Going a full circle into a Marina again. KwS's 1973 Morris Marina Coupe.

[kws]

It was nearing the end of the holiday period, and a little Marina waited patiently for some attention.

Now that the Alto was up and running again, I could focus some time on the Marina and check off another item on the pre-WOF list.

One of the main things I needed to sort, that I had everything for, was to fix the wipers and washers.

I removed the whole wiper system a couple of years ago because it was seized and didn't work. The motor didn't function, one of the wiper boxes was jammed solid and the washers didn't respond to the button.

I started with the washer system. The Aus spec Marina uses a bespoke washer bottle with an integrated pump.

I removed the bottle, removed the pump, and found it full of rust. Trash.

There were a couple of options for a replacement pump, but in my eyes the easiest option was to convert the system to the UK spec bottle and remote pump. It's not as tidy, but easier to get parts for.

I started by scrounging up a good used bottle and cap, some new hose, a new pump and a used mounting plate for the firewall as the bracket is different.

The bracket is spot welded to the mounting plate, so I carefully drilled out the spot welds and removed the bracket. Here I had also prepped it for welding.

I considered using rivnuts to mount the bracket, but it's flat on the back so has no space for the bolt heads once the bottle is fitted. The only option was to weld it to the original mounting plate (or paint the replacement one, drill out the rivets and swap the whole plates over).

I marked it out and cleaned the paint off the weld points

And gave it a quick tickle with the sparky glue. I also welded up the lower hole for the Aus spec bracket as this had been letting water in.

A quick prime and a flick of paint and it didn't stick out so much

A test fit with the new bottle

I pulled out all the old perished washer hose and ran all new 4mm hose. Unfortunately during this one of the washer jets crumbled to bits.

With the bottle and hoses in place, I just needed to adapt and install the pump. The connectors are slightly different, so I had to change the wiring to a pair of female spade terminals, but other than that it just plugged straight into the pump and worked. Dark green was positive, and it grounded through the switch.

I drilled a couple of small holes and used a pair of new self-tappers to mount the pump. Also note the nice new hoses to and from the pump, including a one-way valve inside the bottle.

A quick test with some water in the bottle and we finally had water outside the car, albeit in a stream, not a jet

A quick trip to Supercheap resulted in a pair of generic twin jet washers, which I quickly set about fitting

They looked ok and didn't stand out too much

And they worked a treat. Ignore the spoiler regarding the wipers....

 

Next on the list was to sort the wipers. When I originally removed everything I had to remove one of the spindles with the rack as it was seized solid and you normally slide the cable through it to remove it.

A bit of brute force got the cable out without damage.

The wiper system is quite interesting really. Instead of linkages like cars have these days, it was operated by a motor pushing and pulling on a spiral wound cable through some steel tubes. This cable engaged teeth on the wheels in the spindles, which caused them to rotate back and forth, thus moving the wipers.

It's quite simple, with not many places to go wrong.

Except mine had. The motor was dead and one of the spindles was seized solid. I also discovered that one of the steel tubes had been bent to get around a bracket (which it should have passed though) which was causing huge resistance on the cable.

I removed the motor which is done by removing the mounting screw and bracket, removing the wiring and then flipping the motor over.

Unless you can/want to remove the whole cable with the motor, you need to disengage it from the motor. This is done by removing the circlip from the arm, remove the small washer and then the arm comes free. The cable is attached to this arm on a pin.

A quick bench test showed that although dirty, the motor was working correctly. Even the park function worked.

I removed and cleaned the park switch too. It's worn, but still functioning. I have a spare for the future, if needed.

Everything got a thorough clean and then regreased.

I started by grabbing a pair of good working wiper spindles and fitting them to the cowling panel. This wasn't a job I enjoyed, so there are no photos of it. It involves having to hold the spindle up under the dash with one hand, while pushing on the rubber seal, washer and screw on the nut with your other hand. Next was fitting all the steel tubes (including a replacement one between the spindles to replace the bent one) and attaching the gear covers, mostly with one hand due to space. Good fun.

Once all that was in place I greased the cable up, attached it to the motor and threaded it into the tubes, watching as the spindles rotated as it went through. The motor was then refitted to the inner guard, and plugged in.

A quick test showed everything worked correctly, so I installed the original wiper arms and blades. Note the correct side parking position, which was reversed on the later Marina for whatever reason.

For the first time in a couple of years, the Marina had wipers.

To celebrate, I poured some water on the windscreen (since the washers didn't have jets yet) and turned them on

 

Hmm, something wasn't quite right. It wiped well (ignoring the ancient rubbers smearing the glass), the wipers had plenty of speed and parked perfectly, but the sweep was.... tiny. It barely cleared the drivers vision.

I tried adjusting the position of the arm up the screen, but by the time I could get enough sweep on the glass, the arm was basically in the middle of my vision.

At best I got this much wipe

I ruminated on it for a bit and came to realisation that I had cocked up. Ages ago, knowing one of my spindles was seized, I bought a couple of second hand replacements. What I had ended up doing, was fitting UK spec spindles, to the AUS spec motor. This had created a mismatch in the gearing, meaning the wipers didn't move as far as they needed to.

I confirmed this by checking my photos taken when I removed the spindles, as to which type were fitted originally

The remedy? I needed to swap the drivers side spindle out for my one remaining good Aus spec spindle with the correct gearing. It means the passengers side doesn't wipe as far as it should, but the drivers side is the one that matters.

Thankfully the drivers side is the easier one to get to. I removed the wiper arm, dismounted the motor and pulled the cable out enough that it disengaged the spindle.

I then removed the back cover so I could remove the tubes from the spindle. It's obvious in this photo, compared to the one above, that the gear on the spindle is bigger and has a different design.

Once removed I put them side by side and you can see the difference here. Aus spec on the left with the smaller gear.

With the Aus spindle installed, how was it?

 

MUCH better. It now cleared right up to the A pillar, from the arm being horizontal.

The Triangle of Doom is horrific though, Hubnut would not be impressed.

The ultimate solution would be to source another Aus spec spindle and replace the passengers side one too, but this will do for now. It will get me through a WOF inspection anyway, well, once the new blades arrive to replace these smeary old things. This is a good-weather car anyway.

One last thing for the week was to sort out the source of jokes from my wife

https://youtu.be/Zzyfcys1aLM?si=lo3PLbRUwQmSkoZ7

I had previously tested the wiring, so knew the issue was the headlight itself and being a sealed beam unit where the whole light is essentially the bulb (not a lens and reflector with the bulb in it) the only option was complete replacement.

This one was an ancient GE unit (ignore the upside down photo...)

I bought a pair of sweet NOS Hella H4 units a couple of years ago and have been waiting to fit them

Date stamped 1996, about a year after this car was last on the road

These are a lens and reflector unit with a replaceable H4 bulb

They were a direct drop-in replacement. The Hella, on the right of this photo, has a slightly whiter shade

My only real issue with them is they don't have the nice pronounced curve in the lens like the old lights (and other new replacements available)

Old

New

I'll use them for now, but will look to replace them again in the future with curved lens units, which is a shame because the Hella ones are really nice quality and really expensive to buy new now. They don't quite look right though with the flat lens.

They do light up really well though

Since I have changed the ride height of the car and levelled it out some, I had to adjust the lights to bring them back to level. This is done with the adjustment screws on the light bowl.

With the grille panel refitted. It somehow changed the face of the car not having curved lenses. It looks surprised.

We're one step closer to a WOF and about three more things crossed off the list. The pre-WOF list is getting pretty small now. I need to reinstall the rear quarter glass, install some carpet, reinstall the seats, install the seatbelts, make a door card and have the exhaust rear section replaced and we should be good to give it a try.

[kws]

Progress on the Marina has been slow. I had hoped it would be on the road by now, but that's not happened.

The good news is that any progress, is still good progress, and some headway has been made.

I have really battled with the heater box and dreaded trying to fix it. In reality, getting it into a usable state wasn't that hard. Negative mindsets can be a real pain like that.

According to my records, I removed the intake plenum box way back in October 2021... that's how long it's taken me to get around to sorting it.

The heater/blower system is completely bespoke to the Aus/Nz spec cars and differs greatly from how the UK ones are set up. This was obviously due to the local content requirements of the time, which meant a percentage of the car had to be made locally and not imported.

This car came with the heater box in the boot, so I've never seen it fitted to the car. The plenum box, which is mounted up under the cowl panel behind the dash, was in place but full of dirt and old leaves. Not a good sign.

I removed the grille and then set about removing the screws that hold the plenum box in place. Once removed, the whole box just drops down.

It was pretty well full. Took a lot of vacuuming to clean it out

But the main reason it needed to come out, was to fix this

The metal has ceased being solid and became a crunchy powder.

Here it sat for a couple of years, until almost 2 years to the day later, and I pulled it out to have a better look. This involved lots of cutting and drilling, to remove the spot welds and remove the rusty remnants.

The gaping hole in the side is obvious, but there were also a lot of other areas that needed attention too, in harder-to-reach places

After cutting all this out and cleaning it up as much as I could, I absolutely saturated it in Brunox to treat the rust and seal it off.

Because my car is a poverty spec Deluxe and doesn't have the face-level fresh air vents in the dash, I opted to just completely remove the tube for that function on this side as it was completely rusted out and the idea of refitting the tube was doing my head in.

I started with some good old CAD

Converted it into metal, and tacked it in place

I didn't fully seam weld it, I just didn't see the point when it was not structural

I seam-sealed the area to seal it and used Newtech body filler to smooth over the welds and fill the holes in the top that I couldn't get to with a welder. Newtech is a fibreglass-infused filler and pretty strong, so should do well enough at keeping the air and water inside the box.

Everything got a coating of black zinc on the outside, and the inside was flooded with epoxy primer and then black zinc.

I remembered to refit the heater resistor

Someone had cut the wires for the heater resistor when removing it, so I crimped on a pair of nice new terminals, so now I can unplug the resistor if I need to

With the plenum box done, it was time to test-fit it with the heater box. Before that though, let's travel back to 2021 when I tested and refurbished the heater box

The heater box was already out of the car, so the first thing to do was see if the fan actually worked. I connected 12v and turned it on. Sure enough, it fired into life with no signs of any issues.

I then set about splitting the box by removing all the nuts and bolts around the perimeter. The whole box is moulded fibreglass.

This gave me access to the fan and heater core. I cleaned out years of detritus and pulled it apart further

The heater core looked ok with no obvious signs of leaking

The direction flap is a little less good

The flap is actually made of two layers of metal that sandwich some sort of felt material that creates the edge seal. After cleaning it wasn't too bad, just missing a bit on one edge. Not the end of the world.

I didn't want to just refit the heater core and cross my fingers, so I bodged up some hose and fittings so I could pressure test it.

I filled it with water and pumped it up to 15psi (just above the rad cap pressure)

I can't remember how long I tested it for now, but I think it was a couple of hours and it didn't drop pressure at all. It could spring a leak once it gets hot, but I hope not.

I rust treated and then black zinc painted everything inside the box

I reassembled it, with some new foam on the diverter flap (to seal it when it's closed), and it's been gathering dust since.

Well, today I pulled it all out and put it together. This is the Aus/NZ spec heater assembly

The air enters the top of the plenum via the vent in the cowl ahead of the windscreen. It then enters the plenum box and gets sent to the heater box via the C shape duct on the side (the other hole is the face-level vent outlet for the higher spec cars. This is blocked off on my car.

The air then passes through the heater core (all air does, the heater valve controls if the core is hot or not), through the fan and down to the ducts at the bottom of the box. The circular outlet would be ducted to the windscreen vents while the large cutouts are the "feet" vents. The heater selector only has three settings, Feet/Windscreen, Windscreen or Off.

There should be a heater valve attached to the box too, but mine was missing and the only spare I have I don't trust. They're very expensive heater valves shared with some classic Aussie Fords (hence the cost), so I will likely just have a manual heater tap in the engine bay to turn the heater on and off. For now, I just have the heater bypassed.

The test assembly was a success, so I contorted myself into the car and started refitting it. The plenum went in easy enough, once I turned it around so it faced the correct direction. I used a ratchet strap to hook into the plenum box just to give me something to lift it up from the floor inside the car while standing outside, as the screws to secure it go through from the outside.

The vent grille could then be refitted, with some nice new screws

Next, it was a case of fitting the heater box to the underside of the plenum. This turned out to be a bigger pain in the bum than expected. I fitted it all up, nice and easy, no issues, and then realised I couldn't fit the C-shaped duct in afterwards. So out the heater box came. I fitted the duct to the plenum first and then squeezed the heater box into place.

This took an awful lot of wiggling and jiggling to get into place, from both sides of the car. That was the easy bit though, the hard bit was getting the cable for the diverter flap into place. This is in the drivers foot well, so I squeezed myself into there and hooked it up.

Next, I connected the blower fan wires, connected the battery and hit the switch. Nothing. Hmmm. I tried again, flicking the switch a few times and suddenly it sprung to life. I guess sitting around unused for a couple of decades does that to a switch.

But both speeds work correctly now, so I'm very happy

 

I still need to buy some ducting to duct it up to the windscreen vents, but for now, it'll do.

