Wednesday 21 November 2012

Six steps of successful brazing

Most classic car enthusiast are mechanically or craft minded. Apart from cars, they will normally have other likes and soldering correctly is an important skill for plenty of DIY projects.

Silver soldering and bracing is an important method for DIYers as it is cheap and makes very strong joints.
Al always, practice is important and I have just found a superb video explaining the technique with a great detail and educational view.

The video was made by Johnson Matthey soldering division (UK), which has a large amount of different silver rods and fluxes for all materials. The video is available both in English and Spanish.
Hope you enjoy them as much as I have:






I will shortly order some rods and flux to practice as I have the intention of a mid term project consisting in a tubular stainless steel frame for a radio control model airplane fuselage

10.000 visits and increasing!

Hurray! the blog has achieved the great success of receiving more than 10.000 visits since it first started in mid 2011



I really hope you have enjoyed all my posts, full of details of the problems I find and how I solve them with my limited time, budget, space & knowledge. I really feel most of the classic car enthusiasts are like me and wont be able to make full restoration, but want to keep their car in the best situation as possible.

I will continue sharing all my progress and findings, hopping maybe one or two can find it useful and learn something new.

THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Monday 19 November 2012

Before and after

Believe it or not, the heater fan assembly was restored more than one year ago, summer 2011, along with the heater matrix.

I had to install at the very beginning the heater matrix to the engine, so I could start the engine, not having to mess around after with draining coolant to be able to install it.

But the heater fan was stored in a box, as I needed space on the engine bay to work (paint, solenoide, etc, etc). But now that the car is in running condition (have done 500km so far) and winter is at the next corner, I had to fit it. As long as out side temp is 10º C or above, the car can be used with the top down, but having the heater on is a plus as it will make a sort of hot air bubble inside the car that will make it much more comfortable.

So I used a Sunday evening to seat it up. Installation is a reverse procedure to dismantling (have read too many Haynes manuals!!!), but it's true. Connected the bullet and earth cable, and screwed the heater flap valve control cable. I was lucky as the heater rubber duct is in great condition, so just a little bit of clean with some APC. Also the cardboard connecting tube between the heater fan and the flap valve was in not too bad condition, so i also reused. It's lovely to see how so many parts can be reused keeping a very original appearance.

Fortunately the cable switch worked from the first moment, So I didn’t have to remove it to restore it, so for the moment I will reuse it.

I really have to say that I was impressed when I took a photo after the fan installation, and compared it with some original photos I made at the very beginning. I really shows a lot of work in small details, very easy to make, and that make a huge difference when opening a bonnet to the general car appearance.

I see too many owners spending a lot of money on improving mechanical things of their car, but wont invest any time in just tidying up the engine bay. I really encourage them to do so, its a very rewarding effort, easy, that in most cases can be done in the kitchen as a winter project.

Judge by your self!!!

Original situation:

More:

And the latest situation

And more work to be done!



Tuesday 13 November 2012

Order is vital

Time ago, watching the great "Is Born" series, particularly A Plane Is Born, Mark Evans was talking about the importance of workshop order, and showed a neet way of tidying up all the spare parts that would help easy and rapid location and identification.

As all my parts are stored in small plastic bags, I just pinned them on a big cork board, with a label indicating the part number and description.




A good idea is also to group parts of the same familly together on the same area, all groomets, all screws, all nuts, etc. That way, locating a part is easy and fast.

It is a real good way of getting a visual overview of all your spare parts, and it´s great to see how week after week the board becomes more and more empty, meaning the car is going the right way on its restoration.

Monday 12 November 2012

Fitting new retractible securon seat belts

For me, classic cars must be usable cars. I can understand people collecting very important pieces, but wont understand why they store them as they where a piece of art and never use them.

That said, you all know khow I appreciate to keep cars in a very original way with period accessories and so one, but sadly, its not always possible.

My car had the original Kangool Magnet seat belts in a very good condition, lets say 8 over 10. Webbing was perfect and chrome just showed some light pitting. Therefore they could be used with no problem.


Bad news was they are old seat belts with manual adjustment making them a pain for daily use, specially if many different people are going to use the car, as each one would need to adjust it. Also when using a child seat of course....

So I took the arguable decision to change them for a pair of modern retractable set. And I say arguable, because yes, many people will say I am stupid. Not only because I change them, but because I would sell them. As I am on a budget I sold them to get some "financial support" to buy the new ones.

Any way, here is how I made it......

