kws

I couldn't help myself, I HAD to work on the wing and see what condition it was in. So the other day one of the amazing parts I scored from Whanganui was this original Vitesse rear wing. These are crazy hard to get hold of these days in NZ, unless you buy a fibreglass replica from Rimmer Bros in the UK, for around $270 + shipping. The Vitesse was the only model to get these spoilers. Rumour has it they increase stability at speed, and may even reduce fuel consumption by altering the coefficient of drag. According to Karen Pender's book the standard 1982 3500SE (no spoiler) had a coefficient of 0.405 whilst the early Vitesse was 0.360. The only body changes between the two cars was the spoiler. Plus, they look awesome; they just finish off the back end so well. So yes, I now have one in my possession. Unfortunately the previous owner had painted it white, and it was in bad condition. The paint was cracking badly, and the rubber wing itself was cracked in a couple of places. I started with stripping the paint off to see what state the rubber was in. Initially I tried 80 grit sandpaper by hand but wasn't getting anywhere as the paint was so hard and thick, so I moved to an 80 grit flap wheel on my grinder. I very carefully used this to strip off as much paint as possible, without cutting into the rubber. I decided to grab a DA orbital sander today and have another go. This was far more effective, and I managed to remove most of the paint This shows clearer how badly cracked the rubber is You can also see there that I still have some paint stuck in the rough texture where the wing has weathered. I'll leave this as is, as I don't want to dig into the rubber to remove it. The standard Vitesse wing attaches by about 6 studs to the boot lid. Obviously my car doesn't have the holes for the spoiler, and I'm not keen to drill into it, so will be looking to attach it with Sikaflex or the likes. This meant removing the studs from the spoiler, which isn't a hard job, when only two remain. Using my Dremel and some sweet aliexpress cutting disks I cut them off as flush as possible. I also used my flap wheel to grind them down some more (after the photos were taken). Once it had dried off a bit I decided to have a quick test fit. Does it belong here? Mmm, probably not. What about here? A bit better, but still not quite right. What about here then? Yeah, that's the stuff! It wouldn't hold itself on the boot lid, so no full photos as it's not mounted. I did some thinking regarding the condition of the wing. Obviously I cant just stick it on as it is as it looks pretty rough, so I need a plan. I think what I'm going to do is take a fibreglass mould of the wing, and make a fibreglass replica and then mount that on the car. I'll store the original wing away safely. This is a good thing for a couple of reasons. Firstly I won't need to uprate my tailgate gas struts as fibreglass is a lot lighter than the original wing; It'll also give me the ability to remake the wing if I need to, IE: if I get another SD1 that doesn't have one. Now to add another skill to my set, how to fibreglass. Eek. The MX5 is about to fall off its WOF, and its a couple of weeks until I can get it in for a WOF check, so until then I guess I'll just have to use and work on the Rover more. What a shame.

Legend, ill be taking thursday off then. Thanks!

Fine. Ill continue. Edit. Woo new page! Started stripping the horrible white paint off the spoiler today. Its very thick, very hard and very brittle paint. I used a 40 grit flap wheel on my grinder and 80 grit by hand to cut through the paint. There are a couple of large cracks in the top of the wing, hopefully i can fill them with something, maybe sikaflex? and then ill be painting the wing in either bumper paint, or plasti-dip. Its a flexible rubber, so normal paint is a no go.

Oh hell naw

....!

....

Cmon new page

This is a rather long page.