Following that success, I felt it was time to fit something else the car hadn't seen for many years. For the first time in my ownership, the car has steering column shrouds

 

I did have to relocate the ignition switch though. Turns out it's not meant to point down; the previous owner just didn't clock it to the column properly (and disabled the steering lock in the process) when the switch was replaced. It fits perfectly now, and the steering lock even works too. Makes way more sense having the key where it is, it was always hard to see and use when it was facing down.

We're getting much closer to being able to take it for a WOF check. I need to refit the quarter window, which I'm procrastinating because I haven't done it before and I'm sure it'll suck to do, and then fit some door cards, seatbelts and the other seat.

In the meantime, I scuffed up the new sill and gave it a quick shot of paint

Theres a low spot on the rear quarter that I want to address before I put any more paint on that. Might do that this weekend.

[kws]

*Slaps boot lid and says in a very Aussie voice* Yeah Luv, it's a DE-LUXE

(this car has never had its badges on it since I've owned it)

[kws]

Amongst all the other cars that have had their time in the garage the past couple of months, the Marina hasn't been forgotten about.

This is the culmination of a couple of months worth of work on the Marina. Like usual, motivation has been hard to dredge up for this car, as I know I'm getting closer and closer to the WOF check, which is hella daunting. The "for WOF" list is getting real short now.

One of the major things I need to sort out before a WOF check was the rear half of the exhaust, which had suffered from sitting for a while and ended up with a large hole just after the hump over the axle. This blew out to be a large hole after the first time I started the engine

One problem I knew about with it, was that someone had been here before and the exhaust was all one piece welded from front to back, making it a lot harder to work with (normally broken into two sections before and after the mid-muffler

So I started by jacking the car up on one side and placing it on stands. Not my favourite angle, I had to get it pretty high to clear everything, and couldn't put stands under the axle as it needed to hang down

I hosed everything in WD40 and gave the threads a wire brush, to make my life easier

A ratcheting spanner really helped on the mid-hanger

Once the hanger was disconnected, since the rear hanger hasn't been fitted in a long time (since I welded the rear valance) the rear of the exhaust just dropped down

The front manifold joint was easier to get off than I thought, I just had to be patient and keep the threads lubricated and they came off without any damage. Since that was the only other thing holding the exhaust in place (there is meant to be a hanger up the front too, but that's long gone), the whole exhaust was now wrangled from its home. Much swearing ensued.

I picked this New Old Stock rear muffler section up off TradeMe a while ago. Compared to the old rear section, this has the correct extra muffler, and is longer

Ideally, you'd just undo the clamp on the outlet of the mid muffler and swap the pipes over, but some muppet had welded the pipe into the muffler, on both sides >_<

The plan was to cut the pipe close to the muffler and then clamp the new pipe onto it, but there wasn't enough space for a clamp before the pipe started to turn up for the hump over the axle.

So I cut the pipe further along, planning to weld the new pipe to the old one

I got it all nicely lined up, tacked it in place

And then a quick trial fit showed that as hard as it was to get the old pipe out, getting the new one in and above the axle, all one piece, was impossible, no matter how much a swore at it.

So I cut the welds and started again.

Look, I know it's not pretty, nor does it work perfectly, but it's only temporary and will be sorted later. The long term plan is a new slightly bigger exhaust to allow the engine to breathe better when the twin carbs are fitted...

Using some scrap steel and my rollers, I made a tube that could act as a sleeve over the pipes

In hindsight, I shouldn't have welded the sleeve shut

On the plus side, it did allow me to get the exhaust back into the car

The muffler fits nicely, almost like it's meant to be there (it is). I bent up some scrap steel to make a bracket for the rear hanger strap to bolt to (the previous pipe had it welded to the pipe)

The length is legit too, didn't even realise that it was short before. It barely cleared the valance

Some exhaust paste and a couple of clamps had everything snugged up into place

After starting the car and running it to get some heat in the exhaust, yes, the sleeve leaks a little at the bottom, but it's better than a gaping hole in the pipe that it had before. I'll call it a sacrificial failure for the WOF man; that and the handbrake which could do with some more adjustment.

Next on my whiteboard of things to do, was to make some door cards so that I wasn't just left with big gaping holes in the doors and the potential for sharp bits. I also wanted to make some A-pillar covers, and remake the parcel shelf trim too since that was broken.

Before getting too carried away with my new jigsaw, I started by replacing the exterior handles with a pair of new old stock ones I picked up a while ago.

Since the barrel and mech on the back of the new handles were different, I swapped these from the old handles.

It was pretty easy to do, remove the C clips, remove the single screw, remove the mechanism and barrels, swap them over, tension the spring and then refit the screw and C clips. Done. One thing I did that was a little more complex was rekeying the new barrels to match my old keys, as the new barrels were in much better condition.

I was slightly amused by the passengers handle, which had a very DIY fix at home point

Yes, that's a big old rusty nail. In its defence, it worked fine when removed! I did have to pull the nail out to remove the handle though, it wouldn't fit through the hole in the door otherwise.

The new handles look and feel lush. I ordered some new gaskets to go behind them too

Now, back to that jigsaw. I will admit, I have zero experience working with wood, and don't particularly enjoy it, but here we are.

I had one home-made door card from the previous owner, the other door never had a door card on it. This door card was manky AF, with mould on the back of it. It was useful for one thing only, a template.

I used MDF as that's what was available locally, in the right thickness, and is easy to work with. I know, if it gets wet it'll soak it up like nothing else, but the plan is to seal the back of it somehow (paint?) and then the front will be trimmed in vinyl. All holes in the doors are sealed with tape.

Using the template door card, I traced around it and all the various holes I needed to make and then cut it out

A couple of trims and test fits had it fitting reasonably well

I haven't quite decided what the final fixing method will be, but in the meantime just to secure them I reused the screw holes the previous owner had made in the door shell

The handle looks pretty grotty (both do) but that's after a thorough cleaning with Simple Green, so I might have to dye it.

With one door card working well, I used that to make a copy for the other side. The RH side has not had a door card since I've had the car, and probably a few years before that too.

The next job for the whizzy blade of missing fingers, was to chop some of the offcuts up and make covers for the base of the A pillars, to close them in. I started with some CAD on the back of a cereal box, clamped two pieces of wood together with a couple of screws through where the clips go, and cut them out

The first one went in easily, with minimal trimming

If it seemed too easy, it's because it was. Of course they aren't the same on both sides, I forgot about the darn bonnet release bracket

It was right in the middle of my new trim. So out came the CAD template, and using some scissors and a screwdriver, I located it and cut a slot to slip over the bracket

I'll give the pillar a squirt of black paint when I take this off again later to trim it in vinyl, but for now, the plan worked perfectly

It's been a long time since the car has looked this complete

The final part I needed was the parcel shelf trim. This piece came with the car, but in two of three pieces, so it needed some creative work in order to make a good template. This is far from perfect, The RH side needs more trimming, but for now it's there, and tidies it up a bit

All of these parts will eventually be trimmed in some tan vinyl I have ready to go, but that will happen once the car is on the road and becomes a rolling project.

The last couple of things to do before the WOF are to sound-deaden the floors so I can fit this

A brand new custom-made fitted carpet set. That will allow me to finally bolt both front seats in once and for all, and fit the new seatbelts I had made.

Once that's done, and I fix a couple of small things like the coolant leak it's developed, I'll cross everything and take it in for a WOF. A terrifying prospect after all the years it's been off the road (30 years next year, over half its life) and the work I've done to get to this point.

[kws]

I feel like a WOF inspector wouldn't look kindly upon a car like the Marina failing to start, so I needed to address that.

The Marina has always been a real pig to start, right from the first start (back in 2021, woah).

 

I would need a 100% fully charged battery (on charge at least overnight), and often still needed a boost from a jump pack, and then it would turn just fast enough to start. This was a huge problem when I still ran the original mechanical fuel pump as I could not crank it long and fast enough to draw fuel and still start. The electric fuel pump helps a lot, but nothing will make it cold start when it cranks that slowly.

I bought a brand-new battery for it and still had issues. I thought the battery might be faulty, so had it replaced under warranty, still had issues. I messed with grounds, adding new ones, grounding it with jumper leads, and it helped a little but still cranked slow.

One thing I noticed in my efforts was that the main lead from the solenoid to the starter would get hot, indicating a huge amount of current draw. I tried shorting the solenoid terminals together, effectively bypassing it and connecting the starter directly to the battery, and it still turned slowly (all the while welding my screwdriver to the terminals).

So the solenoid was fine, it had to be the starter.

I had a brainwave the other day, in my spares, didn't I remember seeing a spare starter?

Yes, yes I did. It looks a bit worse for wear, but other than oiling the bearings on each end and cleaning the Bendix so it returned with a snap, it worked flawlessly when given 12V. It's a 4.5" (bolt centres) Lucas M35AK (Aus local content copy).

I reconnected the battery, which had been on charge for a couple of days, and this is how it cranked

 

That was pretty good for it, often it doesn't speed up after a few turns. If I kept trying it might have started, but chances are the voltage would drop and the starter would slow down again.

Removing the starter on the Marina was pretty easy. Two bolts hold it in, both accessible from up top

I removed the power feed from the back, removed the two bolts holding it to the bellhousing and then realised I couldn't get the motor out. I had to also remove the bolt securing the strap for the dipstick tube

I cleaned up the mounting face on the replacement starter, and the face on the bellhousing too, as this is where the starter grounds (or did, it should ground through the extra braided ground strap I added to the top bolt).

I slipped the replacement starter in and bolted it into place.

It could've done with a coat of black paint, but oh well, it joins the rest of the car in also needing paint.

I reconnected the battery, and with no other changes at all, this is how it cranked

 

It cranks like a new car! Well, an old new car anyway. The Bendix kicks in and out nicely and it cranks so fast. It would've started right then, but with 2+ year old fuel in the tank, that's lost all its octane, it's pretty grumpy to start at the moment, but despite having to crank it a few times to get it to start, the starter never slowed down. It's also interesting to note that the feed wires are no longer noticeably warm to the touch after cranking.

Draining the tank and giving it a belly of fresh fuel should make a big difference to how reliably it starts now. Maybe, just maybe, we might be at a point where it'll start each time when cold.

I was meant to be sound deadening the car ready for the new carpet to go down, but having come down with the man flu, replacing the starter was all I could muster.

As a laugh, here is the old starter when being given 12V. The beeping is from the "1200amp" fully charged jump pack warning it's drawing too much current, and the squealing noise is probably from failing bearings in the starter. The starter is noticeably harder to spin by hand than the replacement.

 

[kws]

I'm still slowly ticking off jobs on the whiteboard, and although this wasn't a "pre-wof" job, I wanted to get it done before a couple of other jobs in the queue that were.

Back in Feb I reinstalled the refurbished and tested heater box, but I never actually connected the heater core to anything, presuming that I would do it later. I'll tell you now, I wish I had at least fit a pair of 90 degree hoses off the heater core when it was out and easy to access, instead of doing it in the car.

The plan here to was get the heater connected and working, before installing the carpet into the car, just in case it did decide to spring a leak, it won't damage the carpet.

A while ago I ordered 1 meter of 51mm flexible ducting from Aliexpress to run from the outlets on the bottom of the heater box and up to the windscreen vents, this will allow me to direct air to the windscreen to demist it. This fits inside the plastic 90 degree joints on the bottom of the heater box, and on the outside of the dash vents, as per factory.

I installed the vents into the dash first. These were a real pain in the backside to get into place, and work out which one went on which side.

I got there in the end, and then cut some ducting and slipped it into place, using duct tape to seal and secure it.

The driver's side is a bit less fun as there is less space to work and more wires in the way

Unfortunately, after all the faffing about getting the dash vent in place, for whatever reason, it turns out the vent doesn't clear the speedo on the three-dial cluster and no amount of forcing it was going to allow them to share the limited space available.

I don't know if this is because the car originally had two dials and the vent is different, or if I was doing something wrong, but in the end, I removed the dash vent, and zip-tied the duct to the dash structure. This still blows out through the slot in the dash, it's just not as directed as it should be. It's better than nothing.

Speaking of the dash cluster, once I refitted it, and the steering wheel (since I removed it to give me more space to work under the dash), I refitted the steering wheel center pad for the first time since I got the car. This wheel is only until the car is on the road and then I have a nice aftermarket one to fit, but it's a milestone nonetheless.

Who doesn't love a good plughole of despair?

Testing the vents with the functional two-speed blower showed ample air being blown in the general direction of the windscreen.

The next step was to actually hook up the heater core to the cooling circuit.

This required me to obtain a couple (2-3) meters of 1/2" heater hose, and a pair of "Z" hoses (universal hoses that have a 90 and a 45 degree bend with a couple of straights, for cutting to fit). I also obtained a brass joiner, and brass "ball" valve.

The Z hoses are to give me a pair of 90 degree fittings out of the heater core. I'm not running the standard heater valve that mounts to the box and is controlled with the cable, as I don't have a good one, and replacements are expensive. I don't care much for needing to change the temp often, so I chose to regulate the temperature with a ball valve in the hose instead. Winter mode, and summer mode.

Because I'm not running the standard heater valve, I needed the hoses to clear the brackets immediately in front of the heater core outlets and then exit through the hole in the firewall. A normal hose would kink when trying to bend that sharp, so it had to be a 90 degree moulded bend.

