kws

Is he towing that with a suitably awesome old Suzuki Alto?

Must be a dog box then? Clutch to get started and then just bang shifting the rest of the way? This is such a cool project, look forward to seeing more of it.

jesus thats a long startup time, my 14point7 is almost instant. Is the heater in the sensor working?

These things are mean. Well done. Also,

Rover didn't have money for such fanciness. The original wing is a slab of moulded rubber with a steel plate in it (for the mounting studs). It weighs bloody heaps, and because Rover, the steel plate rusts from the inside out.

Doing a quick Google I can see why the trd wing doesn't have a base, looks like it's designed to attach via the flat section protruding from the outside if the wing. Basically, I'm looking to reproduce the sd1 vitesse wing, but It attaches to the boot lid from the underside of the wing. Will watch that video tonight but suspect a multi part mould will be the go.

Similar to kickers question, if you make a mould of a wing like that, it would need to be open on the underside of the wing to remove the mould (if you lay the matting on the outside of the mould). How would you go about making a lip or flange around the bottom so it can be attached to a boot lid? Completely enclosing the mould would give a really nice flat base to stick it to the boot, but then you either need to cut the part to remove the mould, or leave it in there. I guess you could do an inverse mould, laying the matting inside the mould, but then the issue still remains, if it's hollow, how do you get a nice solid flat base?

Fine. In the last post I had removed both calipers in order to strip and paint them. I popped my wire cup wheel on the grinder, took one of them outside and had a bash at it. Most of the top layers of paint basically exploded on contact with the brush, but the red must be proper stuff because it's tougher to remove. (excuse the weeds, need more fire for them) Under the layers and layers of paint, the caliper wasn't actually in bad shape. There is some corrosion under the paint at the back of the caliper, but nothing major. I took the pads out so I could remove some more paint. The retaining hardware was worse than I thought. The pins have certainly lost some metal, but the plates have almost completely corroded through in places. I have ordered some replacement plates from Rimmers, but the pins were out of stock so I will find the ones I removed from Effie, and use them. The pads are Lucas GDB789. They seem to be listed for Range Rovers (like the ones fitted to Effie), and made by a few different brands, like TRW. Options are good. Hmm... something doesn't look right with those pads. Spot the piston that isn't doing its job (hint, it's the top photo, on the left). The pads seem new enough they aren't worn unevenly, but I'll double-check before refitting. So that's where it all went to hell. After removing the pads I tried to push the pistons back into the caliper, and only three pistons (of four) on each caliper could be pushed back. One piston in each caliper was seized solid. I used some compressed air, with my inflation thinggy, and the pin that is usually used to fill sports balls, to push the pistons out. I wrapped some tape around the pin to try to make a decent seal. Make sure the