The new seat belts had to be from Securon, a UK based company, well known for making universal seatbelts specially for classic cars. They are EU approved of course. The correct ones for the spridgets are  pn 514/30, available through most classic car retailers and ebay. This time, I opted to buy from WelshMG, which has a huge stock of second hand parts, so I could buy some things at the same time. Price was one of the best I could find, and customer service was great.

Spridgets have had 2 ways of attaching original seat belts:
-early spridgets: 2 thinner bolts on the wheel arch
-later spridgets: 1 thicker bolt on the wheel arch

Securon seatbelts come with brackets for the later ones, that will use a single bolt to attach it, so my instructions are referred to the early ones with the 2 thinner bolts. Of course, if your car is a very very early car an has original seat belts (as they where an extra), or even no holes, then you will need to guess your own way to fit them. But as far as I know, all chassis should come with holes already drilled.

As original seat belt had 2 holes on the wheel arch, I had to make a plate with 3 holes. A 3mm steel sheet would be strong . The shape was cut with a small angle grinder and a cutting disk. Two holes of 9mm for the smaller screws and one hole of about 11mm for the big one.

It is necessary to bend slightly the plate, to clear the space for the big screw. Just a few degrees, about 5º.


A coat of black paint finished the job. But I was thinking that I will send them to chrome in the near future, that should make a good finish.

Installation was easy on the drivers side, but the clamp position needs to be changed as it comes facing the inside. The way to change it is easy, just twist the webbing 180º and slide the clamp, don’t be afraid.


Now came the problem.... securon seat belts are not handed, and once installed, the copilots side seat belt has an off set, therefore the plate I made could not be used as the hole need to be about 2,5cm off.  So I had to make a new plate for this side.



Finally, all it rest was to lock the mechanism. Securon seat belts are universal, and can be used with any angle. On my spridget, the mechanism would lay in an horizontal position. To make the retractable system work correctly, you just need to turn the side knobs and make the arrow point to a vertical position. A little of fiddling would make the job.

Please beware that you are dealing with safety equipment and you always have to think twice before making any change. These instructions are the way I made it..... my way.

Hope my experience helps others, as all the information I could find to fit securon seatbelts on the internet, always reffers to the later spridgets with one thick bolt. On early ones, ALWAYS use both bolts. If the engineers had though one thin screw was strong enough, whey would have used it. If they decided to use two, then it's necessary.

Monday 29 October 2012

Open / Close, open / close

Opening and closing the doors correctly may seam nothing special, but it is one of those things that really makes the difference between a nice and tidy classic car, and an old and uncared car.

The drivers doors was closing with great difficulty and normally several attempts where needed. Also the was a nasty noise coming from the latch when opening like something scratching.

So it was time to take a quick look at the latches to inspect them.

First inspection shows the latches to be very dirty.





Removing them was just as easy as unscrewing 3 bolts (use the correct screwdriver size or you will damage the screws). Once out, move the latch from left to right several times to disconnect the inside mechanism from the door.

All the inside was dirty and the grease if any was dry as the parts would move with great difficulty. To clean the mechanism I used some brake cleaner and a hard tooth brush. Also a small flat screw driver was used to remove the inside deposits where the tooth brush would not reach.


About 10 minutes was enough to clean each doors mechanism and proved to be very easy and rewarding. I used some lithium grease on all moving parts until all parts would move nice and freely.


The plate on the B pillar has a very important effect. Of course I also removed them and cleaned them which was easy as there are no inside parts. The plate can be adjusted on the b pillar via 3 nuts that move freely inside, and gives several mm of adjustment.

When adjusted up and down, it is possible to make the door latch to enter and lock without scratching the B pillar plate making a smooth and quiet close. Also, if adjusting the b pillar in and out, it is possible to make the door to have no play once it is closed.

It takes some patience and a few minutes to adjust correctly easy plate, but it is dead easy.

Now both doors close just nicely and any friend inspecting the car will have a great impression.




It's a great 1 hour simple weekend project that greatly improves the daily use of the car and give a great look and feel.

Monday 8 October 2012

Chassis plate stamping

I had no personal way to stamp locally the chassis number I had bought some months ago at Classic Repro. The seller gave the stamping service, but at 20 pounds I just though it was too expensive.

After putting a message on the British Car forum, a nice person (thanks Paul!), offered to stamp it for free.


The before and after image, shows the original situation. I will keep the original plante and place it in the album I want to make some day with printed photos, thatsounds as a good a idea.

Making a custom boot trim carpet

I am not sure whether my car came originally  with a boot carpet kit, but the case is that actually the car has any.

I wanted to give it a better look and cover it with some trim so made some search for a nice pre-cut kit. The quotations I got plus shipping cost where not very appellant, so as many times I decided to make a “weekend project”.