The upper heater core pipe is above the one visible, completely blocked by the bracket

Z hoses are perfect for this sort of thing. I found these Aeroflow silicone ones locally at a reasonable price

I cut the 45 off and shortened the 90 so it would fit

I then proceeded to fight with the hose for the next half hour or so, trying to get it fully onto the upper pipe. The space is limited, and the visibility is zero, so it was all done by feel, and I sure felt the sharp bits digging into me. I was very close to just giving up on fitting the heater, it was fighting me that hard, but eventually, with both hands up under the dash, my head on the trans tunnel and my legs hanging out of the car, it finally slipped into place.

The next fight was the hose clamp, getting that into place and tightening it, but we won't go into that.

The lower hose was much easier to fit, it more or less pressed into place and the clamp went on without much fuss.

Now that I had both stubs of hose poking through the firewall, I sprayed some silicone spray on the rubber grommet and pressed it onto the hoses and into the firewall.

I had previously looped the heater hoses at the engine, as the previous owners had too (albeit their loop was a lot longer and had a joiner in the middle of it)

A bit of research showed that the top heater hose was the one that went to the standard heater valve, so that's the one I fit the tap into

I had also seen in photos that the hoses are usually secured to the inner wing by a pair of P clamps. I located a hole that would've been where a self-tapper went into

I hate using coarse threaded screws to secure things, so drilled it out a bit further

After coating it with some Rover Zircon Blue paint, I whacked an M5 Rivnut into it

This allowed me to use a pair of P clamps to secure the hoses in place, keeping them tucked up nicely

I then quickly juggled the old loop hose, spilled some coolant, and connected the two heater hoses

It's quite a nice tidy setup, and I'm quite proud of how well it has worked out. When the red lever on the valve is in line with the hose, the coolant is flowing in that direction, turn it 90 degrees and it's closed.

While I was there, spilling coolant on the floor, I also removed and swapped the coolant temp sender. I had never seen the coolant temp gauge rise, even when the coolant was warm enough to cycle the fan, so I wanted to see if replacing the sender helped.

I believe the old one was original and is marked Smiths. The terminal was wiggly, which I'm not sure if it's meant to be

The replacement went straight in without issue.

Before firing the car up to take it outside and bleed the cooling system, I quickly filled the hole in the floor for the shifter.

Originally this would've had a lump of foam around the shifter shaft and covered by a nice "leather" shift boot with a metal ring

I have all these parts, but the boot is so manky you wouldn't want to touch it, let alone install it in the car. I plan to remake the shifter and handbrake boots in the same tan vinyl as the door cards, but in the meantime I just wanted to block it off so the WOF man wouldn't be looking at the road during its test.

I bought a MK2 boot from a nice fellow Marina owner, and figured I could make it work. This is the less attractive once-piece rubber deal, which was also used on some UK MK1 cars

I removed the surround plate from the floor and inserted the rubber boot. It turned out that almost all the holes in the boot lined up with the surround, so it screwed in nice and easy

It's not perfect, I suspect cars that are meant to have this boot will have a larger opening in the surround plate, that locates in a ridge on the bottom of the boot, but mine has a smaller opening to support the metal ring of the standard boot. It still works though, and seals the cabin from the outside world.

And with that done, I topped the radiator and expansion tank up and started the car. It really needs some nice new fuel, the old stale fuel makes it really hard to start, but the replacement starter is bliss to use and the engine turns over quickly every time.

Eventually the engine fired up on all cylinders and settled into a nice fast idle. I jumped in, popped it into gear and headed for the garage exit. I didn't quite make it the first time before the cold engine bogged down, so I rolled back and gave it another go, with more revs, and a bit of a run-up to get up my steep driveway. Apparently, this also meant that I did a nice unintentional single-wheel burnout in the garage  Just can't harness all that OHC power!

But make it we did. Once outside I got the hose out and gave the engine bay a quick hose down to wash out all the coolant I had spilled (and all the dirt and muck from years of sitting).

This little burst of "cleaning" ended up in the Marina finally seeing the first "wash" of my ownership. Yes, it was only a hose down, but already it's a lot cleaner. It's crazy how much dirt was washed away, after 20+ years of sitting and 3 years of me cutting, grinding, and sanding.

It's no show car, or even clean, by any stretch of the imagination, but at least I can touch the panels without getting filthy now.

Even with me blasting the car with the hose, the interior was reasonably leak-free, except where expected. The front windscreen leaks like a sieve (expected, the seal is wrong and doesn't fit), the rear windscreen has a tiny leak in the bottom corner, and the front quarterlight windows leaked a little too. Once the windscreen seal is replaced, the others should be fine to handle a little rain if I happen to get caught out.

The whole time it was outside the engine was just happily ticking over at idle, with the fan cutting in and out as needed. On a huge plus, the temp gauge now works.

So what of the heater? well, I can confirm it blows nice warm air around the car, and if you leave it idling with the heater on, the blower on fast, and with the windows up, it becomes uncomfortably warm inside the car. Great success.

As far as I can see, there are no coolant leaks and everything is doing as it should.

Next, sound deadening and then carpet.

[kws]

Like usual, it's been a while between updates, but progress has been progressing. Finally, we're reassembling the interior once and for all.

I had been asked about and pondered for a while, on whether I would be sticking some sound deadener under the carpet on the new floor. I wasn't going to, but since I was here I grabbed some cheap no-name butyl stuff and got to work.

The main places were the two footwells in the front

The front of the tunnel under the heater

The front wheel wells (where stones would hit)

and finally, the rear footwells

I'm not certain it will do anything, but even if it can stop the floors drumming, that's a win. It was reasonably easy to apply, although I did do it in winter so had to use a heat gun to get it and the metal warm so it would stick properly. I also grabbed a small rubber roller from the hardware store to roll it out.

With my newly applied sound deadening in place, it was time to lay down some carpet underlay.

I also stuck some underlay over the trans tunnel, hopefully to keep some noise and heat down.

Now, it was the less fun part. The carpet.

The very first part to go in was the rear bulkhead. This has to go in before the rest of the carpet since the main carpet will butt up against it. Thankfully, this was one section of carpet that still existed, even if it was some manky old faded house carpet. I carefully removed them and used them as a template on my new carpet.

A little bit of jiggery pokery had the first bits of nice new carpet stuck in place

Next, I did a quick test fit of the fitted carpet set. This was made by a local supplier. They had two options, UK or AU spec, but couldn't actually tell me what the difference was. I had hoped it was because the AU spec cars, like mine, have the seat rails welded to the floor, whilst the UK ones don't.

The other option was that the later 025 AU spec cars have a bigger trans tunnel, which is more likely the difference, but they couldn't even confirm if that was the reason for the difference.

In the end, I decided to take a punt on the UK spec carpet set as my trans tunnel is the small UK size. The test fit was promising.

But before I got to work fitting it properly, I wanted to refit the rear seat as I'll need to climb into the car to do so, and would rather not be climbing on the new carpet.

Since I was making the interior nice, I couldn't just refit the dirty old rear seat. I've never cleaned it in the years I have had it, and who knows how many decades it's been. With the help and advice of my wife, a bucket of hot water, rags, some Jif cream cleaner and a spinny brush on my drill, here's a quick half and half of the base

This was quite satisfying as the vinyl was cleaning up really well. Its not even the same colour as before.

Once it was clean, for the first time since I've owned the car I actually screwed the seat in place. The base is a bit of a pain.

At the back there are two tabs which get screwed to the body

And the front has these annoying hooks that go through holes in the body, and then get secured with nuts

After a lot of stuffing around, I found the easiest way to fit the base was to get the hooks in place and loosely secured, by tipping the base forward. Then you tip the base down, and secure the screws at the rear.

The back of the seat needed a clean next. This had some old contact adhesive running down the side

Which after a lot of work, got a lot better. Not perfect, but its usable

Once again, its a completely different colour to what it was

There is quite a bit of sun damage to the top of the rear seat, and the vinyl just shatters when you so much as look at it, so I had to take a lot of care there. I need to find an OG tartan woollen blanket to drape over it like my old Marina.

I have no idea why, but I have no photo of the rear seat completely installed, but the backrest went in easy enough. It hooks over tabs on the body, and then two screws through tabs on the bottom hold it in place.

Now it was finally time to fit the carpet kit. I didn't particular enjoy this as it took something like 14 hours to do, and was not as straightforward as I had hoped for a "kit".

The first problem was that there were zero holes in the carpet, which was a pain. I thought they would've pre-cut the shifter hole at least, and maybe the handbrake, but no. So to help get everything centered and aligned, I used some brown paper to make a template, and locate everything using the center bolt for the seatbelt receiver

Once I was happy with the template, I transferred it to the carpet

Then i started the scary bit, cutting the brand new carpet

With the handbrake and bolt aligned, I made the first big I cut for the seat rail. I knew I would need to cut these four slots in the carpet, but it didn't make it any less scary

A second seat rail appears

I did the same on the other side, and using the same high temp ADOS glue as I used on the TVR, I carefully glued the carpet down. I didn't go too nuts, mainly sticking it down around the edges, not slathering the whole thing in glue.

After that, it was time for the front half of the carpet. This was more of the same; cut a hole for the shifter, glue on the pieces that go on the wheel arches and in the footwell, and then slip the front section of the carpet into place.

Oh and surprise, its a TC center console! I bought this on Facebook ages ago, the seller took my money then promptly ghosted me, after months, I thought it was lost forever but it turns out he was known to some absolute legends on a local forum, who paid him a visit and recovered the console for me. I know the car wasn't fitted with a console originally, but it wasn't fitted with carpet either, so lets just call it an upspec.

The final step to fitting the car was to glue the front down, trim the door jams, and then fit the plates that clamp down the carpet

The heal pad is a nice touch

The biggest issue with the fitment, that you cant easily fix, is the wrinkles around the trans tunnel. This is caused by the cut and stitched sections designed to help it fit the tunnel, but its almost like my tunnel was too small and the inserts were sitting in the wrong place. No amount of tweaking was going to make it fit any better.

In the end though, its 100x better than what was there before (nothing) or the house carpet it previously had, which rotted out from sitting.

Its not perfect, but it's good enough for my Marina.

What good is new carpet, if you don't have any front seats?

I've had both seats in at some point, but for ages the passengers seat has been out of the car, and the drivers seat was only partly bolted in. Now we're going to fit them both, properly.

First things first though, seatbelts. The car came with both old crusty belts,

I took them out a couple of years ago, and had them rewebbed by an awesome outfit, Autosafe, who rewebbed the belts with new black webbing, cleaned up the hardware, and mixed and matched bits with some spare belts I supplied to make the best pair.

Everything is properly tagged and certified, and comes with the relevant paperwork

I had also sourced a pair of new old stock plastic covers for the top bolt, which has the integrated belt park. These came from the UK with the help of an awesome fellow Marina enthusiast

The car came with one cover, along with a single bolt cap (missing from the new ones)

I had considered the usual option of converting to retractable belts, but there is something about static belts in old cars for me. Its a novelty, even if its not practical.

I gave the bolts and washers a quick cleanup and then fitted the belts

And it clips nicely into the buckle

With the belts installed and working nicely, it was time to clean the front seats and bolt them in.

The drivers seat got the treatment first. This is in pretty average shape, with a couple of tears in the base which have been stitched together with some red twine.

Before cleaning it I flipped the seat upside down and greased all the moving parts

They're a very simple rail, but with the added complexity of the tilting mech for getting passengers in the back seat. This little lever is what releases the backrest

The lever releases a big hook on each side

The lever acts directly on it, with a rod going to the opposite side

Everything got some grease on it, and is moving nicely. The actual sliding adjustment is very simple, with two independent rails, a U shaped release lever and two pins.

You lift the bar at the front, it disengages the pins and the seat can slide. You release the bar, and it springs back into place, slotting into one of the notches. All of this got greased and then the seat was flipped over for cleaning.

Cleaning up well

I'm very impressed how well these seats clean up

Its like two different seats

So the base got the same treatment too. The decades old tape residue doesn't seem to want to budge, but otherwise its looking good

After a coating of 303 Aerospace Protectant (all seats got this treatment, it's meant to treat and protect vinyl), it was bolted into the car

Moving onto the passengers seat, it had obvious had a life at some point. The seat release bar/adjustment was very bent on one side. The left side pin wasn't even engaging with the rail

Some careful percussive persuation, and it was all as it should be again

This one wasn't as drastic as the drivers seat, but still changed colour quite well

Which could only mean one thing, the final seat got bolted into place

I kicked off my shoes, hopped in, belted myself in, and spent some time making vroom vroom noises.

We're very close to WOF time now. It'll be a couple of weeks, so I'll have to book a day off work, book it in for a WOF and then I'll have a deadline for the car to be ready. I still need to do an oil change, drain the stale fuel out of the tank, fit the new wiper blades and then see why the engine top end is rattling, but thats a days work at most.

 

[kws]

It's happening, the Marina is finally booked in for a WOF. It's only a couple of years late, but better than never.

I started the day with a checklist of things that needed to be done before the WOF booking in a couple of weeks. The first was to drain the fuel tank of the 2+ year old fuel because it stinks, and the car is hard to start.

With 18L of new high-octane fuel in hand, I used the drain plug on the bottom of the tank to get as much out as I could. I underestimated how much was in there, so couldn't completely drain it, but the fuel coming out was definitely yellow, and stank of varnish. The new fuel can mix with whatever was left in there, it'll be fine.

