beige again, the Princess has suddenly started to look quite respectable.  It got me thinking about doing a bit more tarting up just to make her look a bit more presentable.  There's a few areas that could do with a tweak here and there and it's amazing how much more positively people respond to a car just for being one colour.
 
Begrudgingly, I have to admit I like not having a patchwork car, it does look like I care for her as much as I do to the average punter... but it still annoys me because it feels like I'm doing it for other people and not for me.  Never mind, I put my thinking hat on today to see if I could improve on things a bit further.
 
It's this view that made me buy some paint today.  The black plastics against the beige actually works reasonably well.

 
So that made me decide to go out and buy a tin of satin black paint and eliminate the metallic brown on the C pillars...

 

 
...and the boot top...

 
...and this side still needs some attention to the beige paint just to smarten it up after the fuel leak down the side and where the rubbish respray lifted off with the coach stripe.

 
The C pillars now blend into the door frames better than the brown did and it gives a slightly more modern look to the car.  It also seems to visually lower the roof line a little and I find myself quite liking the combination of beige and satin black... not as much as the purple, obviously, but it makes the car look nicer in the short term than she did.
 
Short term plan is to tidy up the existing colour scheme as much as possible, apply some black coach stripes and the original badges to the boot and try and get the bumper straightened out.  I plan to do nothing to the scruffy bonnet apart from putting the Princess mascot on from my old bonnet.

[start]

That is looking like it should now, I am continually impressed by your work, the black is much better than Brown. The new mirrors look better than the old ones, even though I thought they were going to ruin the car when I saw them!

[Vulgalour]

The mirrors were a gamble, but one that paid off I think, especially with the new C pillar colour. Cheers for the compliment too

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New waxstat and oil filter arrived today. Still waiting for my spark leads and timing belt to turn up, but they've been posted so they'll probably be here tomorrow. I'm holding off doing an oil change until I can do the timing belt and the valve stem seals at the same time, it'll also allow me to remove, clean and reseal the rocker cover to eliminate the weeps from it.

I suspect the old waxstat had started to stick just before the coolant flush and change so I was glad to get a new one to go in, one of the easier parts to obtain as it happens.


When you're removing the waxstat, you have to be careful it doesn't break. I was careful enough for that not to happen, but the thermostat housing which is made not of aluminium but of unobtainium, chose this moment to break a chunk off.


Of all the things to break on this car, this was my worst nightmare. Although I have one phone number left on my list, my searches and those of my peers have been utterly fruitless in finding a 1.7 O series thermostat housing for the past year and a half. We rang around a few places anyway in the hope of finding one but nobody had anything in stock.

It was one of those horrible moments where I knew this one little item could see me off the road. The car was just throwing coolant out of the subsequent hole in the casing too fast for me to go more than a mile without having to top up the coolant. This was less than ideal. Eventually my brother and I found somewhere selling Leak-Seal, which was billed as being suitable to repair small holes in radiators and pipes, was antifreeze, heat and water resistant... so we gave it a go.

After chipping and peeling the old grey putty bodge off the housing and cleaning up the heavily pitted and oxidised areas, I carefully offered the broken piece back up the housing and glued it in before rebuilding the profiles of the housing and sanding it as smooth as access would allow.

It would have been a more perfect job but for the fact that the thermostat housing is so firmly wedged into the block that you can physically lift the car on its suspension by the housing when trying to remove it. This job could almost have not gone worse, so once everything was sanded and cleaned we plumbed it all back in and fired the car up.

Happily, the repaired area doesn't leak at all. Unhappily, the cap is now playing up a bit and lets the occasional drip of water out until things get up to temperature at which point it stops. I need to get a new filler and expansion bottle cap anyway since both are past their prime and they've been on the list for quite a while.

I'm still going to be on the lookout for a replacement housing because I dislike having a bodge solution like this, but for now I'm just not going to disturb it if at all possible and just keep an eye on my coolant levels for the forseeable.

[Vulgalour]

New Bosch silicone spark leads to replace the old ones on the Princess arrived today... I remember how much of an improvement my interim budget leads had been over what was on the car when I bought it, but the Bosche ones are an even more marked improvement again. I can set off from road ends without having to plan about a week in advance and the engine just feels more willing, quieter too which I didn't think was possible as I thought it was already as quiet as an O series gets. Very happy stuff.

The electrical interference I was getting is reduced to almost nothing now. We do get radio interference around here as most of the roads seem to be criss-crossed with overhead power lines, but I begin to wonder if the problem is not with the condenser which I replaced but with the radio itself. If you push the selector buttons repeatedly on the radio while it's on, the interference will go away and steadily creep back again. I get no weirdness from the lights or anything like that, just the radio so I wonder if it's not particularly well suppressed/shielded.

[Vulgalour]

Today, I tackled a cosmetic job that's been waiting in the wings since I bought the car. The chrome inserts on the seals are pretty tatty looking now, particularly the rear one which is more orange than chrome. I removed the bottom section, then rechromed it with the aluminium flashing tape but accidentally stretched it somehow so when I came to refitting it, the whole thing was creased all over. I also panicked because I thought I'd bought a tool to refit the chrome insert but actually hadn't and couldn't figure out how to refit it... until I found a screwdriver and some WD40 at which point it popped back in fine.

Now the rear screen looked a bit worse, if I'm honest, because the chrome bit on the bottom looked like a really cheap replacement, especially when compared to the ancient orangey stuff. Never mind, thought I, it'll just peel right off and I'll get on with a different way of renewing the chrome instead. I also managed to damage some of it by accident when refitting which wasn't clever of me.


It was when I tried to remove the tape I wasn't happy with when I found out just how good a method this might be, the damned stuff is almost impossible to remove and comes off in little bitty pieces, it's really stubborn which is great providing it weathers okay.


Rather than fighting to remove the tape, I applied some to the upright on the driver's side and then ran my thumbnail along each side as you would when opening a Kit Kat. Peeled off the excess tape and ran my thumbnail along again just to make sure any less-than-perfect edges tucked back under the seal. Jobs a good un, takes all of a minute maybe to do this providing you get the tape on right first time.


I'd say this'll look pretty smart for the rear screen since it's all straight-ish lines.



Not sure how I'm tackling the front screen though as that has quite tightly curved corners. I may cheat and just mitre the tightest bit of the corners and do the tape in four pieces. Really, who's going to notice other than me when it's done? This is also completely free since I still have some tape left over from doing the other interior stuff and a lot easier than trying to put new inserts in.

Then it rained a lot, so I can't finish off the screen surround as I have nowhere out of the weather I can do this job. How annoying.