To do so, I just needed to get some square meters of carpet and ended up at the huge hardware store Leroy Merlin where they had several very cheap carpets that should do the job for the moment. After 10 minutes looking at the various colours available I ended up with the classic dark grey carpet, so I ordered a 2 square meter cut (2mx1m).

I know…. that carpet is rubbish some would say, compared with those beautiful carpet kit sold, but those ones cost about 70 eur, compared to the 8 eur (4 eur square meter), and I still have plenty of other important things to spend my money on.

The difficult job was trimming the carpet. What I did was fitting in the boot a huge thin paper and trim it, then lay down the paper on the rear side (important!! not the front side!) and with a chalk, draw an oversized image which I cut with some big scissors.



I then fitted the carpet inside, and with a big cutter, and made the final cut. It was much of an art, and the final result depends on your general ability, but I have to say that my result was acceptable.  I Also fitted a part to the rear side of the boot.



Now I am just remaining to figure out how to fit the side parts as they are complex in shape, or I may end up leaving them exposed.



Lastly, I have some 1cm thick foam that I will use to fit under the carpet to make some cushion effect  and will use some good 3M double side tape to hold the carpet on its place.

One thing I would have appreciated would have been knowing someone with a kit that could have used to cut in paper all the patterns.


Friday 5 October 2012

Finding the correct Rainbow wiper spares

The screen wipers that came with the car look to be period style. I am not sure if they are original ones that came with the car, but they are ended old.

The brand is Rainbow made in England, and luckily the chrome was in superb condition so just some metal polish made them shine again. But the wipers rubber was an other issue, as they where completely dry and cracked.

Finding original spares for the rubbers was impossible even thought  I made a lot of googling, so I ended up having 2 possibilities:
-finding some rubbers that I could adapt
-or buying 2 new modern reproduction wipers, which of course would be my last option as I just did want to re use the original ones and invest money on other parts

Finding the correct rubbers proved to be a challenge, because after many visits to some car spares dealers, non of the modern wipers had rubber that looked similar to what I need, and they where expensive as they had both the rubber and the metal wiper. So I thought that I could try to find the rubber spares sold by meter as once heard that in the old days it was possible to buy.

But again, no one had the rubber part by meters, so I ended up going to shop on the old city part of Madrid where I thought would be my last chance. Fortunately I found what I was looking for, but not cut by meter, it was already precut in universal length.  The brand sis “Refil”


You can see on the image the section of the original rubber at the left and the new one at the right, notice that the new one had a 2 step base.


What I did was to cut the lower step base with an X-acto blade so the metal sides of the wiper would hold it in place securely.


I had to bend all the metal sides of the wiper with great care just enough to hold the rubber, but finally the result was nice. After fitting the wipers in the car, they proved to work correctly.




Thursday 4 October 2012

Heater tap restoration

Much has been written about the issue of leaking heater taps on spridgets, so possibly I will not say nothing new except just sharing my experience.

Since the first day I started to run the car before summer, I noticed a small amount of coolant liquid was always present on the heater tap shaft, no matter it was open or closed.

I read at the mg-experience forum that some people where successful in restoring it just changing an internal o-ring, but many other had  no luck.

First let me say that based on Seth's webpage where you can find a very comprehensive description of the problem, there are 2 kind of hater valves: the lets say first generation that can be disassembles, and the second late generation wich are sealed and not possible to open.

It is interesting to notice that at least on the first generation type valve, different designs exist, as Seth's valve can be opened in just 2 parts, whether my valve is opened in 3 parts.

But lets start from the beginning.....

The first step was of course to drain the coolant liquid if the system, not all, but just the necessary so when I removed the heater hose I will not cover all the engine bay with liquid. So I just opened the small radiator tap and drained about 2 liter in a plastic container that I kept to refill later.

Next I wrapped all the surroundings of the heater tap with some paper to absorb any present liquid and unscrew the only 2 nuts that holds it in place.

Once I had the heater tap in my hand, it was just a matter of removing parts, first the tap knob, then the top part, and finally the middle body part.


On the upper part of the middle body I discovered the problem. Although the o-ring was present, it was full dry, normal as it was possibly the original one nearly 50 years old. I removed it with some small files. The photo shows the origin which had taken all the shape of the thread and the dirty shaft!!!


I hold the shaft on the lathe and cleaned it with some 400 grit paper to a very soft finish. The shaft is the most important finish, and is dirty and with a rough surface, any new o-ring will not seal properly. The 3 body parts where cleaned with the sand blast machine and then some metal polish was used.