bleed valve is shut of course. I found cork sanding blocks were a perfect size for pushing the pistons out far enough to remove them, but not have them shoot across the room. One of the calipers slowly but surely freed up the stuck piston with some compressed air (not the caliper from the above pads) The other flat-out refused. No matter how much air I pumped into it, that one piston didn't move. The other three made a dash for freedom though. Oops. I sprayed penetrating fluid into the caliper, and all around the stuck piston and left it to sit a couple of days. It wasn't magic, and didn't free up by itself. Darn. Today I got the big guns out, and was determined to remove the piston one way or another. There is another method other than compressed air to remove a stuck piston, but it involves a tool I don't have, and didn't want to buy just for this job; a grease gun. The big guns? A chisel, screwdriver and hammer. First I removed the outer seal and retainer with a pick. It was well corroded in there but came out easy enough WIth that removed I started beating on the piston with the hammer and chisel, trying to get it to turn in the bore. I quickly noticed the chisel was too sharp and was cutting into the piston a bit much, so changed to a nice big blunt screwdriver. After much beating, some swearing, lots of penetrating fluid, a moderately sized fire as the penetrating fluid ignited when I tried to apply heat, the piston finally started to rotate. A little bit at a time i knocked it around, until it was moving much freer. Then I gave it some air, and this happened Out the bastard comes. I stopped there and used air to remove all the other pistons first, and then used the vice grips to pull the sticky piston out. This might have something to do with why it was so hard to remove. That black stuff is corrosion/rust pitting in the piston. The bore it came out of thankfully looks OK. No more worn than the others, but the section between the two seals is a bit worse for wear and will need some tweaking with fine sandpaper or emery tape. Upon close inspection of the pistons that came out of that caliper, all of them have signs of pitting and corrosion. Some worse than others, so along with a new seal kit, I have ordered a set of 8 new pistons also. Whilst I wait for them to arrive, I will be completely stripping the calipers down, soaking them in paint stripper, then in Evaporust, and after a clean down they will get a coat of paint. In that same order I have ordered a new pipe for the one I broke (still available new), but the other side pipe is now NLA, so I have roped a friend (with all the tools and knowledge) into helping make a new pipe up for that side, using the fittings from a spare pipe I have ordered and will cut up for parts. I did manage to get that pipe off. I had to use vice grips, a spanner and lots of brute force to crack the nut. Some copper grease will help in future. It's no wonder the brakes felt like rubbish. They had a very soft pedal, and when pushed hard they didn't work all that well. I'm glad I found this now, as it wasn't likely to fix itself and magically start to work, and doing the bleed I had planned wouldn't have done anything either. Once back together they should be as good as the Vitesse brakes can be. Now the waiting game again.