Moving forward I wanted to drain the filter, pump and lines too. I unhooked the feed hose to the carb and stuck it into a bottle. I disconnected the coil and fuel pump, and turned the ignition on. Using the handy dandy connection under the bonnet, I ran the fuel pump and pumped the fuel into the bottle.

This is what came out

It's much darker than what was coming out of the tank, and stank. I ran the pump until nice clean fuel came through.

I tossed up wether to drain the fuel bowl on the carb or not, but in the end I removed the three screws and removed the top

And I'm glad I did. The old fuel was rancid, but there was also an amount of sediment in the bottom of the bowl

I used a hand vac pump to suck the old fuel out and used a rag and carb cleaner to clean the bottom of the bowl.

Once I reassembled the bowl and used the pump to fill it with fresh new fuel, I wanted to check the spark plugs. I haven't checked them since I fitted them a few years ago, and with all the cold running, hard starts and bad fuel, I expected them to be pretty grotty.

Surprisingly they weren't that bad. One was a bit darker than the rest, all had some degree of black carbon, but none were really fouled.

I gave them all a quick clean with a wire brush and brake cleaner and refitted them.

Since I was there anyway, I thought it was wise to have a look at the points. It's a good thing I did, as forget the points, this is what I found instead

Yup, the center carbon post is completely missing and the spring has been wearing the center of the rotor down

After some investigating I found the little carbon post down in the bottom of the distributor, under the points, sitting with the mechanical advance.

I didn't want to leave it there just in case it jammed the advance, so using a small pick and a pair of offset needlenose pliers, I managed to fish it out

I have no idea how long it's been like that, but it wouldn't have been doing anyone any favours. Thankfully I'm a hoarder, so I had a replacement cap and rotor in my stock.

I quickly swapped them over and after a quick sand of the points we were good to go again.

With the ignition back together, I tried to start the car, and despite the fuel being fresh, the ignition working, and the choke pulled out to its stop, it wasn't having any of it.

It was then that it occurred to me to check the choke

Sure enough, with the choke pulled as far as it could be, the jet under the carb wasn't pulling down like it's meant to (to let more fuel into the carb).

With some gentle prying it slowly started to move

At this point I stripped the top off the carb too, so I could access the top of the jet. Whilst there, I also found the same excellent piston lift pin that I used to tune the Mini

I thoroughly cleaned the jet and gave it a little WD40 to help it move freely, and now the choke operates as it should. It should've been obvious that the lever in the cabin was only pulling out about half way, but it's been a long time since I've had another manual choke.

I cleaned up the piston and needle, and refit with new dashpot oil

Now the car started, easily. It's amazing what a functioning choke can do!

With the car starting and running well, the next thing to do was an oil change. Of course I had to warm the engine up for this, as I did the last oil change cold and 20W60 flows real slow when it's cold.

A quick trip to Mexico for a closed road test was needed

 

It runs and drives really well. The brakes are terrifying, but more use seems to be helping, although a remote booster might be on the cards at some point. A loud rattle present on decel turned out to the hood prop rattling in its bracket and on the air cleaner housing. Easy fix.

It was still flat and gutless though. I had wanted to check the timing for a while, but it's a pain in the bum to do on these, plus I needed the car at full operating temp, which I didn't often do.

A normal car would have the timing marks easy to access and see, usually by just pointing the timing light down into the engine bay. Not the Marina though.

The timing marks are on the bottom of the engine, accessible through the front of the lower bash plate

I painted the timing pointers yellow and the crank mark white ages ago, so it was easier to see. The four pointers are TDC, 5, 10 and 15 degrees Before TDC.

The timing when I started was so far off the scale I think it was actually after TDC, not before. The spec is 10 degrees BTDC. I slackened off the distributor clamp and gave it a tweak. The revs picked up and the idle smoothed out. It didn't take much, but we were sitting bang on 10deg now. I adjusted the idle back down to 500rpm, and tweaked it a little further.

I'm running approx 13-14deg timing now, because I'm a spicy lad that wants more power from his 70s Sports Car, and I'm running high octane fuel.

With the timing where it should be, I wanted to see what the mixture was doing. What better way than to use the lift pin on the carb that I just found? I lifted the piston and the revs rose significantly, indicating a very rich mixture.

Using my handy little SU jet adjustment tool I tweaked the adjustment nut until the revs only slightly rose when the piston was lifted. Perfect.

With that, it was time for another trip to Mexico and hot damn, the car boogies now! Previously it felt really flat, didn't want to rev and couldn't get out of its own way. Now it wants to rev, and properly hoofs it down the road (for a Marina anyway). Great success, can't wait for it to be legal and I can see how it really goes.

Another plus is that although noisy in a couple of gears, like all Marinas (it reminds you it's doing actual mechanical things), the gearbox shifts lovely, even at high RPM and on downshifts.

Back home, I put the car on stands and drained the oil. It wasn't that dirty, but it was quite thin and although stuff all Ks, it's had a lot of cold starts, and it's been in there over 3 years. Oops.

I decided not to change the filter this time, since it's expensive, rare, and it's not really done that much work. I'll change it once the cars been on the road for a bit. 3L of Penrite 20W60 went in the top and didn't come out again. Yay

Another quick fix for the WOF was to replace the wiper blades. The old ones are proper plastic, so didn't really do the job of clearing the glass. I grabbed some Tex stainless wipers with the bayonet fitting

They fit well and look good. I gave the arms a quick scrub with some scotch pad and they look a lot better

Sadly I can't test them properly as it appears the Lucas washer pump I fitted in Jan has seized and failed. Lame. I have a replacement on order which will hopefully be here this week. Lucas ain't what it used to be, and it wasn't that good to start with.

The last thing I needed to do was to clean all the windows and then fit a high stop light to the rear. I didn't legally need one, but I hate how invisible classics are these days. The brake lights are small, dim and low down on the car, so hopefully this LED unit shining into the eyes of people behind me might give me a chance of them actually seeing me.

I picked up this Hella Matrix unit and really like how it kinda looks period correct but uses modern LEDs.

Fitting it was less than fun. Trying to line up the grey decal on the glass and get it centered and straight, took a lot of tries before I just gave up and sent it.

I flipped the pads on my clamp and used it as a one-man brake light tester

It works well

Standing behind the car seems to be about the height for it to have the hot spot right in your eyes. Hopefully that's about standard modern car driver eyeline too.

With the help of my wife, we tested the rest of the lights, which did initially show up a dodgy connection on the RH brake light bulb, but a quick reseating of the bulb fixed that.

Thats it. There is only one thing left on the board.

I guess the next update will be after the inspection, where I know it'll fail. What on, well that's yet to be seen, but having been off the road for almost 30 years, it could be anything.

It's been good to finally be doing mechanical work again. I was sick of bodywork.

[kws]

I couldn't help myself, I wanted to know what the cold start was like now with a working choke, correct mixture and advanced ignition timing.

 

It's very good. It has never started like that when cold. Usually it's ages of cranking, the starter kicking out a few times when the engine tries to fire, a couple of backfires out the intake and then eventually it would rumble into life, begrudgingly. Once it was running it wouldn't take any throttle until it had warmed up a bit, and the choke was a balancing act (particularly since it wasn't working properly).

The engine is running so well I need to completely reassess how I use the choke. Apparently this time I had it out for too long and it started to misfire, but pushing it right in, the engine dropped to idle and ran smoothly, like it was already warmed up, and that was less than a minute after starting. I'm very impressed, for a 50+ year old car to start and run like that.

[kws]

The time finally came. After many years and countless hours of work, it was WOF time.

Before the WOF, the first thing to do was to replace the failed Lucas washer pump. This was completely dead, even when powering it straight from the battery with a test probe. It turns out I bought the pump about 3 years ago, and only fitted it in Jan this year, so way out of warranty now.

I sourced a cheap unbranded replacement locally. This didn't even get the honour of arriving in a box, just some bubblewrap with a part number sticker on it.

Other than the label, they're almost identical. No surprise. Both from China no doubt.
I quickly screwed it into place and rejoined the hoses

Finally everything was working again. The new Tex wipers were a bit disappointing, with a very average effort clearing the screen, but hopefully they just need some time to bed in.

I've been doing some closed road testing recently to make sure everything is working well, and trying to bed the brakes in a bit too. It turns out, I had done almost exactly 10km since getting the car.

As bought, back in 2021 The day before the WOF, 2024

In my travels I did notice two things. First, the ignition timing was just a smidge too spicy, and there was some pinging noticeable at lower RPM. Not good, so I wound the timing back from nearly 15deg to 10deg, and that seems to have fixed it. It's a little less keen to boogie now, but it's still 100x better than it was before I set the timing the other day. Plenty of time to play with that once we're on the road.

Secondly, the front bash plate that protects the alloy sump from getting its face smashed in, was scraping a lot coming in and out of my driveway, and I noticed how close it was to the road when cornering in the video the other day.

So I wanted to raise it just a smidge in the front. Sure, it looks cool as heck that low, but I don't want to smash the poor thing to bits.

After MUCH fiddling with the torsion bar trim adjusters, I finally got it to settle at about 10mm higher than it was. It's lost the forward rake it had, and the sill is about level now, but it brings the bash plate just high enough that it's not hitting things now.

Finally, just to be cocky, I jacked the rear of the car up and fixed the exhaust leak I had at the join above the rear axle (with lots of paste), and adjusted the handbrake just a little bit tighter. Maybe, just maybe, it'll pass with no issues now.

The next day I got up bright and early, played musical cars and fired the Marina to life. It was pretty cold this morning, so the engine was a little grumpier than in my previous testing, but quickly sorted itself out.

I backed out, closed the garage, got to the end of my street and turned the corner.Right into the path of a police car full of officers. To say I puckered a little is an understatement, but they didn't even give it a second look and I spent the rest of the drive to the workshop laughing my arse off at the odds of that happening.

I arrived, parked up and then the waiting began. For the first time in almost 30 years, the old girl was waiting for a checkup.

After a bit of a wait, the tech hopped in, fired the old girl up and took it for a quick road test. Here we go!

Seeing him coming back up the road really hit me, it's such a cool looking car to see driving around. I hope when I drive it around, I can brighten the day of people on the street too.

He rolls it onto the hoist and proceeds with the checks.

TOOT, yes the horn goes. All the lights worked (a miracle), and the wipers and washer worked. They have a good look around with a torch, checking all the nooks and crannies, near hinges, down pillars, inside the boot, everywhere (I'm not sure they're usually this thorough on my other cars...)

The hoist goes up, and my heart is in my throat

As it was in the air and being checked over, a young couple picking their car up walked by and the girl commented to her partner "oh wow, look at this beauty!" pointing at the Marina.

The tech is poking around under the car, checking all the usual things. Bearings, suspension, steering, etc. He also did some poking with a big prybar.

After a long wait, I got the news. It's not going to pass.

Long story short, he stopped the inspection and basically changed it to a pre-WOF check instead of an actual WOF check. A variation of my worst case scenario had happened, he wasn't happy with the underside.

To clarify though, he made no mention at all of the work I had done. The issue he had was the old shitty lumpy tar-based underseal all over everything. In places where it was chipping off, there was surface rust, and for the rest he wasn't happy with what it could be hiding (nothing, I've seen the other side of the metal, but he can't check that).

The stuff covers literally everything under there

Very old photos from when I got the car

There were also some other stupid things that I'm beating myself up over for not sorting, like the chassis rails having some rust flakes still in them, visible through the drain holes (from the old floor and rear panel rusting). Despite trying to clean them up at the time, I didn't do a good enough job.

The other spot he was concerned with was inside the boot, near the hinges

It's all surface rust and will clean up easily, but I guess since it's near the hinges he wasn't happy with it being like that.

There were some mechanical issues, but he wasn't really keen on going into detail on them after showing me the bodywork issues he wasn't happy with. He mentioned the RH Rear wheel bearing was noisy and there may be play in the rack.

Overall, I was devastated. It really crushed me, after all that work, for it to fail on bloody bodywork issues. The only positive of it was that it wasn't the work I did (as I feared), it was the work I didn't.

I have always hated the underseal, it's on everything, it's really clumpy, and it's uneven and chipping off. It covers all bolts, nuts, threads etc under there too, which sucks to work around. If you try to lubricate anything with CRC, it melts the tar and turns to a hell of a mess. I should've really removed it all when I did the floors.

Because he decided to not proceed with the WOF, it also means he hasn't entered it into the system as a fail, and I don't have to fix it within the defined 28 day timeframe. I'm thankful for that, because it'd be a pain if the workshops were busy.

So, where to from here? Well, he explained what he wants to see; he wants all the underseal gone, and any surface rust and any uncovered issues to be sorted. He suggested having it sandblasted, treated and then undercoated again in something modern.

I've been mulling it over and looking at my options, and I think from here the best option is indeed to have it sandblasted, to remove the underseal I hate anyway, and then have it zinc coated by the blaster. Once I get the car back, I will then paint the underside in a hard wearing single stage paint (yellow, of course). I'm not really interested in undersealing it again, I'd rather have it painted (unless anyone can convince me otherwise? This isn't a daily and won't often see rain).

