ThreeOnATree 1984 Rover SD1 2600SE

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

Yay, page 2!

Not getting the same adrenaline rush from your usual extreme sports? Try this.

Take one Rover, find a large, glossy, mainstream testing centre, apply fifty bucks and wait and see if you get a WOF.

I didn't. The Rover's now even less road legal than when it last failed - they found one of the seatbelts is starting to shred along its length.

This is now in addition to the lower balljoint play which is apparently pretty excessive.

I should be happy, of course, that they didn't notice or take issue with all the other stuff I know about...

Where am I going to get a blue seatbelt?

Can't put one of another colour in, that'd devalue the car!

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

I gave my hookup a holla and he hit me with a blue seatbelt from one of the 'about 25' SD1s he has in pieces up in Whangarei. He also collects 'Austin, Armstrong-Siddeley, Daimler, Jaguar, Wolselely and Vanden Plas cars'.

The belt isn't identical (UK import vs NZ-assembled?) but at least it's blue.

I also sourced a brand new lower arm (with balljoint) and got a garage to fit it. The testing station guy tried to explain how I could drill access holes through which to grease the balljoints, tap them and fit grease nipples or something.. but the important part was that now I have a WOF!

And the rego is back off hold!

OK, now what?

I bought this big blue boat, so I suppose now is where I try to use it to go places.

I took the car out christmas shopping to burn through some of the months-old fuel, and got reacquainted with some of the car's many faults. Lousy electrics, play where the steering passes through the firewall, and the requirement to drive around a juddery clutch and a clunky noisy drivetrain.. But the Rover has now visited my favourite underground carpark, which features super-smooth concrete all slippery from the rain..

Next plan is to find some stops on the carbs to allow me to bodge the 200rpm idle up to a more reasonable level until I can get the car tuned properly.

Plus do an oil change, a head bolt retorque, and get antifreeze back in the cooling system. Then see if the motor blows up when I use more throttle.

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

Next plan is to find some stops on the carbs to allow me to bodge the 200rpm idle up to a more reasonable level until I can get the car tuned properly.

Plus do an oil change, a head bolt retorque, and get antifreeze back in the cooling system. Then see if the motor blows up when I use more throttle.

So I did all this, plus I found Repco have red plug leads, and I tied up the steering column with cable ties to stop it knocking about due to the disintegrated bush in the firewall.

The head bolts didn't require much effort to back off slightly compared to when I first undid them. I then got a quarter of a turn out of them all when torquing them back up. I also found and picked out a little screw which I half suspected I'd dropped into the valvetrain area last time.

What happens when I drive the car a bit harder? Well. A people mover was ahead of me going onto an onramp today, so I switched lanes and accelerated past him before the merging point. This was the most revs I've used since getting the car back on the road.

But as soon as I was on the motorway, the car started to lose power!

Did I give the old barge a hemmorhage?

I checked my mirrors for clouds of smoke. There weren't any.

I applied more throttle. The car continued to slow down!

I had to shift down two gears to make it up the next hill, hazard lights going. The people mover guy probably felt very smug as he drove past.

I got off the motorway, and at the next lights the car idled badly for a bit then sorted itself out (relatively speaking). The power returned until the next time much throttle was required.

Guessed yet?

An old fuel filter was to blame. The pump couldn't suck enough through to supply the mighty Big Six under sustained periods of awesome power.

Once this issue developed, it got worse fast. I abandoned ideas of driving back home over the harbour bridge, and found a mechanic who hammered a screwdriver through the fuel filter for me to make it a straight-through high flow design.

Car goes fine now. New filter on the way. Car finally makes induction noise through new air cleaners when throttle is over half down. Post needs photos.

..apply a little paint..

Hatch leaks in the rain. Upturned sub woofer starts to fill up like an oonst oonst bird bath.

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

Three days before I go back to work, I finally got my summer road trip. I packed up the Rover and set off, but a couple of miles down the motorway I discovered the fuel filter hadn't been the (only) cause of fuel starvation. The stuttering returned.

It was mid afternoon, and if I'd turned around and gone back, fired up the Alfa and swapped all my luggage over to that, I wouldn't have reached my destination before dark. So I just kept going.

Driving the Rover with that fuel starvation / mandatory economiser issue was frustrating and not very relaxing. Like an old video game where you had to build up your energy meter to execute a finishing move, I had to build up my fuel reserves in the carb float bowls by coasting along with the clutch in wherever possible. Then on every hill I'd try to pick the right gear and throttle angle to make best use of my savings. I could average no more than about 80kph, less on hilly sections. This could probably be equated to an average horsepower of 50 or so. Not fun, but I got there in the end.

