mk2marty

Was good to finally put some faces to internet names! Only photos I took:

Totally expecting to see this at work tomorrow btw

According to my info, the tag decodes as follows: C=Ford UK CKD kit A=Auckland (Wiri) assembly plant A=Escort T=Two door sedan T=1977 production year P=April production month 85878= unique 5-digit identifier Model: A=Escort Drive: 2= right-hand drive Engine: J3= 1300 2V Kent engine Trans: B= 4-speed manual, floor shift Axle: D= 4.125:1 ratio final drive Trim: P = unsure, this code isn't in my chart, but early Sports to my knowledge used cloth seat trim from an Escort GL with vinyl door trims, of either beige or brown. Paint: 7=1977 code L=electrocoat primer 2=Taubmans paint vendor EF= I think this is Olympic Blue, based on research of NZ-assembled Escorts I've seen over the years. We had unique paint codes (because local production), so overseas manuals and colour charts don't translate here. Unfortunately, the guy I knew with the proper list of NZ paint codes just passed away over the weekend, so I can't ask him. 1= again, unsure. A lot of cars didn't have a number here. SVC ST=December 1976 CKD kit generated. So in essence, that tag belongs to a 1977 Escort 1300 Sport, and the powder blue colour is likely pretty close to what it had originally.

Reason for Rejection #18 from the VIRM:

Being a 1600 Sport it should have had 9" rear drums from OE, although yours is a very early production model so it's possible that it didn't get them. Odd. In terms of the oil from the pinion flange, it sounds like it's working its way up the splines on the drive flange, which these are known to do. Replacing the pinion seal won't help this, but a judicious amount of silicon sealer in the splines will stop it. That does mean the flange has to come off and the pinion nut loosened, which unless you're careful and get it back in the right place will upset the pinion bearing preload. Too much and you'll collapse the bearing spacer further, which means pulling the final drive apart to fix. The silicone will probably also mean the drive flange is harder to get off in future, but meh, it's better than an oil leak. As for the backlash, if the axle isn't noisy personally I wouldn't worry about it, a used Timken axle does usually have a bit of backlash. Depends on what you're doing with the car/how deep your pockets are, though. Here are some possibly useful bits from the Ford book (the pictures are of a Salisbury, but the principles are the same):

I've got a Uniden R3NZ, which picks up posted speed cameras (via GPS) and speed vans, but you have to mess with the settings a bit to narrow down the detected K band range otherwise it picks up every "your speed" sign/shop doorway sensor etc. It's good for Ka band (mobile radar), it usually picks it up a decent distance away (like several kilometers) unless there's particularly hilly terrain. It also goes off when you're getting lasered, but by the time that happens it's probably too late anyway. Wouldn't drive on the open road without it now, not because massively illegal speeds or anything, more just for the peace of mind on passing lanes or for those random 30km/h signs for non-existent road works. Has the ciggy plug adapter too, so easy to swap with the suction cup mount between cars. Mate had a Valentine that told you which direction the signal was coming from, which was a nifty feature.

Cheers for the speedy reply! The car is standard otherwise, so maybe this will be the tipping point for more mods... Or maybe I'll ask the body shop to just weld the guards on. It would probably take a fairly observant WOF inspector to notice the difference, but why risk it tbh.

Front guards on a Mk2 Escort are spot welded on from the factory. If I were to bolt them on using rivnuts and M6 bolts every 60mm or so (for ease of panel gap adjustment/removal for future repairs etc) would this get into certification territory? My thinking was that people have run fibreglass guards on Escorts for decades, and given that they predate any kind of frontal impact legislation it might be allowable - the bolts are spaced at roughly the same intervals as the spot welds were, so whatever body stresses the guards carry should be unaltered. However, the bloke painting the car reckons otherwise, and tbh looking at the VIRM it may be classed as a modification to the vehicle structure. Who is right?

@brocky41 will PM you with a list of random trim bits I need for mine

Yeah can't do tonight, but keen for next month!