I have some calls to make tomorrow, to see what options are available to me, and the costs. I'm not made of money, but this car has cost me less than any of my other projects (monetarily, it's a complete time hog though) so it deserves to have some money spent on doing it properly.

We ain't done yet, there is no option other than pushing forward.

[kws]

After the bitter disappointment of the failed "WOF" I've been non-stop working on plans to move forward, and yesterday I put the first of these into action.

The main thing that stopped the WOF in its tracks was the underside of the car. I was told the underseal had to be completely stripped off, and all surface rust had to be removed. The easiest solution was to "go talk to such and such" and have it sandblasted, treated and recoated.

Now, if this was for a re-registration inspection for a car that was de-registered (like the Mini was), this is a request that can be made if the inspector has a reason to suspect the underseal is hiding something like rust. Ironically, the underside of the Mini was coated in the exact same underseal, and flew through re-rego check.

For a standard WOF, for a car that doesn't need re-rego (the Marina rego has been on hold for almost 30 years, thanks previous owner!), this request is way out of the scope of an inspection unless the whole car looks like its been under the sea (which happens occasionally).

The Marina is neither de-reg, nor does it look like it's been under the sea.

I didn't call the guy the WOF man was recommending, but instead spoke to a very helpful chap at a local sandblasters, who is known for doing work like this on cars that are rusty underneath.

His opinion was that it was best not to touch the underseal and to leave it as is as it was still doing its job. Removing the whole lot would be a huge amount of work, since the tar-based stuff is meant to absorb impact and deflect things like stones, sandblasting wouldn't really strip it. He couldn't think of any reason someone would want to strip the whole lot off, unless it was a full resto, and needed to go back to bare metal. After a good chat with him, I felt confident in my next move.

Despite having seen it briefly on the hoist during the WOF when I asked to be shown what the issue was, I had built up a far worse picture in my mind of what it looked like under there. The only thing for it was to grab a scraper, a wire wheel, and roll under the car and have a look myself.

For the first time, I put a car up in the air on my really old, really solid screw type jack stands. These go higher than my usual ratcheting type, and I needed all the height I could get.

I took the wheels off and went for a tour with my torch.

This is the surface rust at the front. He made it sound like this was life threatening and an absolute horror. It's the underside of the battery tray, welded to the inner guard. I wire brushed and treated this with Brunox.

One thing I will agree on is that I didn't do a very good job of cleaning the old rust flakes out of the chassis rails when I replaced the rear valance and floors. I blew it out with a compressor a bit from the top, but clearly I just moved it around and some of the flakes were too big to even come out the holes.

That was entirely my own doing, so I'll own that.

In terms of the underseal, I spent ages under the car poking around. These are the worst areas I could find

The worst areas, the last two photos, are in direct proximity to the muffler and it looks like the heat from that actually dried out and cooked the underseal.

Beyond that, the underseal although dirty, is actually in really good shape. it's stuck on well, still soft and doing its job.

I started with the nasty job of wire wheeling all the loose and flaky underseal off. I was going to use a scraper, but it didn't touch even the flakiest bits. The wire wheel did a good job on the dry stuff, but barely touched the areas around it where the underseal was still nice and soft. I'd hate to try and actually remove the whole lot. No photos of this, it was super messy and I was trying to just get it done.

Once it was all cleaned back, I coated all the areas in Brunox, a rust converter and treater. This should stop any surface rust from creeping back. This was step one.

While the Brunox was doing its thing, I changed to clearing out the rails of flakes. I did this with a combo of my air compressor and a long flexible magnet.

Stick the magnet in the helpfully placed holes and go fishing

It would come back with a nice little collection of crust. Rinse and repeat.

Using an air gun I blew as much of the smaller stuff as I could out the holes in the rails, from all directions, and then using a combo of air and the magnet, caught anything else that was left. The magnet was good for smashing up the bigger bits too.

It was a long, messy job, but I ended up with some nice clean holes

This is what happens when you fit a towbar and don't use crush tubes

Since it'd been a couple of hours now, the Brunox was nice and dry and ready for me to give it a coating of black zinc paint. This will also help to protect against any future rust.

While that dried, I moved on to the big bad rust inside the boot

It's a prick of an area to actually work on without removing the boot hinges, so I had the bright idea to try my soda blaster on it. This is a cheap gun, on a compressor that's far too small, and firing baking soda at it under pressure. I didn't expect much, but I had everything already so it cost me nothing.

It's not perfect, but it knocked the lighter rust clean off and the deeper rust cleaned off so the Brunox will be able to work on it. I treated the rust with Brunox and then coated it in black zinc to seal it.

Finally, we were back to the underside again. I finished the job by giving everything a nice fresh coat of underseal. Because the new underseal is pretty flat, it's obvious it's not hiding anything, but seals and protects everything. Its looking 100% better.

I'm pretty confident now that the underside is looking as good as it could, for a 50 year old car.

I have started on the mechanical repairs that were mentioned too, but that'll come in a later post as I'm having some struggles with that.

Another WOF is booked, at a different workshop, in a couple of weeks. I've got plenty of time.

[kws]

Along with the underside tidy-up that I did in the last update, there were a few mechanical bits I needed to deal with before the next inspection in a couple of weeks.

The first one was an annoying one; the leaking clutch slave cylinder.

I knew the cylinder was slowly weeping fluid, and it appeared to be from the bleed valve. I wasn't too worried as it seemed to lose fluid quite slowly, and I planned to deal with it later.

Unfortunately, on top of all the other things the WOF guy blasted me on, one of them was the damn slave cylinder taking a dump. It was still working fine (despite him using it as a reason for grinding it into reverse, nah mate), but it was actively leaking fluid out the front of the cylinder and down the bellhousing now. Balls.

I was particularly annoyed by this, not just because it was one more thing the WOF guy didn't like, but because I had already rebuilt it. I sent it out to be resleeved in stainless and I fitted a seal kit I got from the UK.

This time I didn't bother to strip it, I decided I would have the pros strip and rekit it for me, just in case there were other issues at play.

The culprit lurks down here. In hindsight I should've painted it after it was sleeved (came back freshly sandblasted)

It'd used half the reservoir of fluid just in the test driving before the WOF, and the drive to and from the workshop

I removed the pushrod, boot and retaining circlip. The boot was full of fluid

With the circlip removed the cylinder just slides backwards out of its retaining ring on the bellhousing, making it a lot easier to disconnect the pipe

A big adjustable spanner is used to hold it whilst the pipe is undone

I was recommended these pipe-end blocking clamp things by a friend, and I'll be darned if they aren't pretty handy. Normally I'd just tie a rubber glove finger over the end and deal with a glove finger full of brake fluid later, but this sealed it completely with no mess

The inside of the cylinder wasn't looking too hot (and the piston was stuck at the bottom...)

And some very fine marking on the bore

I sent it off to the guys that sleeved it originally, CBC Brakes down in Christchurch, and this is what they came back with

The seal had rolled in the bore. I honestly don't know how that happened, or when it happened. I had no issues fitting the piston, it didn't catch, and for it to have even been working as it was is a miracle.

Either way, despite my embarrassment at having cocked it up and with only myself to blame, I had them rekit the cylinder with a new seal.

I will say, CBC have been awesome every time I have dealt with them. Their turnaround is super quick, they are reasonably priced and the work they do is faultless. Now I've had them resleeve and kit the brake master, clutch master and clutch slave. I'm glad I had them do the brake master, I wouldn't want to find out I rolled a seal in that! No room for failure with a single-circuit brake system.

The slave cylinder arrived back in record time, and I think they took pity on me because this time it came freshly painted and looking a million bucks.

I quickly set about refitting the slave. I greased the end of the pushrod and refitted it into the boot

The pipe was refitted, and the slave was slipped down into its retainer and the circlip refitted. A few pumps of the hand vacuum bleeder got fluid flowing, and I finished it off with the trusty one-man bleeder bottle.

As an aside, when refitting, despite how much of a pain it is to have the feed pipe on the bottom and blocking the bleeder, the bleeder must be fitted at the top or you'll never bleed the air out.

In my testing since refitting, the clutch feels much the same, which I guess is good. No leaks though, so I'll take that as a win and having it properly rebuilt now, hopefully I'll never have to look at it again.

Now, two big things were picked up on in the "WOF" check. The RH rear wheel bearing was grinding, and there was play in the steering.

I started with the wheel bearing. When spinning the wheel there was a definite whirr noise, which wasn't present on the LH side. I watched a couple of videos on Youtube, and ordered a new bearing kit.

Do note that as my car is an Aus Marina it uses a Borg Warner rear axle, so the work I've done may not apply to UK cars, but I imagine the theory is similar.

The drum has to be removed first, which exposes the axle

Four nuts secure the retaining plate

These are accessed via the big cut-outs in the face of the hub flange

With those four nuts removed, the axle should pull free from the diff. Should.

Most people say to flip the drum over and secure it with a couple of wheel nuts wound on a couple of threads, and use it like a slide hammer to thump the axle free

This did not work, despite many many attempts. It got to a point where either I was going to pull the car off the axle stands, or break the drum, neither of which I wanted to do.

I got pretty annoyed at this point, and after all my efforts I had only moved the bearing maybe 1mm as I could just see a lip of rusty bearing showing.

A new plan was needed, so I bit the bullet and ordered a slider hammer kit that included the required fittings for axle removal.

In the meantime, I took a look at the play in the steering.

The Marina has a fairly well-known issue where the inner rack support bush on the LH side wears out, as it's made of nylon, and this allows for play in the inner rack. Because the rack can physically move up and down, this allows for play in the LH wheel.

I checked for play when I first got the car, and I don't remember there being any, but I ordered a new bush anyway and put it into my spares. Now though, it's good I did, because when you wiggle the wheel side to side, heaps of movement.

It is recommended to remove the rack, strip it down completely and then bash the old bush out from the other end. There are a few that have done it on the car though, and as I'm low on time and can't be bothered removing the rack, I chose to do it on the car.

Before doing anything else, crack the tie rod end lock nut, as you'll need to remove the tie rod end and this can be properly stuck. With that free, remove the nut on the tie rod end and pop the taper using a couple of whacks of a hammer on the arm.

Counting the turns, wind the tie rod end off

Remove the lock nut, and after loosening both clamps, remove the boot. Be aware it should be quite oily.

Interestingly the inner tie rod is actually serviceable and adjustable using a cup and spring setup

As a note, the worn bush is #12 and retained with #11 screw

The rack end is locked in place with #10 "locknut", which uses a stake on each end to lock both the tie rod and the rack end together so it can't come loose. I used my big grips on #8 "ball housing" wiggling it back and forth until the stake on the rack end loosened up, and then I could wind both the housing and locknut off. In the end of the tie rod is the cup and spring. Once on the ground I could separate the locknut from the housing.

With the tie rod out of the way, you can see the worn-out bush. Theres nothing touching the rack

The new bush is made by Nolathane in polyurethane and is part number 41044.

I slid this over the end of the rack, and carefully drifted it into place against the old bushing. Before fitting I measured how deep in the rack the original bush was, and how long the new bush was, so I knew it was fully seated.

The one catch is that if you aren't removing the stock bush, you need a new screw in the housing to retain the new bush. To do this you need to drill into the housing and screw in a self-tapping screw. I did this in the bottom of the housing as it was easiest for me to access, but in hindsight, I would fit it higher as I have had to use sealant to stop any oil leaking passed the screw.

I couldn't find it at the time and only later noticed it in the photo, but the screw retaining the original bushing is there, with the orange arrow. The new screw I fitted is the green arrow. Looking at where the original screw is, I don't think you could access it on the car.

If the bush comes loose, the worst that'll happen is that it'll stop supporting the rack and it'll be no worse than it was before, since the old bush is still there. If that happens I will remove the rack and fit the new bush properly.

The instructions to fit the tie rod are fairly specific. First screw the lock nut onto the rack and bottom out the threads. Before I did this I used some narrow pliers to straighten out the stakes.

Next, you insert the spring and then the cup, followed by the tie rod and its housing. Screw the housing down until the tie rod is nipped up and cant swivel, and back off 1/8 of a turn until the tie rod can articulate fully but still be firm (the spec is 3.63-4.18nm of force to move). Next wind the locking nut into place and lock it with the tie rod, making sure the adjustment is still in spec.

Now, using a punch, lock the nut to the housing, and the nut to the rack, both of them have indents where the locking gets punched into

Now slip the boot back on, do the clamps up, refit the lock nut and tie rod end (turning it the same amount of turns it came off). Refit the tie rod end to the arm, and its job done.

I haven't driven the car since, but there is no play in the wheel when wiggling it side to side, and it was really obvious before.

It will be interesting to know how the steering feels now. It's always been a bit vague and wandered a bit, it'd make sense since it had dynamic toe on the LH side.

While waiting for the slide hammer to arrive so I could yeet the axle out of its home, I ordered a couple of transmission mounts, which arrived quickly.

I did a bunch of research around these because original mounts are NLA, and the Aus cars use a completely different mount setup than the UK cars.

On the UK cars they use a cross-member mounted to the body, and a single rubber mount the gearbox rests on. This mount is attached to the very end of the tail housing on the gearbox, Whilst the Aus cars have a pair of mounts much further forward on the gearbox on a pair of plates and brackets

The orange arrow points to where the UK mount would be on the gearbox

The stock mounts are a weird Z shaped thing, and mine were trashed.