Next day I looked under the hood and almost immediately spotted a kinked section of rubber fuel hose. My fault too, due to the way I'd suspended the fuel pump / meter / rail with one or two cable ties after removing the factory intake chamber they normally mount on. Mucking about with the fuel filter the other day (see previous post) must have just moved this particular piece of hose back into a straighter position, removing the kink until next time things shifted around enough.

I got some wire and tied things up until they worked.

The trip home went well.

Observations:

• [*:rkxtjo8e]Unless I'm still down on power for some reason (I can think of a few), the 2600 takes a bit of a kicking to keep speed up on the open road sometimes
  [*:rkxtjo8e]It gets a bit coarse at higher revs
  [*:rkxtjo8e]Existing rear suspension must go, and giant steering wheel too, in order to fix handling.
  [*:rkxtjo8e]In its present form, the Rover would get walked on by the Alfa
  [*:rkxtjo8e]At least it looks pretty good.

http://www.axys.co.nz/ben/rover/church/kkchurch1s.jpg

http://www.axys.co.nz/ben/rover/church/kkchurch4s.jpg

http://www.axys.co.nz/ben/rover/church/kkchurch5bws.jpg

http://www.axys.co.nz/ben/rover/church/kkchurch6s.jpg

http://www.axys.co.nz/ben/rover/church/kkchurch8s.jpg

http://www.axys.co.nz/ben/rover/church/kkchurch10bws.jpg

http://www.axys.co.nz/ben/rover/church/rover1s.jpg

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

Something has clicked in the car and its idle has improved noticeably. I had to undo my throttle preload because when the trouble self-corrected, the car started to idle at close to 1500rpm.

But after, like, two whole months (during which time fuel economy was in the region of 11~12l/100km), it's looking like the head gasket problem is returning. Twice now in my regular checks of the coolant reservoir I've found it full and under considerable pressure. A bit disappointing but not entirely unexpected.

I've also noticed that if I'm waiting at the lights for a while then I accelerate 'rapidly', the guy behind me often gets a bit of a smoke cloud, probably oil.

So now those same choices return:

Sell the car (will probably lose me the least money in the long run)

Buy that second hand Rover six and install it, fixing clutch at the same time (moderate difficulty, low cost)

Get a Rover V8 and convert to that (high difficulty and cost, long time off-road, possibly better long term solution)

Converting to a non-Rover engine is in the too-hard-and-expensive basket.

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

The Rover blew a small hole in an old cooling system hose, making a mess as all the pressure in the cooling system sprayed radiator stop-leak everywhere. So I went to Pick-a-part and got a Falcon hose to chop up to mend poor Rovie. By now, the cooling system is so pressure-tight that I'm concerned something very inconvenient could happen, such as an explosive heater core rupture.

Time to put a bullet in the big six.

Ideally at this stage I would find a cheap V8 manual SD1 for sale with the body beyond saving.

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

O blue Rover arise
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall
Send her victorious
Speedy and glorious
In thee our hopes we trust -
God save us all.

 

 

This thing turned 30 parked up in my garage and nobody came to pay their respects.

 

Today a delay in repairs to my Alfa meant I'll be missing some of Nats, and I scared myself by pulling the SD1 out, washing it and cleaning some of its mould (the interior mould which the evil car sickened me with over New Years).

I need my Alfa finished so I do not have to trailer this to WOF-less whale to Nats, because the trailering part would not be fun at all.

Back to your garage, bringer of pain.

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

When I was a kid in perhaps the mid/late 80s, my brother and I were playing on the beach building dams in a little stream. By and by, my great uncle came driving down the beach (the only way to access his bach house) in his Rover SD1 V8. He saw someone he knew, so he stopped the car down in the path of our dam and got out to chat.

I couldn't believe the opportunity for mischief that this presented!

We quickly scrambled to break the dam and direct the water around the wheels of great uncle's SD1.

The car got stuck in the sand and blew a radiator hose, sending clouds of steam everywhere. I bet he was pleased, being 50m from his house and far from civilisation...

I suspect he put a curse on me, that I would one day buy a Rover SD1 and it would be rubbish and burst its radiator hoses and lose me a lot of money..

This great uncle, who had reached his late 90s, died just the other day. The curse must have lifted with his passing, because eerily around the same time, a madman contacted me interested in buying my SD1.

I know he's mad because he has owned a full twenty of the cars in my buyers guide "LEMON: 60 Heroic Failures of Motoring"....

 

This car is now SOLD to Zebra Dude.

[The Dude]

Oh God what have I done!!!!!!!