It's good knowing others with the same sort of automotive suffering as myself, sometimes they surprise you with opportunities like this one. A friend and fellow SD1 owner (and also the Chairman of the local Rover club), Nick, had been following a lead on a couple of SD1s that were sitting in a backyard up in Whanganui. These cars were sadly left behind when the owner passed away, and his widow was looking at options to move them on. She was having trouble accepting that due to the condition of the cars they were going to be hard to sell for much, as none of them were complete, none of them had engines or trans and all of them were de-registered. A few months pass and I get a call from Nick asking if I was interested in coming with him to check the Rovers out, and see what parts could be saved from them. It turns out the widow had given up and was going to scrap all of the cars. Understandably as soon as Nick heard this he jumped on the chance to save the hard to find parts that we all need to save. Of course I'm never going to turn down a chance to have a look at some SD1s, let alone the chance to hopefully score some good parts for little money (and save the parts from scrap). Yesterday we made the 4+ hour round trip to visit the cars. There were three cars left, out of what sounds like a possible four or five originally, so she had managed to find a home for at least one. This is what greeted us The red car was completely stripped, and had a whole range of various random bits dumped inside. Unfortunately these had been left out in the elements, so some of the good stuff was ruined. The red cars shell actually looked like a good rust free shell (other than the rusty tailgate) but it would be a lot of work to do anything with other than cut off repair panels. The red car also had a strange looking coilover strut setup in the rear. The axle looked standard, and no signs of a rear swaybar or anything. Normally SD1s have separate spring and strut, not coilovers. One issue that has been found with some other cars changing to a coilover like this is that the metal where the top of the strut mounts was never designed to have that much force put on it, and can be damaged. The blue car next to it was an 2600s, and other than no engine or box it was a mostly complete car. This car yielded some goodies, like a towbar which will be going on my SD1 shortly It's not the most fancy or solidly built towbar, so I wont be towing car trailers with it or anything, but being able to haul a load of garden waste or a motorbike around would be awesome. Nothing like towing a mundane load with something special. That car had the same colour interior as my car so I yoinked the center console to replace mine, which has a couple of holes drilled in the black plastic section Don't work on cars that have been sitting outside on a farm if you can't man up and pretend there aren't spiders. This one was chilling out right next to where I was working in the boot. There was one on the other side too, of similar size. There was also another almost complete 3500SE in the back shed This one had some very terminal rust in the firewall, and had been off the road for about 10 years (and likely sat in the same spot all that time). It was also sans its v8 engine and manual gearbox It was pretty dusty, and the tires ceased being round years ago The interior was also full of various other cars interior bits and pieces Nick took the bumper off this car, and I happened to notice how much you really wouldn't want to be towing with it! Very crusty. I got a bunch of good stuff from that car, including some spare headlights, some good uncracked tail lights and a set of indicator/wiper stalks that aren't broken. The shed itself was full of hidden goodies. You really needed to keep your eyes peeled as there was stuff everywhere. This straight through large bore exhaust was just chilling against the back wall. I had to strongly resist the urge to bring that home with me. Gosh it must sound good though. Nick found a couple of good bumpers hung on the wall, and I almost lost my shit when I spotted something tucked away up on a shelf Yes, that is a legit original rubber Vitesse spoiler. It's in terrible condition, but I will save it. These are like gold-fish teeth to get hold of, and here was one, sitting right there. *regains composure* It's badly painted, cracking and the internal metal frame is rusting, but I'll sand all the paint off, remove what metal I can and see what I have. I'm hoping to be able to make a mould of it, and then either use the rubber one on the car, or make a light weight fibreglass copy and store the rubber one away. But hey, I have one, and that's what matters; It gives me options. I salvaged a whole big box of other random parts, most of which I needed to tidy up little things on my car. I found a pair of these front chrome strips that go on the front grille (the one that my car had painted black, and I covered in chrome tape before British Car Day). It'll be nice to fit a proper one of these as the chrome tape looks good from far but far from good. I also grabbed a speedo and tacho cluster. This has a good plastic lens to replace my scratched one, but more importantly it'll let me play with the trip counter and find out why they stick and won't reset, and how to fix it. I'll also look into the tacho and see what solder joints might have failed in mine so I can one day reinstate it. I scored these two re-trimmed D-pillar covers too, to replace mine with all the fabric torn off them I found a pair of these series one front corner lights too, so will experiment with swapping from the orange lenses to the clear lenses (the orange insert on these ones can be removed) and see if I like it. One is damaged, so if I like it i'll have to try to source a good lens. So yeah, we spent the whole afternoon stripping as much off these cars as possible, stuffed it all in the van and set off And that was the last we will see of these cars. Sadly they will be sent to scrap now, crushed and turned into Cherys (or Chinese MGs).

Love the carbon fibre tube hiding the wiring for the injectors. Thats a real nice little touch. That engine is clean enough that you could sleep with it in your bed.

http://web.archive.org/web/20100128214844/http://www.jeeps-offroad.com:80/f41/engine-swap-bellhousings-4740/

I wonder if one of them would survive the massive power and torque of a rover v8 hmmm.

Anyone got any tips and recommendations for a first time painter? Have a compressor, 120LPM so nothing impressive but hopefully enough to do a somewhat OK job. Could use rattlecans again, but have compressor now. Need a low cost, OK gun, are the cheaper ones from supercheap OK? Thinking one like this, http://www.supercheapauto.co.nz/Product/Blackridge-Air-Spray-Gun-Gravity-Feed-600mL/340067?menuFrom=1021509 Whats the go with buying paint and shit for it too? Its for the boot lid on MX5 which is a non-metallic black. I presume i need to buy thinners and stuff too? Can i use the same gun for everything, primer, paint, clear etc? Being non-metallic, do i even need to clear coat it? #noob

My plugs were checked as 1.1 when fitted, which is a recommended gap iirc.

AFR is about 15:1 at cruise. Standard plugs which are a 6 on the temp range

The rest look like this sorry for super huge photos. Posting from phone.

