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.

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.

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.

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.