Its been a while since we last posted about the restoration of our project car so here is an update on the work that we have done recently.
Although the chassis was in pretty good condition, the rear fascia mounting plate was pretty badly corroded and the rear fascia mounting studs had 'blown' out of the fascia.
We made up some mounting pads by welding studs to some flat bar and bonded them to the fascia with PU adhesive, although it took a bit of time, we thought that it looked much better than drilling through and putting in nuts and bolts with plastic caps.
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We also had a new mounting plate made and folded out of stainless steel.
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We then moved on to the interior headlining, although the rest of the interior in the car was pretty good, the headlining was in a pretty poor condition as you can see by the photos below.
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Here are the various stages of reupholstering;
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Next it was time to deal with the slightly tired looking front and rear fascias, we decided to prepare and paint them on the car to avoid damaging the new paint.
It took Barry and me a couple of days all in all to do this and we were fortunate in so much as we used one of our industrial units for the weekend to carry out the work, I don't think we would have wanted to do this in the close confines of the garage.
The paint system we used consisted of a primer, topcoat and then a clear laquer, we are very pleased with the results;
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So we then put the car back together and it's starting to look pretty good so we commence a series of 'shakedown' test drives and for some reason the auto gearbox decides to malfunction (stuck in third gear) further investigation revealed a series of different faults with the auto governor computer, wiring and the solenoids.
It would seem that the main cause of the problem was the PO at some time had removed the auto loom wiring from the car by cutting the cable ties above the gearbox and had inadvertently cut into the cable which in time had caused the computer to fail.
At this point we would like to pass on our thanks to Nick T for his help given to Barry and me over the phone and What'sApp in repairing the governor computer.
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- Circuit board removed from the housing
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- New components
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Having repaired the circuit board and reassembled everything we took the car for another test drive and although this time the diagnostic indicator lights were showing that electrically the governor was functioning correctly it became apparent that one of the solenoids was sticking so we take it all apart again!
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The solenoids were removed from the gearbox, flushed out, checked and refitted.
Success! the car drives lovely with nice smooth gear change but as we know, every silver lining has a cloud with these things, and when we are on quite a long test drive and we notice that there is a slight chugging coming from the exhaust?
Further investigation proves that the right hand manifold is blowing so we bite the bullet and go about removing the offending manifold, this leads to two of the studs snapping off and we have to surgically remove them.
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All boxed back up and now it runs a treat so we take it off for the 'final' job of regassing the airconditioning.
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The aircon now blows as cool as a cucumber so that's it, a final clean off and the car is ready for it's new owner after a 16 month long restoration period and we estimate well over 1000 hrs spent on it. It's just as well that this is just a hobby and we don't do it for a living!
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