Change Thread to my name?

Horror in store

[The Dude]

//oldschool.co.nz/index.php?/topic/26722-thousand-dollar-supercars-rover-sd1-2600e/page-5

 

Discussion here, why oh why have I done this to myself??????

it smoked up the motorway on the way home, and overheated on my doorstep, YUK!!!

[The Dude]

has now got a Wof, and mega super pressurised rad system, radical cure in progress (for the meantime)

say hello to rover sd1 number 2

[Threeonthetree]

So I swapped half a brown VH Commodore for the Series 2 Rover SD1 and it is now mine.

The 2600 Six cylinder engine is basically a dead horse. You can spend as much money as you like trying to fix them but they will always break. I toyed with the idea of fitting an AU Falcon XR6 Tickford motor and manual gearbox in its place, even going so far as to measure both engines and draw up some engine mounts. But ultimately, the Rover disease had me in it's grasp...

 

So after work on Wednesday last week I trundled down to the wrecking yard and removed a few pieces for my engine conversion:

 

 

That's right, after being laden with a bastard child of a six cylinder for over 30 years, the Rover will finally have a V8 under the bonnet. 

This donor car was an automatic but I will keep my car manual. In order to fit the V8 engine I also needed to remove the K frame, so I did that too:

 

Step 1 - Loosen K frame bolts and lift up front end of car with gantry crane

 

 

 

 

Well that's basically the only step, as it just kind of fell out nicely after that. So I then wheeled the front suspension and K frame into the back of my ute and it is now awaiting fitment.

 

A few other small problems on my car were the steering column flopping about due to the steering column bush having disappeared, lack of a drivers power window and the glovebox latch on the passenger side being broken.

So I have taken a couple of good latches from the donor V8 car ready to install into mine. Rimmer brothers in the UK supplied me with a new steering column support bush and I removed and tested the switches and regulator from the V8 donor car so that I can fix my permanently closed window. So far so good.

[Threeonthetree]

Here are a couple of pictures of the SD1 as it currently sits. I haven't really driven it much, mainly to and from film shoots around Auckland where the car has started to pay for itself.

I do however take it for the odd howl around the local airport. It really is a shame that the 2.6 six cylinder can never be properly fixed. It's noisy and truck-like at low revs but sounds like a 1960s Italian GT car when my foot is deep in the blue carpet. I would love to keep it six cylinder but I just know that it will fail spectacularly. Because the car is actually really enjoyable to drive, I want it to be at least reliable enough to take away on weekends. So the V8 will have to do the job.

 

 

[Threeonthetree]

I attended a classic car auction a few weeks ago and purchased quite a few vehicles on behalf of others. There was only really one vehicle that I wanted to buy for myself and thankfully I managed to purchase it for a mere $200. It's a 1981 Series One Rover SD1 3500 in Barley Yellow. The car was assembled in New Zealand at the New Zealand Motor Corporation's assembly plant in Stoke, Nelson. 

It's a 3.5 Rover V8 engined model with a Borg Warner 65 automatic transmission. The only other person bidding on the car at the auction was a scrap metal dealer that I have had numerous run ins with in the past. He was going to send the car to be scrapped complete. And while my plans aren't to save the car, I will at least be removing everything of use and using the parts to keep another three SD1s on the road.

 

 

In thses engine bay shots of the yellow car, you can see Zebra Dude removing the usable radiator. He blipped the throttle V8 in his manual SD1, the fan flew off the end of the water pump and ripped a hole in his radiator! Great British Leyland reliability. This replacement should get his car up and running and we'll cut the huge extension on the water pump off as it's only there to bolt a mechanical fan to. Electric fans will do a better job.

 

 

I also bought a second Series One Rover SD1 at the very auction that I purchased the yellow one from. This one is a UK assembled 2600 2.6 Six cylinder automatic model with manual windows.

It's actually a rather tidy car and is now owned by Zebra Dude. The colour is 'Pharaoh Gold' and is probably my favourite colour of all the Series One SD1s.

 

 

I'm going to remove the good usable parts from the yellow car. The rear bumper, some trim pieces and a few other small parts will make their way onto Zebra Dude's Brown/Gold SD1. The entire interior, complete doors, glass and rubber will be fitted to Zebra Dude's other SD1 (A Series One 5 speed manual V8) which will then be painted white and turned into a UK police car.

The engine and all V8 specific parts will be removed and used as part of my V8 transplant into my Series Two Blue SD1 2600. The alloy wheels on the yellow car will also be removed and stored for use later on, probably on the gold/brown car.

 

The gold/brown car also came with a complete 3.5 Litre Rover V8 in pieces. 