I had an idea I could probably find a cotton reel style mount that would work, and after much digging around the internet I found someone on the Aus Facebook group mention they had successfully used "series Land Rover gearbox mounts". Some more digging, and I came up with a local supplier of NRC2054

Compared to the original mounts they're a bit taller, but I have no idea how compressed those old ones are

Getting to that point wasn't too hard, I supported the gearbox on the jack and removed the bolts for the "cross-member" which is actually two brackets linked by a brace. This allowed the mounts to slide out

The new mounts are metric 10mm studs, so I had to drill out the smaller imperial holes to fit, both on the chassis brackets and on the gearbox brackets (that was fun...).

What came next was like trying to assemble a jigsaw with only a vague picture, and a bunch of bits that don't fit together. It sucked.

Because the mounts are on an angle, everything has to slot together nicely in a certain pattern, and nothing fit. I ended up having to remove most of the bolts from the brackets on the gearbox, so I could pivot them around, and jack the gearbox up and down

Everything had to remain super loose until eventually it all fell into place, all the bolts went in, and only then could I tighten them all down. Some use of the big lever was needed.

Paint marks because ADHD life

The gearbox definitely sits a little higher now, this was most obvious by the fact that the top radiator house was now firmly trying to occupy the space the radiator fan does. They've always had a slightly touchy-feely relationship, but this was beyond acceptable.

I had preempted this, by buying another radiator fan mounting kit. I wanted to move the fan over to give the hose more space anyway (I mounted the fan to the radiator out of the car, before I had fitted the top hose and realised the fan cannot be central on the radiator), so this was my chance.

I snapped all the little ties off, using a metal trim tool on the fan side to gently twist it back and forth until the head popped off

I moved the fan over and gave everything some nice clearance and zipped it into place

Ample space

Technically it's on the hotter side of the radiator now, so maybe it'll work more efficiently.

Finally, the slide hammer arrived (to be fair, it arrived after the weekend. This work all happened over the course of a couple of days)

I ain't playing around now. I tried asking nicely.

I attached the fitting to the hub

And screwed the hammer into it

Three decent thumps, and the axle was out. It's amazing what you can do with the right tools.

Forget Loctite, rust is the best bearing retainer

I pulled the axle out and cleaned the oil off it

It's not really any surprise I needed a slide hammer to remove it, the manual does call for special tool 18G A284 "impulse extractor", which looks suspiciously like a homemade slide hammer.

To say it needed replacement might be an understatement

 

To actually replace the bearing you either need to press it and its retaining collar off, or just do what everyone does and cut them off.

I stuck the axle in my vice and zip-tied the retaining plate away so I had less chance of cutting that off by accident

I fired up the death wheel and got cutting. The retaining ring was first to go

Once it was cut most of the way through I stuck a chisel in the cut and a couple of hits split the metal and it slid right off

The same happened to the bearing. I cut through the outer race in two places and broke it away

I removed the balls and inner cage and then cut into the inner race. Once again, when I was mostly through it I smacked it off with a chisel

You can see here I only needed to cut so much of it before the chisel just forcefully cracked the rest of the way. It only took a couple of hits to split. Also note the dull grey area to the left of the cut, this is the reason you must wear PPE doing this, as that's where a chip of steel must've broken off and flown off at high velocity. You don't want that in your eye.

Strangely the races of the bearing seemed pretty ok considering. This was the worst damage I could find; a couple of marks on the inner race

It's interesting to note though that you can see where the bearings run on the outer race, it must've gotten hot?

With both bits loose I removed the axle from the vice and shook them free. Now it was time to fit the nice new one

The kit comes with the bearing and a new retaining ring. Do note when fitting these that the bearing has a raised lip on one side (facing up in the above photo), this must face the hub flange when fitted

Making sure the retaining plate was in place, I carefully slid the new bearing onto the axle and mounted the axle into the press. I'm using the old retaining ring to press the bearing on, as it will only exert force on the inner race of the bearing, and having been cut it won't bind on the axle shaft. My biggest socket gives the press a flat surface to work off (slightly bigger would've been nice so it could sit on the ring not just the raised bits in the middle, but it's not often I'd need bigger than 36mm)

Here's the old retaining collar being put into use

I slowly pressed the bearing on until it bottomed out

With the bearing in place I slid the old ring off, and the new ring on. The old ring was then used to press the new ring on

And done

The bearing spun smoothly by hand, albeit with some resistance from the grease inside the bearing

I gave the housing a good clean up with a scotch pad to remove any rust that might stop it sealing. It was pretty manky

I don't know if it's right or wrong, but I read others have done it, so decided to use a very thin smear of sealant on the surface the outer O-ring seals on. The old bearing was the type that is just a friction fit, but this type relies on that O-ring to keep the diff oil where it needs to be (along with the bearing being sealed).

I carefully slid the axle through the backing plate and into its home. I gave the hub flange a couple of hits with the soft face hammer to make sure it was seated.

With the four nuts tightened down on the retaining plate, the drum went back on

Finally, the wheels were refitted. Before lowering to the ground I spun the wheel and noticed it had a noticeable rumble when spun. Asking around, it appears this is normal for new sealed bearings due to the grease in them, and even bearing manufacturer SKF suggests running the bearings for a few km (or 10 minutes) for the grease to break in, so I'll give it some time and check back later and make sure it's all working as it should.

Once on the ground, there was one last job on my list and that was to replace the bonnet cable. The old one was really stiff to pull, and half the T handle was broken off, risking the other half breaking off and being a pain to open.

Doing some googling around it seemed like the MGB bonnet cable was able to be used, so I ordered a CHA460

To remove the old cable I had to remove the front grille, and that gave me access to the cable and bonnet catch. The cable loops through the release lever and is then secured in that little screw thing. The cable outer is secured in a clip on a bracket to the left

I undid the cable and removed the clip, allowing me to remove the cable

I undid the nut holding the handle in place and pulled the cable through the car. Refitting the new cable is just a case of putting the cable through the bracket, securing the handle with the nut, and running the cable through the engine bay to the bonnet catch. The new handle body is a bit smaller than the old one so I used an appropriately sized washer to make it fit better

Unfortunately the CHA460 is too short. The cable inner just makes it and can be secured in place, but the outer has no chance of being clipped in place. From my measurements the outer needs to be about 155cm long and the inner 160cm or so.

The cable works as it is, and works really well, the bonnet is much easier and nicer to open, but I need to secure the outer, maybe with a clip or just a zip-tie to that hole there.

While in the area I finally took some time to adjust the bonnet properly. It's always sat a bit off, and I've had issues with the bonnet popping when driving, which led to some bodges to make it work before the last WOF check.

I undid the bodges and found the adjustment slot in the end of the catch pin was so full of gunk you couldn't see it at all, so after some digging it out, I could adjust it properly.

To free the center pin up, I removed the catch and put it in the vice. Using my rattlegun with a slotted screwdriver bit, I gave it a quick jab of the button, which instantly freed the pin up.

I refitted the catch and adjusted the pin to the spec in the book; A= 50.8mm

I had to wind it out significantly to get that measurement, it was at least 10-15mm too short.

I used the slotted adjustment holes in the catch to move the bonnet left or right when closed, and get the gaps nice. After some playing with the hinge adjustments

Along with the little rubber bumpers

I was finally happy with how the bonnet shut. It sits a little high in the middle at the back due to the seal, so I'll need to look into that, but otherwise it's good.

That's pretty much the car buttoned up again and ready to go. I did do a string alignment to check how the toe was, but I'll do a write up on that later as this post is already getting too long.

I'm two weeks out from my next inspection, which I've specifically booked as a "pre-WOF" inspection, or a WOF that won't be entered into the system if it fails, just in case. Surely I'm running out of things that it can fail on?

[kws]

It'll come as no surprise that I've paid for a lot of alignments in my time, and as on most cars they can only really adjust toe, it began to irk me how little value I got for my money.

With that in mind, there is one thing I have wanted to try for a long time but never really been bothered to do, as it seemed like too much work. A DIY string alignment.

I will say off the bat, I know it won't be as accurate as frickin lasers on a machine worth tens of thousands of dollars, and adjusting the toe without a hoist is a pain, but for the cost of... almost free, it's good enough.

I had done a lot of research and even considered spending the money on a pair of nice toe plates that you use with a pair of tape measures to check if the wheels are toed in or out, but the idea that it couldn't identify if the wheels were "straight" but actually both pointed off to the same direction, didn't sit well with me.

And then I found this guy's video online, and it seemed just easy enough that even I could make a string alignment work

 

The basic theory is that you run a pair of string lines down the sides of the car. With certain measurements, you make the string lines parallel and then measure the distance of the front and rear edges of the wheels against the string to check toe. This method will only do toe, but that's all I need to measure.

Having just done work on the steering of the Marina, and it being decades since it's probably seen anything resembling an alignment, I wanted to check it before I went too far on the road again.

Years ago I marked the steering column before removing the steering wheel, and when I last refitted it I fitted it to the marks, which meant the wheel was off center for whatever reason (maybe wasn't straight in the first place). I fixed this by just moving the wheel a few splines over, and it was close enough. Before checking the alignment now, I foolishly moved the steering wheel back to the marks, thinking it would be a good idea.

In an ideal world, you would center the rack, center the steering wheel and then do the alignment, but I don't have a centering hole in the rack as the UK cars do, and I didn't want to have to measure tie rods, so this is close enough.

I fired the car up, and using its freshly rebuilt clutch slave, moved it back up and down the driveway a few times to settle the suspension.

Before setting up, always roll the car forward, not backwards, as this can impact the alignment settings.

Next, I checked and set all the tire pressures to the same 28-29psi

Then I set up the string lines on my four axle stands. Almost immediately I noted that the string I was using wasn't right, it was too thick and "fluffy", you really need something like fishing line for this, so it's thin and accurate. Regardless, all I needed was a ballpark figure, so I pushed on.

I pulled the string quite tight by rotating the axle stand

The first hurdle for me was that I don't have center caps, just a big gaping hole. That makes it a bit harder to measure from the center, so after a few tries of different things, to set the string height I settled on my camber gauge with its top edge sitting at the center of the hub and the bubble flat. The height doesn't have to be 100% accurate, just close enough to the same for both wheels on that side. The string height is set by moving the center of the stand up and down for coarse adjustment, and then sliding the string up and down on the stand for fine adjustment.

Next was to measure the distance from the center of the wheel to the string. You need to factor in the track width of the car with this, so that the strings are straight and not slightly tapering off, as the front and rear track are not usually the same.

In the Marinas case, the track is 1333.5mm in the front, and slightly narrower 1331mm in the rear. I wanted the string to be 80mm from the rear wheels, so I measured that from just in front of the center bore, at the height of the string.

Ignore the .45mm extra, it's really hard to be accurate when also taking a photo.

Because the front is slightly wider, I needed to remove the extra width from my measurement, which is 2.5mm across both sides. Halve that, and you get 1.25mm per side. So I needed my string line to be 78.75mm from the wheel on the front. Moving the stands at the front and rear until I got those two measurements, on both sides of the car, and I finally had a pair of parallel strings. Not too hard!

Now it was time to measure the toe. I used my calipers on the wheel lip to check the distance to the string line. Protip, make sure your wheel weights aren't in the way...

Having checked both sides, I knew the rear was square as the front and rear measurements were the same (good test of my string lines), but being a solid axle I expected that. The fronts, well...

The numbers were messing with my head a little, but from that I had 11mm of toe, but not in or out, they were pointing off to one side. They were pretty well parallel, but not straight. This is where the string line has an advantage over the toe plates, it can tell me the wheels are pointing off to the side but only had 1mm toe difference, the plates would tell me there was 1mm toe but not that they are pointing off to one side.

This was due to me moving the steering wheel on the splines. Darn.

I straightened the steering out so the wheels were more or less straight and then moved the steering wheel over on the splines to straighten that out. To settle the steering I had to push the car back and forth again, which meant the poor thing got its tail out in the rain. With the faint sounds of rust creeping in, I rolled the car forward and set up again. This time all I needed to do was set the string the pre-measured distance from the wheels again

Round two was a lot better, this time it looks like I'm slightly pointing off to one side

It appears I have about 1mm of toe in on one side, and I'm pointing off to one side still. I need to drive the car and see how centered the steering wheel is, I suspect it might need to go over one more spline, but since it hasn't really stopped raining, I won't be venturing out just yet. Once I have the steering wheel centered, and the car tracks straight, I'll get some fishing line, set up again and see how the actual toe is. The setting in the book is 1.6mm combined or 0.8mm per side toe in (wheels closer together at the front edge than the rear).

Over all, the string method seems pretty good. It'll suck to have to actually adjust anything since any time you move the car, move the strings or make any changes you need to set things up again, but you can probably get fairly quick at it with some practice.

I'll play with it more, on my other cars too, as a quick basic way to make sure the toe isn't wildly out before having someone check it properly on a machine (if needed). I wouldn't bother with a machine alignment on this Marina, since there are no more adjustments than toe, and this isn't a daily driver, as long as it's in the ballpark and drives straight, I'm happy. My daily, or track car, should really be checked properly for handling and tyre life reasons.

I can definitely recommend giving it a go, it's a fun skill to learn and pretty low cost if you have some measurement tools, a set of four jack stands (or similar things to tie the string to on each corner), some fishing line and some time.