One year on from when I bought it, and it's looking a bit more respectable. I bought a grille, front bumper, front air deflector, chrome moulding and column switchgear from the wrecked sedan in Lower Hutt, which has prettied up the front of the car immeasurably. Also, in a feat of impulse buying, I bought some headlight covers from a NOS Honda accessories bloke in Indonesia, who very kindly sent them over just before lockdown. They couldn't go on the car just yet though, because while the grille and surrounds were a lot better than the ones on the car, the surround was missing the left hand corner piece. There was a guy in the States who was selling a couple of corner pieces, and after lucking out of people in this country who might have the right part, I sent him some internet money for the piece of moulding in question. Three and a half months later, it managed to fight its way through the COVID ravaged postal system and finally took its place on the front of another Accord, half a world away from the car it came off. It was definitely worth the wait though! In other news, I fitted some headlight relays because the high beam switch had enough and self destructed one night. Fun fact: the switch is before the fuse in the headlight circuit, so when resistance through the switch gets warm enough to soften the solder on the terminals, there's nothing to stop the wire from falling out and then trying to weld itself to anything that has a body contact nearby. Unfortunately, without drastically altering the wiring loom there's no easy way to remedy this. The best course of action was to fit the replacement high beam switch and run it through a pair of relays to remove the current load. Other than that, there isn't a lot to report. Tune in next time for the valve stem seal replacement and 1980s stereo install, hopefully

Yeah, I still own this. One day I'll fix all the photos in this thread, but for now here's a slice of the 1980s on my front lawn. Nothing else has happened really, apart from that the WOF man decided he didn't like the Recaros, so I'll have to swap the original front seats into it, and it needs a driveshaft hanger support and rear gearbox seal replacing. Maybe once the Escort is out of the garage I'll give it a bit of a freshen up, it probably deserves it by now.

Just arrived, carpark is full though!

Keen!

Cheers mate! Maybe it's the Northland climate that helps with the project car enthusiasm

Surprisingly I still own this. I figured i'd better update the build thread now, it has more metal in it now than it did 2.5 years ago. With a year of a long distance relationship, moving house, changing jobs, other cars and a fairly sizeable task ahead to fix all the rot, progress kind of came to a halt not long after the last update. In the last year or so though I have been chipping away at it, so far I have cut and welded the l/h inner guard, heater bubble, l/h floor pan, inner and outer sill section, rebuilt the bottom of the l/h A pillar, l/r wheel arch inner and outer, outer sill section, and probably some other small bits I can't remember. I also cut the front valance off, and I am very thankful for the abundance of pressed panels available new for old Fords in that I got a new valance, front guards, and a myriad of repair sections to stitch in, without these I probably wouldn't have taken this on tbh. Here it is on its way to its new garage: Some repairs to the firewall where every Escort rots - under the heater bubble. I've made an indent in the new heater bubble so water can actually drain away, rather than collecting in the bottom of the bowl and rotting through the seam that joins it. It mightn't look tidy, but it's solid and there's good penetration through to the other side, so I'm reasonably happy. The l/h side floor section was probably the most daunting repair in terms of size, I ended up cutting the floorpan back almost to the seat mount before I found decent metal, but after I zapped in the floor section the outer sill and pillar fitted up pretty nicely. This was the most recent repair - the rear wheel arch - which someone in the past has had a go at, not rust proofed behind the repair, and it's rusted again. There was a patch welded into the outer arch, which someone had beaten in with a ballpein hammer and shaped with bog, and a large patch on the inner which had gone rotten. It all had to go, I ended up cutting away the inner half and remaking it, and welding in a pressed section into the outer. All that's left now is the l/h C pillar and vent, probably the r/h C pillar too, the bottom of the r/h A pillar, a random little hole in the rear apron, make some new front guard supports and attach the front. I have a full set of factory bronze tinted glass and chrome trim mouldings for the windows, which will probably end up on the car too. And this is pretty much how it sits today!

Some good things have happened to the Accord since the last installment! I gave it some CV boots, thankfully the inner and outer are the same size, because both boots on the L/H axle were split. Fun fact - pre-facelift Accords have CVs at both ends, but later ones like this one have tripod joints on the inner. Confused the hell out of the bloke at BNT, anyway. It passed another WOF last week without any hiccups, and we've taken it for decent number of road trips around the upper North Island. I even slept in it after Crate Day, which honestly turned out to be more cramped and uncomfortable than I thought it would be. Still working on tidying up the front end, there's a sedan at a wrecker down country who might be able to supply the grille bits. The passenger side carpet is pretty rotten and it got consistently damp in the rain, which was a pretty good indicator that there were holes somewhere that there shouldn't be holes. I broke the unwritten rule of old car ownership, that being "don't pick at that bathroom sealant, you won't like what's underneath it" and lo and behold after chiselling away the layers of Selley's Bathroom Adhesive in the windscreen plenum chamber there was a decent hole. After taking out the wiper motor I found another hole, so out came the cutoff disc and the welder. Just to be safe I pulled the dash out so nothing caught fire, to be honest this is probably the first time this car has seen the hot end of a MIG torch in its life. I made up a couple of patches, binned them after I found more scabby bits near where I was welding to, and then made up some bigger patches. Glued them in with the metal gluestick, and hit it all with some epoxy. Might spray some underseal in there yet, or I might just spray it all with fish oil and put up with the smell for a couple of weeks. Otherwise it's been plain sailing, the front seats need some more foam because as far as I can see they don't actually have springs in them, just a layer of heavy foam which has disintegrated over the past 39 years. Local content laws dictated that as much trim as possible had to be made here, which is why we didn't get the neat colour coded interior fabrics that everywhere else in the world got, we got beige or beige. I pulled out the amplifier that was tek-screwed through the floorpan underneath the passengers seat and the lil' Johnny spec head unit that was flopping around the dash and wired in with three core house cable, and wired in a period '80s Clarion spindle mount unit - less doof, but more class! It needs a set of TS-Xs for the parcel shelf next time i'm near Buyee.com. Here's some pictures of it enjoying the scenery