 

The heads came with the much better looking (in my opinion) early style rocker covers which I will eventually paint black with the raised alloy fins polished silver.

So I now have a complete 3.5 V8 in pieces, a complete and fully assembled (ready to run) 3.5 V8 in the yellow car and the dummy assembled but not very complete 3.5 long block with heads that I removed from along with the K frame from the silver Series Two at the wrecking yard.

 

Rover used an LT77 manual gearbox in every manual SD1. Therefore with the correct bellhousing, clutch fork pivot pin and release bearing sleeve I can adapt the current LT77 in the Series Two 2600 to work behind the 3.5 V8. So now that I have the engine(s), K frame(s) and everything else, I need to source a V8 manual bellhousing, flywheel and the aforementioned small parts and in theory I should have everything I need.

 

Discussion: //oldschool.co.nz/index.php?/topic/26722-threeonthetrees-rover-sd1-2600se/

[Threeonthetree]

And that concludes the filming work for my Series Two SD1. It is now parked in the corner of the shed awaiting the V8 conversion process to begin.

I now have to strip and dispose of the yellow Series One SD1 and then work on my Morris Minor and VW Golf. So there won't be much progress on the Series Two SD1 until the new year.

I'll still fix a couple of small issues on it and have a little list to work through:

 

- Boot struts don't hold up the hatch

- Drivers' window does not go up or down

- Wiper stalk is broken

- Trip computer is missing some buttons

- Steering column bush is missing

- Horn inoperative

- One rear wheel cylinder is seized

- Rear air shocks leak

- Rust below front windscreen

- No radio fitted to car (will find a suitably 1980s one)

- Fix centre console by returning it to original specs

- Tighten up both wing mirrors

- Replace gearbox oil

- Replace right rear tyre due to excessive one wheel peels by previous owner 

- Align headlights and spotlights

- Fix broken switches on instrument cluster

- Clean the car properly

 

Just a few things...

[Threeonthetree]

Back to the Barley Yellow Series One SD1:

 

We had a bit of an SD1 stripping party at the shed and removed a few bits and pieces from the car, namely everything:

 

493 by Neal OnTheTree

 

I then used traditional methods of a fence post and some tyres to remove the entire front subframe, complete with engine and transmission.

 

552 by Neal OnTheTree

 

554 by Neal OnTheTree

 

The last job was to remove the entire rear axle assembly. These cars use a torque tube differential setup with is a pain to remove compared to a conventional live axle.

So I jacked the car up on one side, cut and unbolted everything I need to and then did the same on the other side. It worked and the rear end slid out without too much fuss.

 

556 by Neal OnTheTree

 

558 by Neal OnTheTree

 

568 by Neal OnTheTree

 

In keeping with the Oldschool theme, my Blue Series 2 SD1 requires some brake parts on the rear. So rather than purchase new parts, I am going to rob them from the rear end I removed from the yellow car. 

[Threeonthetree]

I had made a list of jobs that I needed to carry out on the Blue SD1, but I hadn't driven the car let alone worked on it for at least a month.

I fired it up, fixed a fuel leak and drove it to the Oldschool Meet on Wednesday. I then spent a bit of time working on it yesterday and managed to complete a few jobs:

 

- Cleaned the car properly (and then messed it up again by cutting wires, throwing tool around and eating my lunch and dinner in it)

- Replaced the broken wiper stalk

- Replaced the broken buttons on the instrument cluster

- Sorted out the flickering oil pressure light (Pressure is fine, the sender was at fault)

- Sorted out the red temperature light (used to illuminate at random, again a sender fault)

- Fixed the buttons on the trip computer. They're pretty good now, I just push them at random for the hell of it because I'm an 80s Executive etc. Just need a car phone now.

 

I'm putting some rear tyres on it today and possibly sorting out the horn. I removed the Air horn setup and am going back to twin electric shell horns for that low tone.

 

Here's a shot from South Auckland Bristol with another English car:

 

603 by Neal OnTheTree

 

IMG_3948 by Neal OnTheTree

 

No more airhorns. They weighed an absolute tonne. It's a good thing I removed them though, as the car is such a lightweight performance vehicle where every kilogram helps...

 

IMG_3951 by Neal OnTheTree

 

Disconnected the alarm and associated wiring. I kicked the siren away in triumph but it speared off the side of my shoe and landed back in the car (sunroof was open). 

 

IMG_3953 by Neal OnTheTree

 

IMG_3955 by Neal OnTheTree

 

IMG_3956 by Neal OnTheTree

 

All fixed:

 

IMG_3958 by Neal OnTheTree