The came the hard work: finding the correct o-ring. Taking measures, I had that the shaft dia was about 7.5mm, and the upper body inside dia was 11.5. So the most logic measure to look was an o-ring with 7 m inside and 12mm outside. I went to many hardware stores, and had no luck... I was starting to get pretty upset because I wanted to use the car and couldn’t and I would possibly had to buy a new tap.

But fortunately I located a hardware store specialized in bearing, o-rings, seals, etc where they had all possible combinations of different dimensions. I got 2 different o-rings: 12x7x2,5mm and 12x6x3mm

I finally decided to use the 3mm thick oring as it would be the tightest one. I used some vaseline and push the o-ring in its place. I had to flatten the tap base against a flat surface with some sanding paper to give a good flat surface and used some special gasket paper to cout the correct new gasket. The last touch would be painting the tap knob in red which gave a great look. 

Finally the shaft was very tight but easy to turn. After some 100km with the valve opened and closed, no sight of leaking, so looks like a success.

By the way, I had to buy a plastic bag of 20 o-rings (3mm thick size) so now I have 19 spare ones that I dont need. If anyone has difficulty to find locally the correct one, just send me an email and I will see who I can help. 

Thursday 6 September 2012

Front bumper restoration

Cosmetic things are in second line at the moment as I have always said I wanted to concentrate on the mechanical side, to have a perfect and secure running car.

But some times, a small cosmetic repair can make a huge difference on the overall appearance of a car.
That was the case of my front bumper. Although it was structurally sound, with no important dents, all the surface had rust pitting and the chrome was covered by an ugly layer of brown rust.

Of course sending the bumper to rechrome was out of my scope, as possibly it could go up to 300 eur. But I thought maybe I could do something to try to recover if not all, at least most of its original shine.

I remembered that sport fire guns and rifles are usually maintained when rust pitting appears on the barrel with wd40 oil and very fine steel wool. I have done it in the past, and it really gives a great result.

Instead of using wd40, I just got a small pot filled with some diesel engine fuel, and with a 0000 steel wool, I started to rub down all the chrome surface….. the result came out very quick: a nice and shine chrome surface appeared.





Giving the treatment to all the bumper surface was only a 15 job, after which it was cleaned, and then a metal polish compound applied.

To finish the job, I sanded all the inside of the bumper with a 120 grit sanding sponge, to remove all the rust, loose chrome that was summing out, and then gave two coats of enamel black paint. Why??? I once chromed the bumpers of a nice range rover classic, and the company boss told me to paint all the inside one I receive it, because during the chrome process a much thinner layer will be on the inside of the bumper and can easily have rust problems. The outside will always have a much thicker layer. And it’s true that many original bumpers I have seen from RR and Mercedes, do come with painted on the inside to protect it.

Now I have a lovely restored bumper, witch although not perfect, is in a great used condition, just like I like it, for the total cost of just a small quantity of diesel fuel and paint. A nice weekend project, with just a small time investment that gives incredible results.

I was just wondering if I should give all the bumper a fine coat of clear lacquer to protect it. I think many people do it.

Two more images showing the result of cleaning the overriders




Wednesday 5 September 2012

Rusty nightmares



One of the common places on spridgets for severe rust problems is the inside of the wings where they meet the A pillar. My car showed some small rust bubbles on the area that of course was no good news.

One of my main concerns after dealing with all the mechanical side, was to verify as soon as possible the real situation of the body. After removing the seats and carpets, there were no sights of rust problems, except on the inside part of the A pillars that showed some small rust spots.

So now that I had a few spare days on holidays, I just had to take the opportunity and remove the front wings to inspect them….

Removing them was both difficult and easy…. Easy because one wing was just held by about 8 crews, and difficult because the second one was soldered on 2 or 3 spots. I had to use the dremel with the cut-off wheel to remove those solders, which took me some hours.

Once both wings where removed, my worst nightmare came true…… loads of mud and debris was accumulated and the inside of the wings and panels where affected by rust.

First step was to remove as much mud as I could. Using a wire wheel grinder, I removed as much rust as I could to prepare it for the POR15 system.



After cleaning all the surface, I first used the Marine Clean product to remove all grease and dust. Secondly, the Metal Ready was used to each the surface and convert the remaining rust. Metal Ready is supposed to give the best key for the por15 paint. Before painting I used the dremel cut-off wheel to make a square hole on the A pillar where it had a rust spot. That way I could clean the inside, and treat it. Fortunately the A pillar was not in too bad condition.



Two coats of por15 where applied waiting about 3 hours until the first coat was tacky.



