Thousand Dollar Supercar

How solid is the blockage if it works? Did you nana your Rover for the extra year or can it take some abuse? I guess how good the fix is and whether you even get a result must depend on how bad the break is to start with?

It seems my Rover SD1 2600's cooling system is being force-fed air, hopefully through a head gasket leak into the water jacket. I get bubbles in the radiator when I run the engine. Mechanics suggested I use Irontite or similar in the cooling system as a cheap way of keeping the car usable. The website says it works, see? http://www.irontite.com/faq.html#Will_Irontite_Sealant_Products ""Will Irontite Sealant Products fix a head gasket leak? YES. Either the Ceramic Seal or the All-Weather Seal will repair minor head gasket leaks. " Has anyone tried it? Is it dodgy as, and will it just fail then block my heater and make my cooling system inefficient forever after?

As soon as I got the radiator, thermostat housing and hoses leak-free, the water pump started to leak. So I took the car to a garage, and got them to replace: Water pump Cambelt Cambelt tensioner and all fluids except engine oil. Of course, the cambelt tensioner is no longer available, so they had to make one. And when they went to bleed the rear brakes, they found both the wheel cylinders were leaking. And one other cooling system hose decided to leak on them too. So I got a massive bill from all the days it took them to do that, but the car should be sweet for next week's track day now right? It's still losing coolant, and I can't find any more leaks. I have a theory that explains this, along with the entire cooling system's general willingness to leak, and the fact that now when I run the engine with the cap off the radiator expansion bottle, significant amounts of bubbles come up... No prizes for guessing, folks. I think I may have the inevitable 6-cylinder SD1 BLown head gasket. Probably had been developing for a while, but now discovered at an inconvenient time and right after the perfect opportunity to replace it has just passed.

I spied it driving today while I was sitting in Wendys having lunch. Sheepers was pulling out of a side road, and I was disappointed he didn't pick a really small gap and then activate the turbo boost. http://www.axys.co.nz/ben/sheepers_boost.wmv (411kb)

Where do you keep finding these? I never see them on the roads. It is in the spirit of 1980s Mitsubishis that this car eventually be converted back to EFI Turbo. Your turbo also ought to have a big sticker on it saying "TURBO", so people know. In the photo of the car side-on in a field, it reminds me slightly of 1980s Subarus, with the white paintjob emphasising the square styling. Lower it and don't park it in fields and you'll be fine!

Cool! I vote keep the mags and the ride height. But not the stickers. If you're gonna paint it, would you do it two-tone like the Australian redback Sigma Turbo? http://www.sigmaturbo.com

Minilites, these ones? The best day of the nats is the track day, cos we need entries. But otherwise the Saturday.

Company car: I successfully managed to get rid of this - one of the other techs at work was only too happy to become its custodian. A win-win situation. Black Alfa minor update - air intake upgraded with piece of Rover (top pipe) in addition to previous grey pipe (middle, above radiator hose). I damaged the distributor rotor by accidentally driving with the cap not clipped down , but have now replaced this. I drove the Alfa to Whangamata over the summer but have now stopped driving it, hopefully pending a partial rebuild. Although I haven't managed this so far. The reason I don't have to depend on the Alfa despite getting rid of my other vehicles is this: I got me a nice economical, reliable runaround in the form of a 1984 Rover SD1. See the build thread in my signature. Incidentally, I am using as my buyers guide the book "Lemon! 60 Heroic Failures of Motoring" by Tony Davis. 58 cars to go? Priceless.