... - - - ...

Effie has just started to leak coolant from a dodgy coolant cap, so a new one of them is on the way. Bloody coolant.

Not to mention all the coolant you have to buy

Rovers are awesome. No end of things to do in the garage with them.

Cmon man, just give me a new page

It slows things down

Too many photos on this one

I think we need a new page.

Things with Tess haven't been going quite to plan, so I took a couple of days off, but here we go again. After pulling down the front struts to replace the shocks, the next part of the game was to strip out the rear and replace the shocks and springs there. I also needed to get some oil into the now clean but empty transmission. That was the first thing I wanted to do, fill the trans. Now I did mention in the previous post that I had a special mixture of oil to go in the trans, and here it is. Another variation of a Ramon recommended solution for the gearbox. He swears by a mixture of "5W40 "Castrol RS" " and a dose of Molyslip. Now, neither the Castrol RS oil (which I believe has been superseded anyway) nor the Molyslip is available locally, so I substituted for the closest I could get. The Shell fully synthetic oil seems to be decent stuff, was available in 1L bottles, and cheap. The Nulon Smooth Shift is an additive that is meant to improve shifting. This seems to be very similar to the Molyslip additive, and should do nicely as a substitute. I was originally going to use some Redline MTL, but my local BNT was out of stock. I couldn't be bothered ordering it in, so decided to try this combo instead. Hell, if it doesn't work to plan, it can't be worse than no oil, and I'll just drain it and refill with MTL later. Filling the trans was the same as filling it with the flushing solution, except I squeezed the tube of the Nulon additive in first, and then pumped in the oil. Of course, before I did this I popped the drain plug back in with a new fibre washer. The washers I used come in a pack, from Mitre10, and were cheap as chips. Much better than the over re-used and over crushed washer on the fill plug (which was loose and leaking originally), and the remains of the washer on the drain plug, which had turned to mush and stuck to the transmission. Needed a scraper to remove the remains of that one. The verdict so far? Well, I haven't driven the car obviously, but I ran it through the gears today. At idle it's already much quieter, although the bearing whine is still just audible but it doesn't sound like a bag of bolts now. All the gears went in slickly, but the real test will be how it drives on the road after about 200km or so when the oil has broken in. Its going to go either way, it'll be an improvement on no oil, or I have just made it so much worse and will need to rebuild my spare gearbox for transplant. That'd be my luck. Moving back the main event, the suspension. This is what's currently in the rear, some lovely Monroe air shocks. Well over their use by date, don't seem to hold air and do NOTHING that resembles damping. Playing with them, I suspect the air in them does all the damping, so without any air in them they just bottom out. Guess this explains why they recommend something like 15PSI in them at minimum. One of them also rattles when shaken... It's a fairly tidy install with the air hose run through a tiny little hole the perfect size for the hose. The springs are a bit random. They are lowered, and have a sticker on them with "PROKIT" on it, but other than that no obvious markings. The bump stops have seen better days... years ago. You can see above, in the middle of the spring mount, a nice clean patch. That's where the metal bolt that should be the bump stop, has been hitting it. No bloody wonder it feels like the car is being rear ended when going over bumps in the rear. Ouch. Now in theory the rear suspension should the one of the easiest things to do on a car like this, with a solid live axle. The shocks are just bolted top and bottom, and the spring is held in place by a clamp on the bottom, and hopes and dreams at the top (well, they kinda freely rattle around in the tower but are stopped from dropping out by the shock limiting the axles downwards travel). First up was to find the top of the shock. Drop the rear seat, and then behind the carpet will be the top of the shock. I also removed the bolsters, because it's easy on my cars and I didn't know what I was looking for (and thought I had to remove them; you don't, but the extra room is good). With those located on both sides, all that was left to do was to stick the jack under the axle to take the weight Rattle gun off the nut, and lower the axle down to drop the shock out of the body The bottom of the shock had a locking nut setup with two nuts. Whizz them off, and the shock just freely pulls out. You can see the state of the bushes too; they are stuffed. Interesting to note there was nothing locating these shock in place in the (much larger) holes, other than friction and the compression of the bushes. Old shock vs new shock. Here you can see the length difference, which I will go into shortly. With the shock removed, if you lower the axle down further the top of the spring comes free, and the spring is then only retained in place by the single clamp on the bottom mount. This is held in with a 10mm nut/bolt setup. Undo that, remove the clamp and out comes the spring. New spring is a bit longer, but has more coils. With the spring removed you can also remove the top cone that has the bump stop mounted to it, and replace the bump stop. Obviously mine was missing