[kws]

Well, here we are, It's time to try this WOF thing again.

After the string alignment, when the rain finally stopped, I took the Marina out for a quick run around the block to see how the alignment was. The steering was dead center, and it was a lot less wayward than it had been, likely due to the new bush in the steering rack. I'll call that a success.

All that was left was to wait a couple of weeks for the next booking. This time I booked it with a different workshop, one that I was recommended by a friend in the local Rover club which he had good experience with, and I booked it as a Pre-WOF inspection off the bat (just in case I did need more than the 28 days to fix anything).

I wanted to make a good impression, so the day before, I gave the Marina its first real wash, with suds and all. It was dirtier than it looked but it's hard to tell because of the condition of the paint. The wheels gained a bit of a shine though.

The Marina did decide to play a great little prank on me though, the day before the WOF check, where it ran on only three cylinders. haha so funny. I checked spark, all good. It didn't clean up when revved, and barely idled. I was starting to get a bit concerned, and then decided to check the carb and noticed the choke jet was out despite the handle being all the way in; the jet had stuck and the carb was over fuelling. I lightly touched it and it snapped back into place and suddenly the engine smoothed out and ran beautifully, as expected. Phew. It stuck again the next morning, so I'll need to sort that out.

Yesterday morning, with my wife in the Leaf in tow (two polar opposites of transportation), I drove the Marina the furthest it's been in my ownership and dropped it off at the workshop. Other than once again passing a police officer on the way there, and my wife alerting me to an iffy connection on one of my brake lights (which a quick jiggle of the bulb holder cured), the drive went well.

Straight off the bat I got way better vibes from these guys about the Marina, having had a quick chat with the guy there who expressed his interest and enthusiasm towards the car. It makes a big difference when the people you choose to work on your special project actually care about it.

There was no waiting around for it this time, and since they were busy I wasn't going to get the car back until the afternoon, so I jumped in the Leaf and after some breakfast and errands, I spent the rest of the day trying to distract myself whilst anxiously waiting for the call.

Late in the afternoon the call comes through "your car is all done and ready for collection". Vague.

We jump in the Leaf again and shoot down there. As we roll into the carpark, the Marina is just parked out front, looking awesome. As we turn to park next to it I notice something and just about jump out of my skin. There is a sticker on the windscreen.

I go in and sure enough, we've done it. After almost 29 years to the day, the Marina has a fresh new WOF on it. All the hard work finally paid off.

Soon to be updated

The guy from earlier came over and complimented the car, saying how good it was and how good it looked underneath, and wishing me some good cruising over summer. He also clarified a note on the WOF sheet for me, that the bushes on the rear axle reaction arm are perished and will need to be replaced, but that needs to be done before the next WOF. Other than that, we were all good to go.

Some strategic tape to cover the gap in the seal, since it was meant to rain. New seal to be fitted.

I jumped in, the old girl fired up first turn of the key and off we went. As it's not insured yet, it went straight back into the garage for now.

We quickly popped to VTNZ before they closed and renewed the rego, which has been on hold for as long as it has not had a WOF.

I was 7 years old when this car was last on the road. It hasn't been on the road for longer than some of my colleagues have been alive. But here it is, back on the road again and ready to do some summer cruising. It's been saved from an uncertain fate where it could've been stripped for parts, chopped up or scrapped. A lot of people wouldn't have bothered to do the work it needed, but back in 2021 when I bought the car, I promised the seller I would get his dads old car back on the road.

For a couple of years now I've been holding on to a little treat for the car (and myself), only allowing it to be fitted once the car is road-legal. That time has come.

Off came the stock wheel, which is badly cracking and doesn't feel great to hold

The boss kit needed a couple of pins for the indicator cancelling fitted, and then it was fitted to the column

And my steering wheel of choice was fitted.

It's been so long that I can't recall the size now, it's a nice black leather Mountney wheel.

Compared to the original wheel it is slightly smaller, but so much thicker

And it feels great in the hand

It won't be to everyone's tastes, and I couldn't care less. I like it.

I wouldn't be a British car owner without some self-deprecating humour too

A huge thank you goes out to everyone who has followed along, all the comments and support, and to the people that have helped out with knowledge/advice and parts when needed.

There is still plenty to do to it, and it'll have some money spent on upgrades soon, now that it's proven it can get through a WOF. For now though, once the insurance is sorted, I just want to get some Ks on it, give it a shakedown and see what happens.

[kws]

With a successful WOF under my belt, I could finally drive the Marina out on the roads and see what it is actually like.

Before driving it the couple of KM to the last WOF inspection, the most I had driven it was around the block a couple of times. I had never really strayed far from home.

Now though, I could take it out for drives "for the fun of it". I could even get some photos that weren't taken in my garage or driveway!

The interior in particular looks a lot better out in natural light than in my garage

The feeling of finally being able to get out and actually drive the car properly was awesome. For 51 years old, it drives really well. Going down the road, it just feels like "a car" (that you have to dodge all the potholes in lest you bottom out the suspension). It can be driven just like any other car; get in, turn the key, it fires up and off you go. The difference is that you are driving it, it's not an appliance. About as far from the Leaf as you can get.

Touch wood, but it doesn't smoke, it's not overheating, the gearbox shifts well, and although a bit soft, the suspension seems to be doing what I ask of it. I'm very impressed.

Those first couple of drives did show up a few niggles. One of them, which concerned me a little as it was the first time I'd heard it, was a clattering from the gearbox. It only happens sometimes, and only when warm, which is why I hadn't heard it before I guess and usually only on over-run or when taking off from a stop. Surprisingly the shifts are good and the syncros are doing the things they should, unlike my first Marina which would punish you if you didn't go from first, across the gate left to right and then go into second gear, to give the syncro time to catch up.

There is a squeal from either the clutch release or spigot bearing though, so a new clutch will be on the cards in the future.

Something that has been bugging me for a bit, was that my tacho was intermittent at best and dead at worst. It happened randomly a while ago and sometimes works until the cars been running a few minutes and then just drops to zero. I checked the wiring from the coil to no avail, so knew it had to be something in the cluster. Having spent a not insignificant amount on the Spiyda tacho conversion, I was hoping it wasn't an issue with that.

With the column shrouds off already for other work, removing the cluster was a matter of taking out two screws (since I haven't got around to sorting the top two yet), reaching in through the "speaker" grille in the dash and undoing the speedo cable, and then pulling it forward enough to disconnect the harness.

Once on the bench, I had my suspicions about what the cause was

This little guy. I didn't do this, and it's on the power feed to the tacho. Lifting the end nearest the screw showed it was barely attached to the copper trace, if at all.

I carefully peeled it off, snipped it back to the solder and soldered in a new jump wire, this time joining straight to the bare copper where the ring terminal contacts the trace

To give it some support and stop any risk of shorts I covered it in some hot glue

Refitted to the car, lo and behold on the next drive I had a rock-solid tacho for the whole drive. Excellent. I love a simple fix.

A not so simple fix, was the next thing that was bugging me. The ignition key.

Ever since I've had the car the ignition key has been a bit of a pain, but it did work, you just had to jiggle it a bit and sometimes it'd only work if you pulled the key out and turned it over. I could live with that though.

What I needed, was spare keys, just in case I locked my only set in the boot, which has no release except with a key and cant easily be accessed from inside the car.

The door key was easy enough, the locksmith decoded it and cut me a nice new one. It turns out his decoding of it perfectly matched a photo I took of the back of the outside door handle ages ago, showing the back of the lock barrel where the number is stamped into it.

The ignition key though, was a different story. The first thing the locksmith said to me was "this is on the wrong blank" just by looking at it, followed by "its been hand cut with a file". Oh goody.

"custom" key bottom, new blank on top

Long story short, the original key had been hand cut by/for the previous owner and had an asymmetrical cut. It took me a little to work out why, and was only when I remembered something the guy at the workshop that failed the Marina said when he went to open the boot with the ignition key and I told him to use the door key, "it opened it before"...

Sure enough, when flipped up one way, the ignition key will open the boot

But it won't open the boot if the key is inserted the other way, and it won't open the doors. Some wizardry had been done. Why he specifically needed this cut, I don't know, but it's kinda cool.

The locksmith didn't want a bar of it, he said he could replicate it but it may or may not work, and in the end it would probably still have the same issue the key currently has, where it's hard to use in the ignition. The reason for this is because it's not a symmetrical cut, with the same cut on each side of the key, so of course the wafers in the barrel will be different on each side.

My plan was to copy one side of the key to both sides of a blank, by hand, and make it a symmetrical key. I bought a blank from the locksmith and dug out my needle files.

Before I could do that though, I wanted to strip my spare barrel so I could use that to test the key, so I didn't upset the current barrel (and make the car immobile).

The problem was that I didn't have a key for this barrel, and you need to use a key to remove the core. That left me with one option, see if I could pick it.

First I had to drill out the retaining pin. This goes into a hole in the barrel, locking it in place. I actually filed this down first to see if I could expose the pin and pull it out, it didn't go well, so I ended up drilling it.

Next you would insert the key, turn it to ACC position and due to the mechanism in it, it would eject the barrel from the housing.

With out a key, or lock pick set, I had to get creative. Using a bunch of stuff from my rollcab that really shouldn't be abused like this, I picked the core wafer by wafer and out it popped. I went between using this spanner and the screwdriver on my multitool as a turning tool, and the remains of some cheap long-nose tweezers to pick the wafers

Now the fun part. I removed the column shrouds

Took some photos of the wiring so I knew where to plug it in later

And using the handy previously slotted shear bolts holding the ignition on, removed it.

The signs that someone had been here before were obvious... Such as the random screw holding the switch into the housing

and the modification to the retaining pin

It turns out the modification is a little ball that was pressed into a hole that had been drilled down next to the pin

Removing that allowed me to use a pick under the pin to lift it up

Inserting the key into the barrel, and turning it ejected it

The bare barrel

A bunch of wafers were missing from either side, to match the cut of the key. No wonder it was a pain to use

The square metal rod on the end is what turns the electrical switch in the end of the barrel. The white plastic section has a groove that runs around it, and this is what engages and disengages the steering lock (and also what ejects the barrel from the housing).

I used a small punch and screwdriver to drift out the roll pin holding the plastic part on

With that removed, the core will come straight out of the barrel

Make sure you have a key in the core when you remove it or the wafers and springs will go everywhere. The core does not require a key in it to be removed.

The effects of the iffy key can be seen in the barrel, where the wafers have worn into the housing from not being disengaged properly

This is what the uncut blank looks like in the core, showing the wafers that would stop the barrel turning. It does highlight how few wafers were actually being used too. Apparently this "wrong" blank is designed for 10 cuts (5 on each side). The proper blank is for 8 cuts. This key had maybe 4 total based on the wafers left.

I stripped the spare core completely

After cleaning all the wafers and springs up, I went through and using the original key, on the side I wanted to copy, matched the spare core to that key

It's worth remembering that the key works on the opposite side of the core, pulling the wafers down. In the above photo, the cut on the bottom of the key will be acting on the wafers fitted from the top of the core, pulling them down against the springs.

I didn't fit any wafers to the other side, just so I could perfect the one side of the key first

I carefully clamped the two keys together, and using vivid (permanent marker) on the blank, traced the cut from the key to the blank

Using a series of small files, I carefully filed down the cuts until it was close to the traced marks, testing along the way.

I got one side of it really good, almost a perfect match. I started on the other side, got it pretty close and then this happened

I messed up. What I hadn't accounted for was that the other key, having the shorter cut on one side, couldn't be symmetrical using that cut, or the key goes too far into the core

By reducing this area here to line the cuts up, allows the key to go further into the core than it should, misaligning the the end wafers.

You can see the reason for it here, on the original key. With that one, the key goes further into the barrel on one side than the other. Its madness.

Back to the drawing board I went. In a stroke of luck, whilst googling what sort of key the Marina should have, I came across a number for a blank which rang a bell. Hold on, don't I have one of those keys?

It's pretty worn, but yes, that's the blank a Marina should have. I don't know where it came from, if it even came with the Marina or another car, but its quite fortuitous.

You can see the cut is quite different and the tip of the key is longer and stepped

I already knew this key didn't match either of the barrels I had, as I had tested it, but this gave me the chance to rekey a barrel to match this key now. The locksmith was also more than happy to duplicate this key as it wasn't some weirdo custom thing.

I built the core up in my spare barrel for testing, and once good, I gutted the original core and swapped it all over

The reason I couldn't use this barrel in my car is that someone has removed the outer ring which has all the markings on it, so it looks pretty haggard

One tip for reinserting the barrel into the housing, is to make sure the plastic at the end of the housing matches the pin on the end of the barrel. Its not actually a perfect square, but a slight rectangle and it will only go in one way. You can spend a lot of time being frustrated by it not going in, if this piece is the wrong way around...

I gave the barrel, core, and housing all a good clean and then lightly lubricated it with graphite before reassembling and refitting to the car

The steering lock is still a little sticky to activate, it always has been, but the key now works each and every time without having to jiggle it or turn it over. Its made the car 100% easier to operate now.

I really wanted to keep the weirdo asymmetrical key in the car as it's a cool bit of history, but that just made the job far too difficult, when just redoing the whole lot to a different cut made so much more sense. I'll keep the original keys in storage with the rest of the bits, including the wafers I kept in order, just in case.