I got a little resonator thingy fitted in place of the rusted rear muffler, and I had a torn steering rack boot replaced and a wheel alignment done. Also spent several hundreds of dollars and several days of my own time fitting phat soundz. The Rover came with an awful old cassette radio which seems to have been fitted in Nelson in 2001 - why would you fit a radio in NZ that only receives up to 90FM? I decided touring barges should have decent sound systems and I gave this radio the boot. I got a Sony head unit better than my Alfa's one - it does mp3 and wma CDs and has an aux input jack. Flash as. I got some new front speakers: The 'woofer' components of the new speakers are only 5 inch because the original Rover items (left) are 4 inch, and the size of the holes in the doors was obviously an issue. This size limit restricted me to a more fancy brand. Then I put my cap on backwards and said yes to a 600W amp and a 12" sub. I bought two sheets of chipboard stuff that were cheap because they were actually left-over packaging material. I installed the amp up under the dash in the passenger's footwell. The amp drives the front speakers but the existing Rover rear speakers are run directly off the head unit. It then came time to install the subwoofer. No problem, I'll just fake some typical Kiwi DIY woodworking skillz and whip up an enclosure before you know it. Unfortunately the wood knew I was faking. I cut out two bits of wood to make a new false boot floor (saving the originals), and then measured up and constructed a sub box to go under one half of the false floor: This makes use of the huge cavity under there, while still allowing room for the full-size spare tyre, jack etc and not sacrificing any boot space. I had to buy a whole jar of aggro wood screws for the construction, so I went on a rampage, screwing every crack that moved (and some that didn't..). I also squirted glue around liberally. The lid of the box isn't glued - I used foam window sealing strip and just screwed it down. http://www.axys.co.nz/ben/rover/sub/uncoveredenclosure2.jpg In an emporium I found some appropriately ghastly blue fabric to cover the box with. Some spring terminals allow the box to be disconnected for removal. http://www.axys.co.nz/ben/rover/sub/coveredenclosure2.jpg http://www.axys.co.nz/ben/rover/sub/coveredenclosure3.jpg http://www.axys.co.nz/ben/rover/sub/coveredenclosure4.jpg http://www.axys.co.nz/ben/rover/sub/coveredenclosure5.jpg Because the real floor of the boot isn't flat, my sub enclosure (which rests on the floor) needed to be shallower at one end than the other. It wasn't (see fake skillz), so I just compensated by raising the other half of the false floor to match. You'd never know! I'm pleased that the audio system isn't too conspicuous and hasn't sacrificed practicality, but is still the best I've owned to date.

That is pretty groovy. Now I don't have to wait a day for them to self-deflate. The throttle jammed most of the way open on the way home, after I floored it after a motorway roadworks queue. Luckily I was able to keep the massive horsepower under control until I could get my foot under the accelerator and pull the pedal back out again.

In today's chapter of the continuing saga of me misidentifying stuff on this car, a British car garage told me I've been worrying about the oil level warning light thinking it's the oil pressure warning light. The oil level warning light is presumably triggered by yet another sensor, which they identified hiding on the side of the sump where I hadn't noticed it. Regardless, the circuitry seems buggered because the light still flickers randomly no matter whether there's a short circuit or an open circuit on the end of the plug to this sensor. Armed with this theory (hopefully to be confirmed by someone on the Rover forum who actually has an owners manual), I boarded HMS Rover and opened the taps, what. It makes an uncivilised thunderous wooshy racket to let you know you're not supposed to drive it that way, but it gets along well enough for 1984. I've gotta keep in mind when doing this that it's not that big on stopping or cornering. I'll see how the sound changes after tomorrow, when the rusted-to-bits rear muffler is replaced. I'm keeping the curved exhaust tip (no Stag pipes ) so it'll still look much the same.

Haha, I was wondering how long that page would take to show up! Q: I'm afraid you've become trapped in a classic Joseph Heller conundrum. You assert that this is an authentic Lucas part and offer substantial testimony that it works and is effective in many applications. It would seem impossible that it could work and also be a genuine Lucas product. A: This is known as the Nuffield Paradox. It can't be helped. It is the reason BL finally adopted a clenching sphincter as their corporate logo. Oh yeah.. makes sense.. "You can't hide nowhere, with the torchlight on" as Midnight Oil once said.. I wish the SD1 wasn't too long and low to get down the drive.

I bought a brand new battery, and got a repair manual to tell me everything except owners manual stuff. I got a new sender for the temperature gauge and the gauge now reads properly! So I took the radiator to be re-cored ($$$) and flushed out the cooling system. The radiator man said he used to do heaps of SD1s and know the core dimensions off by heart, but SD1s don't come by so much any more.. Got the radiator back - it's a bit of a monster compared to the Alfa! The cooling system should now be taken care of, reducing my chances of BLown head gaskets. The heater even works once you understand the controls. Here's the radiator fitted along with my cold air intake made from black spraypainted drainpipe, temporarily held up with wire.. So next I went out and bought all the stuff for an oil change (including ®oversized oil drain pan). I rummaged under the boot floor for a means to jack up the car, and came up with this, the weird Rover factory jack. I couldn't figure out what to do with it, I assumed it was to help raise boat trailers to get them onto the towbar or something. So I went and bought a SuperCheap trolley jack. I poured two bottles of engine flush into the motor (hoping for ®over-strength formulation) and ran it 15 minutes. I then managed to spill oil on the ground (darn sideways sump plug), and halfway through the oil change I took off the plastic bumper underrider end cap thingies as part of getting access to the oil filter, and worked out how the factory jack was meant to work. I took out the oil pressure relief valve, which looked OK to my untrained eye. Even if it wasn't, where do you get new springs? I poured a shameful jumbo pack of old barge oil into the motor and set off home. 5 minutes later the oil pressure warning light came on, despite the oil pressure gauge reading maybe slightly higher than before. Perhaps I need to consider that suggestion of putting diesel in the engine oil. Then 10 minutes later the prince of darkness got into the wires again and made smoke come out of the steering column. I think he's taken up residence in the headlight switch. And one more annoying thing to happen today. Here's the characteristic curved SD1 exhaust tip: But a suspicious piece of black-painted tape fell off the rear muffler this tip attaches to. What's underneath that I wonder? Wait a minute, that's not the only gaping hole in this muffler! No wonder the thingy's so growly. So. WOF in two months. Do I get the shiny curved bit cut and welded onto a new muffler or resonator or something, or do I go for a new style of tip? If so, what? Something Triumph Stag-ish?