something previously... That's better Pop that on the top of the new spring, and slip the new spring in place. Here starts the first of many issues I have with the Rimmers kit. If you refer back to the photo comparing the two springs, you can just make out that the overall width of the new spring is narrower than the old spring. It's not by much, but its enough that when you try to get it to sit nicely on the lower spring perch, it doesn't. It's a real fight to get it to sit nicely, and it has a habit of pulling free from the clamp. The problem gets worse when you fit the shocks that come with the kit.... but more on that soon. To fit said shocks, first you need to fit the new bushes. These are a much better design than the ones I removed, so obviously Rover had some idea of what they were doing here. The new bush goes through the hole so that it has rubber on each sides of the hole. The two washers are to squish the rubber against a metal sleeve on the inside of the bush. This is the lower bush in place, with the metal sleeve inside. The sleeve is only half the length of the bush. This setup locates the shock centrally in the holes. Just for reference, here is an awesomely drawn diagram from one of the Rover workshop manuals. I love exploded diagrams. This is what things look like inside my head. Getting the bushes in is a pain. LOTS of silicone spray helps, but in the end it just takes lots of force and some twisting to get them in place. Tightening up the top nut takes some creativity as I didn't have a spanner small enough for the flat on the top of the shock, to stop the shaft spinning as you turn the nut. I gently used some vice grips on the shaft and a ratcheting spanner on the nut to tighten it up. You can see some squidge in the second photo; you need to tighten the nut until it squashes the rubber and the nut starts to tighten down on the sleeve. So with the shock installed I noticed one of the most annoying issues with the Rimmers kit. The shocks are too long, and allow the rear springs to drop down too low. For me this caused binding of the cone on top of the spring, which would pull the bottom of the spring out of the retainer clamp. If the shocks were shorter this wouldn't be an issue. I could also have issues come WOF time if the springs fail to be captive. I will have to see how I go on that one. I was a bit pissed off by then but decided to do the other side too, just in case there was an issue with that side of my car. The bump stop was even worse on this side, it had been hit so hard it had dented the cone inwards! You can see the impact point on the spring perch Low springs plus stuffed shocks = pain. The new bump stop pulled the dent out as I tightened it, but the issues I had on the right side were also the same on the left. It's the kit that's at fault, not the car. You can just make out the grey zip tie that is stopping the spring from pulling out of the retainer. After this I was pretty pissed off and feeling a bit dark about the whole job, so I took a day or two off from working on the car. Today I cracked back into it, and got stuck into reassembling the front struts. Autolign supplied some generic bump stops that fit well (to suit the 22mm shaft); thanks to one of my Facebook followers for messaging me about that. Reassembly of the struts isn't rocket science, it's just the reverse of disassembly. Compress the spring as much as possible, fit it, fit the boot, then the spring seat and top mount. Whack the nut in and tighten it up. Oh, another thing, the flash new nuts that came with the new front struts didn't actually fit, they are too small, so I had to reuse the old center nuts. I thought fitting the struts back into the car would be hard, as completely assembled they are actually pretty heavy, especially with the new springs, but it went smoothly and easily. I'm a fiercely independent person in the garage, so I managed it all myself. Jack under the strut, and whilst operating the jack with one hand, maneuver and align the strut with the other hand. Align the studs with the hole, raise it up and pop the nuts on. Done. I did need to do some extra jiggling to get the swaybar back into place, but nothing major. Jacks are such a handy third hand. It was good to finally see the car looking more like a car again. Since the struts were in, I took the chance to swap over the new tie rod ends, to get rid of the worn out haggard looking ones on the car. This is the part number for future reference. Fits like a glove and looks so much better. Be interesting to see if I can tell any difference in the steering. They are a lot stiffer than the old ones. The last thing I did today was to remove the other front caliper for repainting. As you can see they don't look flash at all. The black paint is covering many years of other colours, from red to white (primer?) and even our familiar friend, yellow. The pads look to have been changed fairly recently as they have good meat on them, but the retaining pins and shims have seen better days. I'll get some new ones in my next Rimmers order and swap them over in the future. Compared to Effies brakes, these are ugly. Be interesting to see if the pads have any part numbers on them, as they are different to the ones in Effie. Would be good to know more options. That's where we are. I'll need to find some time to get to the brake specialists in town to have the broken pipe remade, and I'll repaint the calipers. Once that's done, I'll drop her down and see how I feel about the new ride height. Many nerves about that. I hope like hell it was worth it.

