yoeddynz

Here's an update as things have been happening on the Imp front. I lowered the car off the hoist onto our old rolling steel table. I then removed the doors. Oh man was I expecting this to be a no go. Most of the screws were missing on one side suggesting someone had tried but gave up. Lots of wd40 and and an impact driver and I manged to get the rest to move. Then worked carefully away at them. I had to cut the retaining strap pins as they wouldn't pop out. Tools of the door removal trade... The doors are in excellent condition. No rot at all. Not even a bubble. Just some surface rust on the underside of one. Much relief!.. Last weekend I built a new rolling table. I can raise it up 200mm or higher if I swap the legs blue coloured legs out for longer ones. It'll carry 600kg so more than enough for an Imp shell The shelf on the bottom is for all the panel bits and bobs and what not as they come off. The main 17mm sheet on the top can be flipped over for a clean side so we can use the table for woodworking projects Cost was very little, using old steel offcuts and castor wheels on sale at Bunnings. So with that built I started cleaning out the inside properly. The floors came up pretty good with the rot mainly around the front. Nice photo from the back where you can easily spot the holes... I'll fashion some repair panels to fix this. Toying with the idea of letting in an extra channel to allow the water pipes to run under the car- maybe widen the center tunnel slightly. Not sure yet. It's just pipe dreams at this point........ * With the shell up on the hoist I gave the underside of the car a look over and scrub. The underseal comes away nicely and reveals a really solid bottom..often with the original paint. Inner sills are great! This is nice. The majority is surface rust with localised patches of rot. The outer sills need to come off but I am hoping I might be lucky and get away with just patches as the tops and bottoms seem good. I shall see soon. I must add that I am really impressed with the way the car is built. Its a solid wee thing. And the steel seems to be really decent quality. I am guessing that earlier Imps, much like early Vivas, possibly used better steel than later cars? The suspension units and rear subframe came off fine. I was really worried about seized bolts but they all freed up nicely! The Arms are just covered in surface rust and should clean up well then get smoothered in Por15. Yesterday we went back to where this shell came from and picked up more stuff in a bid to keep the race car shell rolling. I now have an even better set of rear arms plus a working transaxle. Back to this car. The windscreen pretty much fell out as the seals had gone all gooey in the sun. Due to this I expected to find rot but its solid as!.. Then I had this lot to deal with... wow -what a nice design!? Rust trap with leaky rear windows. Now most of this will be cut out as re-built due to the opening that will exist there for the Datsun engine rocker cover to pop its head through. But I wanted to expose enough decent steel on the section to be removed that I might be able to use as repair bits for the other areas here. Nasty job. So many spot welds and I couldn't see them for the rust. So I cut out the strips and then chisel away at the remains. So much rust dust and flying metal chips. Yeah- I'm the Friday night party animal, sitting in my Imp chiseling rust... Next job is to start the sills. Lets see how bad they really are. I may well put a mattress on the ground and roll the shell over on its side to make the job nicer. The shell is so light now! *see what I did there..

Oh hey.. yeah it could well have snippets of info that the Haynes manual doesnt have. I'd just bought another 'intereurope' or something manual for $1 on TM the other day but sadly it had even less info. I do however always find it interesting reading them anyways. Are you going to the Nats?

Is it still under warranty? My innovate Mtxl would start reading within about 10 secs. Was pretty good but I did replace one sensor. They dont like lots of over rich starts and rich running plus they dont have the same control of the heater that those 14point7 items have. I'll go 14point7 next time.

On Thursday last week it dawned hot and sunny. This was good. The thought of trying to load an old car shell onto a trailer using a tractor and some pallets in the rain would be yuck. Instead.. we got blasted by sun. We got the shell onto the borrowed trailer, loaded the van up with more parts from another Imp (there's more to collect!) and made our way back home slowly along a now revised (thanks Cyclone Gita) very windy route. Once home this was our view as we sipped our lunchtime coffee... I moved it up to the workshop entrance. Viva wagon was banished downstairs.. Cleaned out a load of old interior carpet and insulation.. Sat inside it and made (little) engine noises.. It came with some patina attached.. Then the clean began.. It cleaned up nicely... Then we moved it inside. Lifting it off the trailer was a lot easier than putting it on.. I am now building a decent sized rolling table to lower it onto. More on that soon. Glad to have the shell here so I can crack on and cut out the rot. First job though is to clean all the mess out inside. Quite a fun job that. I might find some coins and so it can end up even cheaper

The power of the internets! Hey- please do start a thread on your Trabant project as I'm sure there will be many on here interested!

Impressed that it manages to fit in without chopping holes. For some reason I always thought they needed clearance around the front but I might be confused with the Toyota V6 swap. Barry Dowler is nice to deal with eh. Pretty chilled. He, probably like most certifiers, doesnt like peaked cap, tall black sock and jandal wearing Redbull drinking yoof telling him he is wrong and they are right. So glad you've kept this looking stock. You'll have some fun surprising folk! Just dont end up backwards in a hedge- like I did many times in my Aw11 when I ran out of talent

I'll get some photos of it traversing across some very muddy puddles. It is actually looking quite butch all mud up the sides. Needs an LSD rear axle to be truly effective offroad. Oh and an engine with boost what like that bloke @Firetruck had in his wagon.

Pffffff Torrie. What what you know about Commers....

Yeah he's bloody lucky he didn't get pinned to a fence and die. This is the slip what hit him. There were several massive slips just along this stretch of road alone. The huge one that came down through our land is scary as because it could have been so easy to have popped up the quad track and get taken out by it. Shit those slips move quick. Just finished two more days of cleaning up the mess and still a lot to go. It sucks. My back aches!