Time to start this again. Tuesday 19th January. Meet in the carpark above Wallis Cycles - go up Hurst St next to Burgerfuel and this carpark is up the ramp on the left. Meet time 7:30pm. Ellerslie Burgerfuel Carpark Francoli Bar didn't get a good turnout last time even though you can buy alcohol there ( ), so let's go back to not-that-much-cheaper Burgerfuel again this month.

I don't have such a mechanical gauge. So I pulled the plug off the oil pressure switch - dash light doesn't come on while the plug remains disconnected. I tried shorting out pins in the plug - one combination of pins actually causes the motor to crank over! Now that's beating the Italians at their own game. I mounted my multimeter on the windscreen wiper, visible from inside the car, and connected it to the oil pressure switch. While driving I could see that the light on the dash unfortunately tells the truth. Every now and then the multimeter would briefly register a finite resistance where it should have read open circuit the whole time. The broken terminal on the original oil pressure switch was just the one which starts the engine, so it wasn't even stopping the switch from delivering the correct signal to the light. The switch didn't need replacement, and it's looking more like I have oil flow problems. Engine flush? Italian tuneup? Long summer road trip? I blame grandpa (the car's last owner) for this situation, driving slowly down the road to the dairy once a week and sludging up the oil, then only changing it when it came time to sell the car. I've just won the auction on the not-Haynes repair manual, hopefully I can get that shipped soon.

Why, just for amusement? Oil pressure gauge seems to be reading OK. I confirmed it runs off its own big fat sensor (which I only just found today) by unplugging the single wire to this sensor while the engine was running and watching the gauge drop to zero. Oil pressure warning light still spends part of the time flickering or being lit, despite me replacing the sensing switch with a new one that didn't have one terminal snapped off. That means I'm down to an electrical fault or actual poor oil circulation (OK at the gauge sensor but poor at the warning light switch?) Maybe I could put a jumper wire across the plug which connects to the new oil pressure warning light switch. If the light still flickers when my jumper should be keeping it permanently off, I've got an electrical fault.

This time I've got it. The oil pressure SWITCH for the warning light is the one with three contacts, the oil pressure SENDER for the gauge is somewhere else, and looks bigger and fatter but only uses a single wire. So I got a new oil pressure switch and not much changed. Light still flickers sometimes and comes on sometimes. It's getting hot in here.. With the coolant temp sender wire grounded to the engine block and help from my Alfa's battery, the Rover's temperature gauge will reach full scale. So I have a new temperature sender on order from Ripco. While taking the dashboard apart checking for dodgy wiring, I found a couple of old tickets and stuff. Some date back to the first three years of the car's life when it was in the UK: I also fixed a reading light and reconnected a ventilation pipe while under the dash, and painted the badges in the middle of the wheels: (before this they were a uniform dark blue with the coating coming off in patches) They look better in small photos or from a distance but not so flash up close. I replaced the car's now-totally-dead battery with a small temporary battery from my work, and tried disconnecting the automatic choke box but the idle didn't improve. I've still failed to fix anything important on this car.

The bit it's missing is indicated in red in this photo: 'Bypass foot' sounds like the right term. What does it do / will I die if I don't put it back in? Cool, will try that tomorrow. =)

It seems I had the coolant and oil pressure senders mixed up. The oil pressure sender's the one missing the contact. Surprisingly I might be able to get another from Ripco, whose computer actually lists the SD1-only 6 cylinder engine. I replaced the cooling system thermostat to no avail - I idled the engine until the new thermostat opened (based on the top radiator hose becoming hot) but the temperature gauge still stayed near cold. The new thermostat is missing a bit that the original one has, so the original one might go back in once I find the actual problem. There's a bright side - oil pressure and coolant temperature have probably been okay all along. I just need to keep working at getting the gauges to agree with my theories. I took out the hot air pickup system and I'll replace it with just a single big pipe for cold air. Also found I'll need to replace the air duct running across the top of the engine, cos it has too many splits in it. At the lights today a homie in an FTO said "Nice oldschool ride cuz, nice!".. and the best part was that he wasn't a senior citizen!