It's never a dull day in the garage when you own a Rover. Having shown off Tess at the show the other day, it was time to start digging further into some of the issues she has. I couldn't risk doing this work before the show, in case it was delayed and didn't make it there. That was a good choice it seems... So what was the plan? Well, the obvious first step was to replace the springs and shocks with new shocks and standard Vitesse height springs. I purchased these on sale with the steering rack, because I knew the current setup was bad. The front shocks could be compressed by hand on the car, and the front was just too low to be practical. The rear also bottomed out badly over bumps, to the point it would pop the passengers glove box open on hard bumps. It wasn't pleasant. The other job I wanted to do whilst there, was to bleed the brakes. They haven't been touched in at least 4 years, since the car was sitting, but who knows how long before that too. The pedal was spongy, but the brakes did all work, just not as good as they should (and not as good as Effie). A surprise job was thrown at me the other day too; I needed to do the transmission fluid. I knew the gearbox wasn't happy because it whines and rattles, but changes smoothly and otherwise drives well. The other day I picked the wife up from the train station, and proceeded to do a 0-100kph full throttle pull on the motorway. Shit it sounded amazing, but after that I had some reservations about the gearbox and decided to park her up until I could get her in the air. I noticed after that run the gearbox developed a clunk coming off throttle, and was making a different whine. It wasn't happy. I needed to have a look. So today I decided it was as good time as any to get Tess in the air and start spinning some spanners. I got her up on all four stands, and made a hovercar. Being the first time I have had all four wheels off the ground in one go (except for the WOF), I had a good look around and got some photos. These are the lovely box section rear trailing arms. No, I don't know why they chose these over the readily available standard ones. And the massive exhaust. Its well built and looks good. I'm pleased to see standard two bolt flanges all through it, instead of the stupid flanges the Rover uses standard (three bolt, sliding flanges with olives). And the target for today's suspension, the front struts Before that though, I wanted to tackle the gearbox. I needed to drain the oil and see what the state of that was. On the SD1 LT77 gearbox, the drain plug is on the drivers/RH side in the iron mid case, and the fill plug on the passengers/LH side, in the alloy rear housing. This is the drain plug. On the D suffix box it's a 32mm hex and the fill plug (with a socket on it). This is 15/16" As it turns out, the gearbox in my Vitesse is a suffix C box and not the D suffix it should be. So many things have been changed on this car, it's no real surprise. The suffix C box uses 15/16" for both drain and fill plugs, but they are in the same location as above. I cracked and removed the fill plug first (as is good practice, just in case it's seized in, and you drain the oil without a way to get it back in) and then removed the drain plug. To my surprise, only a tiny trickle of oil came out. Nuts. That might have something to do with the angry gearbox. This is all that came out (ignore the coolant, that stuff is everywhere in my garage). Probably 50ml or so, not the 1.9L it should have. Bloody amazing the gearbox worked half as well as it did considering! The drain plug has a magnet on it, to catch metal shavings that occur in normal use. Amazingly, this magnet did have some shavings on it, but nothing too unusual for an old gearbox. No chunks. I gave Sonic the Metallic Headgehog a haircut And then it was time to get radical (dude). The SD1 whisperer, Ramon Alban, wrote up many years ago about how he flushed and cleaned his gearbox out, and swears by it. Others on forums have also done it with good results. I figured, since my box was already in a bad way, it can't hurt. The flush calls for a 2:1 ratio of white spirit and ATF. Fill the box with that, run it through the gears with the engine running and then let it idle for 10 minutes with no load. This ensures that the oil pump in the gearbox circulates the mixture everywhere, and that it gets into all the gears and syncros. I grabbed two bottles of white spirit from Supercheap, and just used some leftover ATF I have from doing auto services. These by the way, are one of the best tools you can buy. It's a hand pump bottle, with a hose and curved steel pipe on the end. The pipe hooks into the filler hole, and you can pump up to the trans from the ground. Its easy, clean and no fuss. So in that mixture went, and as per the instructions I ran the car through the gears. The box was a little quieter, but that was probably just because it now had some oil actually in it... This is what came out. It went in pink as per the photo above.... The magnet also found some more shavings Still no chunks though, so we are kinda winning. I filled another couple of pump bottles of fluid and pumped them into the gearbox, and did it again, this time leaving it to idle for longer. This time the fluid came out much more pink. This time the gearbox was much quieter in operation, so maybe it is helping. We will see. I have a special mixture of oil to go in, but first I need to grab some new fibre washers for the plugs. More on that next time. Anyway, onto the shocks. Unlike