Ha... the power of water. While on the topic of slips...a local friend just posted up a short clip of himself getting taken out by a slip not far from us during the same cyclone. Their place got totally hammered big time. Massive slips and the fields full of full sized pine trees. I promise to get back on Imp subject very soon...

I think it's technically bad for our quad to use it on hard surfaces anyway as it's full time 4wd with no centre diff and can suffer from wind up. But would be lovely to pop down to the beach on...

Fuck that 962 is lush. Wow.

Do you have to rego a quad to use on the road or only if its well beyond ya farm gate? I fucking love our quad. Damn it's been handy.

Good news. That Imp shell I am planning on picking up is safe. We drove up a very rough road in our trusty old 4wd Hiace to check out a friends property over the road which has been demolished totally, everything just washed away leaving a 6m wide creek bed where it used to be 1m! Some other flood waters rushed through on the other side of the road, only 5 metres away from the Imp and took out the inside of the campground kitchen. If you look in this following photo you'll see a line of brown mud heading down the field in the background, Imp sitting high and dry :-)... But our road out of the valley is still too nasty to take a trailer on so the Imp shall have to wait a bit longer.

Yes- photobucket is arse!!!! So much good information has just disappeared Yeah- I shall stay in touch. I'm after a later transaxle which are apparently fine for over 100bhp so long as ya dont go dropping clutches or cane it in rally stages. Shock loads = no good. I reckon the big Nolathane doughnuts should be quite good. A normal Imp wouldnt be able to run them though as they dont have the required sprung centre clutch to take up shock loads. Tell me more about your Commer. I presume a Commer Imp? Where be the build thread?.............

I wonder if they just chopped the end of the arms off and let in the ends off some Datsun trailing arms - so allowing the use of the full Datsun hubs/axles and shafts ? You could be flash and allow for Discs that way.

How did you go about with the hub end? Do the datsun half shafts share the same universal size?

I like wagons. You've done well. Was owned by a Barry?

Please tell me more about these datsun half shafts. Details please. What car, adapted how etc etc Oh.. And the R1 Imp

I guess A15s are lighter too because the holes are bigger?

No playing with Imps for a few days. Its been a bit wet around here. We had 260mm in less than 12 hours here!!! So lots of gnarly watery things happened yesterday. The bridge as you enter the valley floor is wrecked . The main road has slips all the way up. The road out towards the sea was a 1 meter deep in silt and floood water until our Neighbour re-routed the river back to where it started. We have had some huge slips on our land. Its not pretty. But compared to many we have come off ok really. Mustn't grumble. Shed is ok. Housetruck fine. Imp is dry in shed. Viva wag is full of water outside. But that bridge.. These guys have suffered big time.. There is a very strong chance that the Imp we looked at on Monday has floated out to sea. The valley it was nestling in got hit hard too. I'll find out soon enough.

Yeah- I can see more arriving on the horizon. Just in case eh....

I went to the Nelson Vintage car club swap meet on Saturday morning. I was chatting to a mate and taling about the Imp project. Some fella behind me said "Do ya need any bits? I've got heaps of parts!" I turned and it was a fella I had met a few years ago when Hannah and I were looking at Bush block for sale over the road from his place. We had turned up in the Viva and parked it outside. This guy came out to look over the car, we started chatting and he mentioned his Hillman Imps. He then showed us about his workshop. Now I had been intending on going back to his place (handy too because we are mates with the lady who ended up buying the land...bloody hippies ) so it was good to bump into him again. I told him about how the Imp race car, which he knows well, was still quite rough from having been pulled straight after the accident. He mentioned the spare shell he had sitting there and said we should pop up for a look. We went up there yesterday and....well.. I have now got three Imps. This shell has some rust, the worst being the drivers floor but very easy to fix. Main thing is that its straight. I would say the worst aspect is the dent behind the drivers door. It will pop out but I don't really like having to use lots of filler, especially on large panels. Oh well. I can only try my best. The front slam panel has a dent but there is a good panel on the other , completely chopped up shell in there. The windows need a clean.. 1971? Mk2? The car is a nice light blue, not too different to the blue I was thinking of painting the car. All for the princely sum of $50 How could I refuse! So my plans are changing (everyday) and I will now use this shell as a base. The Blue car in Chch will be used for parts but I will keep its shell as a future car project (old cars lining up the upper driveway amuses Hannah no end I can tell you... but at least Imps are little cars) thus making the caged race car shell spare (I already know someone who might just want it...) In other news I went hunting with my large spanner and caught a Datsun engine sneaking around the back of my Imp... Then I had a BBQ, drank beer and stripped it down. Hows that for hardcore Saturday night antics eh?! Here's the little transaxle.. Fits on to a quite nicely constructed 'bellhousing' adaptor. The flywheel and clutch remain Datsun. Uses a modified release for with a typical release bearing rather than the carbon Imp type. I'd love to know more about who built this adaptor because a few Imps were converted to Datsun engines here in NZ? Clutch has a sprung centre which is needed because I reckon the custom Nolathane driveshaft couplings don't have the required amount of give to take up shock loads like the original rotoflex couplings do.. That is all for now. I must finish the truck cab swap so I can create some space for more Imps. In the meantime.. you can discuss whether I am starting to get an Imp problem here...

I now really want to phone this frank guy and wind him up... But he could be a really nice fella.

We've got enough big freaky Funnel web spiders here thanks. Just bring beer.