Next day once the por15 paint was fully dry, I used a 120 grit sponge to scratch all the surface to give a good key for the blue paint and gave a nice coat. Once it was fully dryed, I gave a large amount of cavity wax to prevent future problems, and used some 2 component putty, to seal the holes I made on the A pillar to prevent any future ingress of water.





The wings will need to be repaired, but until I can tackle with it, I wanted to stop the rust and seal it. I used a rust converter from the Loctite/Henkel company that I had bought some years ago…. I remember it cost a fortune at about 50 eur the bottle. The product is a sort of milky liquid, that is brushed over the rust, and will convert it to a stable state. Once the conversion process has ended, the rust will have a black colour. A coat of black enamel paint was given and once it was dry, liberal amounts of cavity wax where aplied. That should stop the rust for some time, until I decide what to do. I will probably order some repair panels and send the wings to a metal workshop so they can cut and solder the new parts. New BHM wings are available but the 450-500 pounds cost per wing is out of my scope by the moment.






At least now the front of the car looks much nicer and I can sleep knowing there are no hidden rusty nightmares 

Monday 30 July 2012

Accelerator cable change

Over the fist km I have made, I noticed when accelerating, the pedal was sticky and therefore acceleration was very annoying, specially driving in a city.

The organ style pedal was not the reason as it was restores some time ago, and the hinge was cleaned and greased. So therefore the problem was the cable.

Reading the MG Experience forum, I found that some people instead of buying a porpoise made cable from the usual provider, they just used a normal brake bike cable.

So I ended up on my nearest bike shop and asked for a cable. The inner cable is sold as a unit of 1,5meter, and the outer case is sold my meter, so just got one. These bike cables have some kind of plastic inside which makes the braided cable to slide very smoothly.

I removed the original cable, and but the new one to the correct size, just about 8cm longer because I felt it was a little short and reuse the original end-point. As Haynes books would say, refit is the inverse process of removal.


It´s incredible to see the difference that makes a new cable on the riding. Now acceleration is smooth and much more progressive.

I noticed the original cable had inside a spring that was not coated, so the braided cable had a very rough contact surface.

Total cost of the cable: 2 eur

Monday 23 July 2012

Soft top structure restoration

Hello all, this weekend I had nothing to do on my resto, because I just had no time to remove parts from the sprite. So I just turned my eyes to the original soft hood structure. I will not be using it until next year possibly, as I have no soft hood and as they are expensive, it will have to wait. But I just wanted to restore it and store it safely....




The structure was in good condition.... plenty of surface rust as you can see...


Also I had a problem as one of the hinges was broken and not working. The hinge was positioned correctly, and taken to a metal shop where they kindly repaired with a few sports of MIG welding.


All the structure was wire wheel cleaned, because it was big and would not get into the sand blast machine. As the smaller parts and hinges could not be easily cleaned with the wire wheel, I used an outdoor sand blast gun I had, and cleaned them, with the counterpart of loosing most of the sand media.

Once the structure was completely cleaned, I had to paint it, and here come the problem. Originally the structure (as well as the toneau sticks) was painted in cumulus grey (ref Terry Horler's book). As I had no clue of a paint code for this grey, and I was not willing to make a special porpoise made spray can with the correct colour as it´s very expensive, I just got a RAL chart and searched for the most similar shade. I found that medium gray RAL 7000 was very very similar, and fortunately it´s a colour widely available at all hardware stores.

Some coats of spray primer, and several coats of RAL 7000 gray ended with a lovely restored structure that anyone would hardly tell the difference with the original colour.

Tuesday 17 July 2012

Gear knob restoration

Fortunately the original gear knob was still in place. Condition was good, with  no cracks, but all the original paint was gone and the grooves full of dirt.





As always, I was not going to buy a new one, or one of those modern wood ones. I just had to try to restore it. The process was easy and gave excellent results.

I first used a needle to remove from the numbers and grooves all the rest of paint and dirt, cleaning all with alcohol and a ears cleaning stick. That way the surface was clean enough to accept new paint (white enamel paint by the way)

Now came the difficult question…. How to apply precisely the paint?? A tiny paint brush? What I finally made was to apply paint with the needle, giving 3 layers, because each layer as it would dry, it would shrink.

You can see that after 3 coats, the lines where thick and the numbers could not be seen……

Now came the clever bit, as what I did was to sand down the paint with a very fine sanding pad (about 600 grit), with water. Slowly  sanding, until the excess of paint came off and the lines came true and the numbers came clearly visible.



Once I was satisfied, I polished the entire knob and came up with a nice an lovely restored unit.
My doubt is if I should give a coat of clear lacquer to make it shiny and protect the new paint……. What’s your suggestion???