the Mini, the front struts on the Rover also incorporate the hub and stub axle, so you have to remove it all in one go. This makes it heavy, and awkward to work with. Another issue I soon encountered, was that my bloody swaybar is kinda rust-welded into the lower arm and I cant remove it without cutting it off. Lame. Glad it has urethane bushes I guess. To make life easier, I unbolted the front calipers from the hub and hung them up. Well, one of them anyway... The passenger's side didn't go so smoothly, and the bastard thing broke the copper hard-line that goes into the caliper. I didn't even apply much pressure to it, so obviously it was weak. It turns out that the pipe was rusted into the nut, so that didn't help. Question. How do you stop a broken brake pipe from draining the master cylinder reservoir (when you have braided lines and can't clamp them off)? With a rubber glove of course. Stretch it over the opening of the res, and zip tie it in place. This creates a seal in the system, so the fluid can't just freely drain out. As you can see above, it pulls a fair bit of vacuum, so to be safe I also used a silicone cap to plug the pipe in the meantime. Better safe than to drain the whole system onto my garage floor overnight and then have to refill an empty system. So that sucked, and now I have to go get a new pipe made up. The one plus to this is that since one caliper is off, i'm going to look into repainting both as they are looking pretty haggard. Many layers of flaking paint. Moving on, back to the struts. I unbolted the swaybar from the crossmember, so that it could hang down (since I couldn't remove it from the arms), and one of the lower arms had to be removed (or the swaybar still fought me). With all that sorted, out came the struts. On went my sweet spring compressors and off came the strut top The boot on the RH side is mint, but the LH is torn and will need replacing. The same can't be said about the front bump stops. Years of being smashed by lowered suspension had turned them into chunks floating around in the boot You can also see a lot of oil floating around in the above photo. This is from the shock, as it had been leaking badly but was contained within the boot, effectively hiding the failure. The shock on this side was so bad that as soon as the strut top was off, the shock collapsed down by itself. You can pull it up by hand, but it pulls itself down again. Well buggered. The next fun was to remove that massive nut on top of the strut leg, so I could remove the insert. I didn't have any spanners big enough, so what do I do? Improvise. Out came the chain oil filter wrench and a breaker bar. Other than the strut flopping around, this made short work of it, without even damaging the nut. I could reuse it if the new shocks didn't already come with new nuts. Off came the nut, to reveal the shock insert. I saw in the receipts the front shocks had been replaced years ago, but wasnt sure what was actually in here. The shock should just pull straight out; and this is what I have. Monroe Gas-Matic. This is the difference between the old and new shock and the old left and right shocks (left on top) Old spring vs new spring. You can see the new spring is a fair bit longer and slightly thicker coils. I added a squirt of hydraulic jack oil into the strut leg (adding this is neither here nor there; some say its to help transfer heat from the shock to the strut leg. It's easy to do, so I did it), and slipped the new shock into the leg. A couple of dabs of copper grease, and on went the new nut. This was tightened by hand as much as possible, and then cranked up tight with the chain wrench. Its well nifty that thing. Anyway, that's where we sit today. I can't reassemble the front struts without new bump stops, so i'll need to grab some, and I need a new brake line made (but first I need to undo the old one from the braided flex line, which is proving to be very hard to do). Tomorrow I will swap the rear shocks and springs, and hope that goes well and that I don't need parts for that too. Thankfully the new shocks have new bushes for that. To be continued.

Previous owner paid a premium to put the cats on the EFI, wouldnt be my choice because of all that Rover V8 powerz

I don’t buy shit tires anymore but will leave them on a car I buy unless they die, or the car is sold. Big fan of lower cost Falkens and Yokohamas. Decent performance and quality for the price. I was genuinely worried when the wife was driving my other SD1 to the show on the weekend in the pouring rain, on Supercats. I have had that car step the back out going around a roundabout in the wet without even giving it throttle. She was ok though and of course blamed my driving.

Touchscreen tablet, but yeah you gotta get one that is a decent size or youll be jabbing at the wrong cells all the time. OLED would be nice though, especially if you could get a nice matte display.

Or get a cheap windows tablet with BT and install tunerstudio on that. That was my plan but I never got around to it.

I have nothing to add to this thread, except that i like seeing what others are doing. A+ work, will keep reading.

Effie passed her WOF easily, so both cars made it to the show on Sunday. Unfortunately the weather was gross and it ended up pouring down, but both cars looked great. I spent Saturday machine polishing and waxing Tess, which has made a huge difference in the paint. Being black, its unlikely to stay that way, but hey.

That last photo makes me pine for a landy. very cool.