Cool! Thanks! Maybe I can pick up a giant rubber spoiler, or even see if they bothered to give the V8 model better brakes. Wouldn't kill Pick-A-Part to actually put this on their website..

The big six: Discovered the car's colour is Eclipse Blue, and that it has one of those battery disconnect things fitted to the battery terminal - the kind you install when you can't work out what's wrong with your car's electrical system. I spent a few hours in the scorching sun poking around cleaning electrical connections. The car's cooling system thermostat - perhaps a bit bright orange, but present and closed nonetheless. I believe this is the sender for the coolant temperature gauge. There's a bit of a problem with it though: I tried to solder onto the remains of the broken terminal. Maybe tomorrow I shall go out Roving to see if I've been successful.

Duly noted. I've been basically daily-ing the Alfa for over half a decade (with recent exceptions), and the times I've been temporarily or not-so-temporarily unable to get anywhere in it have been: * Timing belt tensioner broke (they weren't changed when they should have been) * Rear brakes seized on (doesn't happen now and is easily dealt with anyway) * Moisture in distributor (hasn't happened for years, but I carry CRC now just incase) * Bad connection in battery cable (age-related, fixed and won't happen again) Most of the car is badly designed and constructed, and yes there are certain to be some minor things wrong with it at any given time. But the bits that allow me to travel from place to place are too mechanically simple to give much trouble. The only added complexity I can see in the Rover is power steering. I have a workmate with Morris Marina horror stories, but have had a former SD1 3500 owner come up and tell me his gave no trouble in 3 years. I'm sure I shall find out whether the Italians can comprehensively out-engineer the Poms (in my experience they could hardly engineer themselves out of a paper bag - those Poms better be pretty bad).. Like grandpa used to say, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Rover ventured, still nothing gained.. I haven't taken it past 3000rpm and have stopped driving it until I can confirm whether or not it's getting up to temperature and has proper oil pressure. Just don't tell Old Man Sheepers.

I can. That's them all lined up, and it's bad enough, but once I open the window some of them will get blown downward and I won't be able to see the queue of cars behind me any more! They might work better if the window was closer to vertical. I've kept them, anyway, and won't throw them out since everyone seems to like them.. I totally wanted an XJS, maybe just a 6-cylinder one cos I'm not clever enough to do manual conversions, but I guess this is a compromise. It caters to buyers in that market segment between reliable newschool city car and V12 gas-guzzling old Jag.

I agree this might be a plan. What's in there now is Caltex Havoline, according to the window sticker, but it's quite overfilled and an engine flush might be an excuse to replace it with the right amount of a gloopy old car oil. First though I'll need to make sure the car is getting up to temperature, so it'll be more effective if/when I drain the oil.

Well I did read they were Caravans Monthly tow car of the year back in the day, on account of their height adjusting suspension don't you know. I would appreciate an owners manual. I've been asking the SD1 forum what all the buttons do! The web tells me that British Leyland had to cripple the 2600 a bit to make sure the old 3.5 looked better. I'm already eyeing up the restrictive-looking hot air intake system for potential removal, and the 2600 exhaust headers seem to turn an unnecessarily sharp corner right out of the engine block considering how much room there is. Massive engine, but massive engine bay.. I will take some photos probably after christmas, cos the only christmas shopping I've done so far is to buy myself that Rover.. Some warping of the dash and headlining sagging a bit near the rear window, yeah. I don't want to spend much on it to begin with, because I'm supposed to be buying a house and spending money on the Alfa. All going to plan, I'm going to be poor. But the Rover may well end up coming to the Nats in February, so it'll need to be up to that. I'd like the Rover to be more of a daily driver than a project car, if that's possible. I can spend a bit getting it to that state I guess, because I'll still have saved money vs buying a boring Jap econobox to run around in (fuel bills excluded).. If/when I get around to modifying the Rover, I guess I'll look for a smaller steering wheel, and ways in which I could make the car stand up to a few laps on the track or be better suited to faster driving. More of a sports barge. I'm not gonna debadge it, slam it on widened steelies with stretch tyres, fit boso exhausts, paint it matt black or any of that stuff.