Could be keen

Cheers guys! The car came with a Gregory's manual but thanks for the offer, @tortron I'll keep you in mind, @- i5oogt -, if plastic welding the corner of the grille on the car doesn't work then it'd be good to replace it with something decent.

We've all done it, right? Spotted something tasty on Trademe while browsing idly on a Friday night? Sometimes, after a few beers, you might even put in a cheeky low autobid just for the hell of it. Well, fast forward two weeks and it turns out no-one else wanted that crunched Accord you were bidding on while a little bit drunk. Damn. Thus, for a stupidly small amount of money, I added another slightly rotten Eighties classic to the fleet. This one rolled off the NZ Motor Corp production line in Nelson sometime in the early part of 1981, probably into the hands of a caring gent who treasured it for a couple of decades, adorned it with a set of THE GREATEST WHEELS EVER M8, and apparently never had a flat tyre because the original Reidrubber Award is still sitting in the boot. Fast forward a few years, it passed through several more owners, and tried to pass through a brick wall which didn't go so well for it. However, considering the reputation that first-gen Accords have for disappearing slowly before your very eyes, this one seems remarkably solid. The wall-inflicted damage was limited to the pushed-back bonnet, radiator support panel, guards and bumper, with the chassis rails thankfully having escaped damage. It was in this state that I picked it up on Saturday morning, drove it to the parents place and tore it to pieces in their driveway. By Saturday afternoon it was sans front, I had pulled the radiator support panel back to where it should be (it helps when your Grandad has a low mile, immaculate one owner example you can take measurements off) and I sprayed rust neutraliser over every bit of metal oxide I could find. The whole structure is surprisingly flexible, everything bent back into place quite easily, and by Sunday afternoon the front was starting to look more like a Honda again, and the bonnet was back to where it should be. It was solid enough to make the trip home, anyway, and to drive it round to Grandad's beforehand to spin Honda yarns and spot the differences between pre and post-facelift Accords. It was already missing parts of the grille moulding and a bumper insert though, which was a bit annoying, and the bits of chrome moulding it does have are bent. Not sure where to get replacements for these, I am unused to the lack of aftermarket support for anything that isn't an old Ford... I did however find some repro indicator/park lamps from a place in Otahuhu that turned up in the mailbox the next day, which was pretty sweet. I'll take some proper photos of it once the rain stops, but here are some phone snaps in the meantime

Cheers all for the feedback, it's a huge help when the holes in the car just keep getting bigger, and the motivation gets lesser... As much as I'd like to make the repairs as invisible as possible, the replacement panels limit that a bit. What I'm thinking at this point is to cut the hole larger, drill the spot welds on the inner sill/firewall and use the replacement inner sill panel and butt it to the rest of the floorpan, and plug weld it to the sill and firewall in the same place as the factory did.

So there's a hole in the floor of my Escort. Would it be best to butt weld the floor repair section in, or lay it in from underneath and lap joint it - ie. weld it from the top? Bearing in mind that there's also the lower pillar and sill sections to be welded in too.

Anyone heading to the Waipu car show on the 10th?

So I did a silly thing the other day and bought a motorcycle. I am a complete newbie to the world of bikes, so this is all a bit of a learning curve. It's a 1985 model (Japanese assembled) Suzuki GN250, with flat handlebars and not much of an exhaust. It has got spoked wheels and a retro looking striped tank though. I'll probably end up finishing off the cafe racer mods the previous owner started. Yeah, I know, how original... Any tips/tricks/advice/sharns are greatly appreciated, and if there is any possible way to hot up a GN motor let me know! Still amazed at the quantity of stuff on Aliexpress available for these, some of which is already on it's way here from China

Cheers, i'm going to need it! Thankfully there's plenty of knowledge around OS and beyond, so the trepidation level isn't too bad at the moment. But then, I haven't actually uncovered all the rust yet...