To the peeps in the know. This is the first time I have checked my plugs in about 1500km or so of installing my speeduino. Do they look normal? They almost have no colour on them, but no spot or petrol etc. this is the most pale plug. All the other seven have some colour to the ceramic.

I did a lot of work under idle to help with stall recovery in my car. I have no idle valve, so can only control it with fuel and advance. I added a lot to VE and advance below idle, so when the RPM drops below idle it goes into those cells and it pushes the speed back up again. It hasnt failed me so far. I dont think VE would work alone, the ignition advance made the strongest difference.

Woo hoo, It’s finally time to fill the big gaps in the front of the Rover. Wow its a double post day today! I haven’t spent much time working on the Rover recently, but don’t worry, it’s still here and still loved I have been trying to source a set of good fog lights for the SD1 since I got the car. I got a pair from the previous owner, originally from the car, but both had damaged lenses (one with a hole in it, and the other was properly smashed). The reflectors were also a bit average. One light had been “modified” somewhat too, so that was no good. Finding any, let alone a good pair, was damn near impossible locally but fitting them to the car was fairly important to me. Without the fog lights I was left with just a pair of big gaping holes in the front I finally sourced one good pair of fog lights…. in the motherland, Britain. Thankfully my lovely wife just happened to be in Britain last month for work, so I put two and two together, and got the lights shipped to her and she brought them back in her very overfull luggage. They may or may not have also been the reason her bags were searched by customs…. but we aren’t sure on that They were used lights (I had the option of New Old Stock/NOS ones too, but they were a lot more expensive and harder to justify), and not perfect. One had a very bad reflector. The reflector is made of steel with some super thin reflective coating on it, and over 30+ years the quality British steel has suffered badly. One of the lights that came with the car has a better, but still rusty, reflector. I carefully applied rust converter to the worst areas, but I didn’t want to risk further damage to the reflective coating. This was the reflector I chose to use. So the aim of the game was to take 4 average light units, and make two good units. The replacement lights had lenses fitted; one good and one broken, but the seller included a perfect spare NOS lens. To get the reflector units apart, and remove the lenses, there are small clips holding the stainless surround to the reflector. They’re easy to remove, either lever them out, or preferably, push the long leg down and unhook from the surround. With the clips out the whole lot just comes apart. I replaced the lenses and reflectors and built a good pair. Before fitting the lights I had to actually dig out the wiring for them on the car. I had seen the LH side wires in the past, sitting up on the under tray But the RH side ones were nowhere to be found. I did some digging, after removing some screws on the under tray I found the wires jammed up between the under tray and the front panel. I plugged a spare bulb holder into the wires and tested that it actually worked Success. The light works, but the switch needs rebuilding (like the rear fog switch it doesn’t latch). Even the dash light works The housings are easy to get into place. They have a push-pin on each side and an adjustment screw on the top. You hook one pin in, and using a small blade you push the other pin in whilst slipping the housing into place. Screw the adjuster screw in, and BAM, done. Rinse and repeat on the other side Plug the bulb in, and then the reflector housing pushes into place until it clicks in. Now to fix that switch. Off comes the dash top, and then the button pushes out the front It’s a prick to get at the wiring for the switch though. It’s the big red plug that needs two hands to undo Off comes the cap Pull off the cover and see why the switch doesn’t latch. The latching pin has come adrift thanks to the useless little plastic tab breaking off. Same as with the rear one, I used a small screwdriver heated up with a torch to melt the plastic over and secure the pin into place. Whilst there I also fully stripped and cleaned the contacts, just so I didn’t have to do it again later. They were pretty corroded. Once reassembled…. we have light! And then LIGHTS! I still need to align the lights, and also replace the bulbs with a pair that match. I’m happy already though, looks so much better with the lights in place.

Sucks, the Rover club here even tried to get them to do a bulk combined shipment of larger items, but they weren’t interested. Rimmers have good stuff but can be dicks.

Ah balls, totally forgot this was on. Wondered why i spotted a couple of mint old cars as i was heading back from Pram in my Honda parts hauler.

Im a huge fan of E34s, and the manual 535i sport is an awesome car. Big capacity straight sixes are win.

I converted to single mass in my old e36 and yes the gearbox rattled like a bag of spanners at idle in neutral, but didn’t cause any other issues. It revved very quickly though, and I’d certainly recommend it over dual mass. No obvious harshness and wasn’t any harder to drive in Wellington hills etc.

What’s the deal with stretched tires in a wof? Gaylord of a previous owner of my shitbox mx5 put new wheels on it with slightly stretched tires. The tires just fall out of the spec for an 8” wheel as per the lvvta chart (195/55r15). will this be pulled up in a wof? They aren’t stanceworks hella flush stretch but noticeable.

MT90 is the recommended oil in NZ for the Miata gearboxes, which are known to throw a wobbly over GL5. Will be getting some for my shitbox NB shortly.