Now, I have two complete sets of keys (plus another spare that will open the boot) and an ignition barrel that works properly. Success.

Finally, the last niggle the car has developed since I've been able to drive it properly is an issue at higher RPM where it seems to cut out.

I had a rather interesting moment shooting a gap in traffic where I started off rapidly with a chirp of a tyre, and just as I got out in front of the oncoming car, the engine cut flat out but came back to life when I basically crash started it and kept going like nothing happened.

Testing it again later, the same thing could be replicated by giving it beans in a straight line. It didn't seem to be load dependant as you can go WOT at low RPM and other than some light pinging (hopefully to be fixed by running higher octane now) it pulls fine, but once the revs climb above about 3500rpm it started to misfire and then cut out.

It could be fuelling, as I've been topping the fuel tank up with jerry cans and I don't know how much is actually in there, and although the fuel gauge is coming back to life, I don't know how accurate it is. Theres no obvious rust in the fuel filter, and the pump should easily be able to keep up with the demands of this engine. I've topped up with another 20L of 98 octane to be sure it isn't just low fuel, and the gauge reads about 3/4 of a tank now. It's a 54L tank, so that makes sense.

My suspicion is the ignition system, as the tacho drops to zero when the engine cuts out. Other than cleaning the points, checking the gaps when I got the car, changing the plugs, leads, cap and rotor, I have done nothing else. My plan here is to replace the coil, relocate it from the engine to the engine bay (like later Marinas, presumably to reduce vibration), convert to electronic ignition, and I'm also going to give the carb a quick going over as I've only barely cleaned and adjusted it to get it running.

Hopefully that fixes it. if not, more troubleshooting will follow, including maybe checking inside the fuel tank for condition.

In the mean time, its more than happy tootling around town, as long as I don't try to drive too aggressively.

[kws]

I've not driven the Marina since the last update, and it's been a month now. The reason? My usual "it's on the road now, let's pull it to bits" thing.

To be fair, it's not without reason though. In my last outings in the car, I found the engine would cut out under higher RPM, so I wanted to investigate this.

Since I got the car, despite having run and driven it a bit, other than cleaning out the fuel bowl and tweaking the mixture, I haven't actually touched the carb.

To kick everything off, I thought I would pull out the old carb that came in a box with the car, and strip it down to see what state that was in. The fact it had a big X marked on the top of it didn't bode well.

I love SU carbs, they're just so easy to strip and service. Nothing fancy, but does the job.

Sadly, there is almost nothing in this carb that was reusable. I pulled the throttle spindle out and it had massive wear

The bushing in the body was worn too, as even the "good" bit of the shaft would wobble about when tested

With the right tools, some new bushes and some time, I could fix that, but I really don't care for it.

Even the needle was stuffed. The holder is cracked and the needle itself is actually bent

The jet seems to be welded into the jet bearing, as when trying to remove it the complete plastic end of the jet decided it would rather come off instead

So moving on from that development, I popped the bonnet on the Marina. This is what I started with

I removed the air filter saucepan and its intake pipe which gave me access to the mighty SU HS6 carb

Three tight and one loose nut later, the carb itself was off. The gasket and under the carb were all quite wet with oily fuelly muck

The heat shield and spacer came off next

With the carb on the bench

I removed the fuel bowl lid and was annoyed at the muddy sediment on the bottom of the bowl

It didn't really act like rust and wasn't ferrous, it was more like dirt. I have a filter in the system before the fuel pump, and that not shown any signs of rust or dirt (yet), so I'm not sure where this came from. I cleaned the bowl out when I first got the car running.

The float looked fine. It moved freely and had no signs of liquid inside it

Next I removed the damper, suction chamber and piston. This allowed me to remove the needle, which I confirmed is the correct "BAN" needle for single carb 1750.

One of the biggest reasons for servicing the carb was due to this, a sticking jet when the choke was applied. The jet doesn't return and causes the car to run super rich and drop a cylinder

Usually it takes just a gentle tap with your finger on the bottom of the jet to pop it back up again, but this requires popping the bonnet when starting cold, which is unacceptable when you have an image to withhold.

It should sit all the way up against the adjustment nut

The fuel feed hose had been weeping too

I removed the jet and feed hose

I thought it was weird there appeared to be no seal on the end of the hose in the bowl... turns out it was still in the bowl

Careful use of a couple of picks and I managed to chip the "rubber" seal out. It was harder than plastic. The new seal is to the left of the remains

I ran some brake cleaner through the jet and found more gunk

I cleaned the outside of the jet and inside of the jet bearing up as well as I could, and when testing on the bench it all worked nicely with no sticking

I fit the new seal to the fuel feed hose. A new washer came in the gasket kit, but I found the outside diameter too big and I couldn't thread in the fitting, so I ended up refitting the old washer and it works fine.

And refitted to the fuel bowl. It turns out this also wasnt tight when I removed it, as the fitting screws much further in than it was

The choke linkage was also refitted

I refit the needle to the piston and after a thorough cleaning of the inside of the carb body, refitted the piston.

As its turns out, the spare carb had a different piston spring. Neither have any obvious paint markings to show which one is "RED" as indicated in the manual.

The one from the spare carb is slightly longer and has thicker wire in the coils

0.99mm wire

and the one that was in the carb on the car

0.82mm wire

I don't know which one is right for the car, and just for curiosity I fit the thicker coil spring from the spare carb to the car to see what it was like. I might need to swap back though as I'm having some weird tuning issues.

Next was the fuel needle and seat, and float. The needle and seat are what stops the fuel flow into the bowl, so it doesnt overfill and overflow. As the level in the bowl rises, the float will rise up with it and at a certain height it presses on the back of the needle and pushes it into the seat, blocking the inlet.

My needle and seat appears to be original, and replacements these days come with viton rubber tips, to help seal. Mine was a plastic body with brass tip.

With these carbs, to remove the needle and seat you need to remove the float. This is held in place with a small hinge pin. I used a smal punch to carefully tap it out enough to grab with some pliers

The seat just unscrews from the cap. The spare carb had one washer under the seat whilst the in car one had two. These set the height of the float

The new needle and seat. The new needle is all brass with a viton rubber tip

After a lot of faffing about with float levels, which I'm still not 100% sure is right, the new needle, seat and float were refitted. It's annoying these floats don't have a metal tab that allows for adjustment.

With a new float bowl gasket, the carb was reassembled. I didn't remove the throttle plate or shaft as I didn't have new ones or new screws. There is some play in the shaft, which pretty much dooms this carb, but it'll do for now.

Before refitting I decided to bite the bullet and remove the inlet/exhaust manifold. I knew there had been a leak, it wasnt bad, but it was a good time to address it anyway. Plus, this gives me a chance to prep the fittings for easy removal when I go to fit the twin carb manifold.

By some miracle, all the nuts and bolts came off without issue. The only little hangup was that the front stud was rusted into the manfold, and needed some persuading to give it up.

The inlet port sizing on the manifold is... slightly mismatched. I may check the match on the twin carb manifold and massage it if needed

I cleaned the face of the head up with the wire wheel on the drill

Add went through with taps and dies cleaning all the threads

DIY short spinning tap handle

After cleaning up the manifold I found a rather decent crack in the casting between the two center exhaust runners

That necessitated some copper exhaust spooge on the gasket, for maximum sealing

And with that, I banged it all back together, with new gaskets on everything

Because I'm sick of the saucepan handle rattling on my hood prop, I replaced it with a cheap foam "pancake" filter. So much room for activities now. In hindsight it's a bit close to the heater hoses, so I should've got the offset mounting to raise the filter up. Oh well.

I've set the carb up, and tuned it as well as it wants to be tuned. It runs well, but I cant help but think the float height or piston spring arent quite right as when lifting the piston the engine revs up slightly and then dies, indicating its lean, but if I add more fuel it starts to run a bit rubbish. At the moment its running at the "audiable sweet spot" where it sounds happiest running.

Unfortunately the damn jet is still sticking when the choke is applied, so this carb isnt long for this world. I have a kit to rebuild the twin HIF4s, so they will be going on the car some time soon.

It's no real surprise I guess; only a month or so ago the jet was completely jammed solid and didnt move, so I'm lucky I can use it at all.

In the mean time, I wanted to investigate the ignition system a bit further to see if it has any affect on the cutting out at high RPM.

I have nothing against points, they have their charm, but I wanted to convert to electronic ignition to do away with any risk of the points or condensor being an issue. I bought an Accuspark Stealth "Kit 4" for a Lucas 25D distributor, which I can now confirm works fine on the Lucas 29D4 in the Marina.

The old points and condensor accepting their fate

I pulled the rotor off and removed the points and condensor

I wouldnt be surprised if this had something to do with the issue...

The main power feed to the points had been "fixed" at some point, with the worst crimp they could find. I don't even know if any copper was still connected, or if the only thing holding the terminal on the wire was the insulation. I could spin the terminal right around with no issues.

This also wouldnt help

With some careful poking and prodding I pushed the grommet through the housing and removed the old wire

The terminal fell off once out of the car

The new Accuspark pickup fits right in, after smearing some of the supplied thermal grease on the underside. The pickup ring slips over the shaft easily. The kit comes with new grommets, only one of which will fit and annoyingly it's not quite right, it should really have a 90 degree outlet to avoid the clip for the cap, but it is pliable enough that you can bend it out of the way without issue.

I wanted to also replace the coil, as I suspect it was probably original.

I got a nice Powerspark high output coil. Its very understated, with not even so much as a label on it. Perfect.

UK spec Marinas mounted the coil on the inner wing, away from all the heat and vibration of the engine

Aus cars didnt have that luxury, the coil is mounted on the engine. It'd be quite an easy thing to change, I believe the holes are even already in place. Unless you're me, and have mounted an aux fuse box to that location. Nuts.

Oh well, I cleaned the inside of the bracket up

And mounted the new coil. Its a little bigger than the old coil, so its a tight squeeze. The Accuspark gets wired straight to the positive and negative terminals.

The rotor, cap and sports car racing leads were all refitted again. You'd not even notice the fancy newfangled technology hiding in the distributor

The car fired into life straight away, with no issues, which was a relief. Once it was warm I checked the timing, which was a little more advanced than it should be, so I knocked that back a little, tweaked the carb tune and took it for a run around the block.

I'll tell you what, it has no trouble revving to the 5500rpm redline on the tacho now! The sound it makes from the little pancake filter too, its excellent.

I'm not 100% happy with the carb, so will do a couple more tweaks on that, but otherwise its running and driving very well. I think the biggest surprise for me is that the gearbox syncros can keep up even at over 5000RPM on a 1st to 2nd change.

Heaps on the list of things to do, but I'm really trying not to get too stuck into much else that will take it off the road, as if we can get some sunny days for once, I want to be able to drive the car.

[kws]

Well, that's another year done. Happy New Year and welcome to 2025. May everyone's year be excellent and filled with car stuff.

To celebrate the New Year, and the weather not being the usual NZ "Summer" trash of wind and rain, I took the Marina out for a quick spin, the first of the year.

The main goal here was to do some testing. I hadn't really driven the Marina since freshening the carb up, and upgrading the ignition system, and wanted to see that the issues I was having were resolved.

The biggest test was that I wanted to try heading up some hills and see how the engine responded. I've not been up any hills yet, so haven't really had a chance to put the engine under sustained load, and see how it likes it. Before redoing the ignition, I suspect it would've just cut out and not made it.

I planned a route, a 22km round trip. Enough time to get the engine warmed up before I hit the hill, and a wide enough road that if I have to bail, I can pull over and do a U-Turn.

My wife and I jumped in the Marina, and after a quick tweak of the idle (too low) and unsticking the choke jet again, we were off.

After a quick drive, we get to the bottom of the hill. Now, by normal standards, it's not that steep, but for a 52 year old car that's not seen a hill in at least 15+ odd years, it's Mt Everest.

Much to my surprise, the Marina just cruised up it with no fuss. My concern was for nothing. Being twisty, most of it was done in second gear, but third was also given a work out too. The engine pulled great, and the temps were stable the whole time.

The suspension was struggling a bit, the front really needs the telescopic conversion to control it, and the rear should get the new shocks fitted soon. Corners are best taken slowly.

I had my wife checking my speed against the indicated speed on GPS, and it seems my Speedo is reading about 10% low, so I've been speeding everywhere, oops!

Being out on the back roads gave me a chance, for the first time, to open it up a bit and see what the car was like at higher speeds.

 

The pancake filter really unleashes the carb intake sounds.

At 80kph, the car feels perfectly stable and cruises really well. At 100kph, It's not so good, everything starts to get a bit floaty, a "feature" I suspect is related to the front suspension being too soft. Basically, it's an old car, drive it slowly (at least until I sort the front suspension).

We pulled over for a quick check and to grab some photos. Everything was happy, no leaks, temps were good and the fan was working well to keep it under control.

It's a cool looking car, even in its current "ratrod" look.

I quite enjoy the reactions of people as I drive by. It seems yesterday the cyclists got the biggest kick out of seeing the Marina out and about, many stares, lots of smiles and one audible "Marina?!".

Over all, a very successful drive. We're getting closer to being brave enough to drive the car the 60km round trip to work...