Back out at the car today with the owner of the workshop, whom we shall call Mr. Herald from now on because he has a Triumph Herald...
I've bought a fuck load of shit for it recently...
New suspension bushes all round.
Payen head gasket set
Top/bottom end gasket sets
Timing chain tensioner/gaskets
Valve guides + stem seals
Cam followers
Oil pump
Coolant hoses
Brake flexis all round
30W running in oil
2x 20w50 mineral for the first two changes
Paint (twice)
I think I've now officially spent more money on the resto than I did buying the car in the first place. I'm gonna' tot it all up when it's done and not a minute sooner! ?
So. To recap the car looked something like this a couple of weeks ago after significant prodding
It now looks like this:
Yup, first bunch of filler now on the passenger side and in the process of being sanded back. There is a lot of sanding to go mind, there should only be a tiny skim to even out the hammer marks by the time it's done... The driver's side still needs a couple of tweaks before it's ready for filler. Here is is pre-filler to prove it isn't sculpted from P38:
A fairly important thing to note here is that because the metal left on the car was so corroded there was essentially nothing left to work from. The lower corners of the front wings were entirely misshaped filler, the headlight retaining structure was gone entirely, as were half the bumper mounts. All the new metal work has been made by Mr. Herald from scratch and working from photos online because there was either nothing left or what was left was bodge...
It also appears that either there were a couple of varieties of front valance or that the tooling got so worn out the later cars were different to early ones...
The leading edges of the front chassis legs were also entirely replaced, as were several panels behind the valance - I cunningly failed to take any pictures.
In engine terms progress has also been made. A fortnight ago a meet-up of automotive tinkerers from the Scottish contingent of Autoshite forums was organised to take engines apart and such... We travel in style.
The old engine needed it's Dolly specific bits removing so we set about that first.
The timing gear was... A bit worn. The cover was... A touch sludgy...
The replacement engine was put on a stand and then we realised we had a problem...
In 1970 the Triumph 1300 engine was significantly changed to share it's bearings with the 6-cylinder cars. This made them less rev-happy and caused premature failure of bearings. This meant there was also a change for the timing cover and crank seal, with later cars have a larger diameter and a much bigger pulley.
The Dolly being a '77 was running a "large journal" engine, the replacement is a mid 1960s "small journal" engine from a 1300fwd. This meant I needed an appropriate timing cover/seal, which I was lacking. The 1300fwd also had a taper on the crank, due to problems with very early examples throwing their pulley off at speed... Indeed, the layout on the fwd is entirely different as the flywheel and starter is also at the front of the engine, as to not foul the gearabox!
Thankfully I'd picked up a Herald 12/50 1200cc engine for free a while back "just in case", and these feature the same diameter crank and use the same timing cover as the "small journal" 1300 units, so I had the required parts "in stock"!
I'll still have to use the smaller 1300fwd pulley as there is a taper on the end of the crank, but this should be fine provided I change the size of the water pump and alternator pulleys accordingly.
Mr. Herald has rebuilt the cylinder head.
It has new valve guides fitted and a mixture of it's original valves and spares from Mr.Herald's Herald re-lapped in. He's also removed a significant amount of casting flash and superfluous metalwork in the inlets for better air flow!
We pulled the cam out and found that there was some scoring to the end-most surface so it was swapped for the Herald's original cam as well, which also featured slightly more lift. We drenched it in assembly lube before fitting.
With that decided the gasket and front plate were fitted and the end float on the cam checked - We're in spec!
I checked the torques on all the main/big end caps and fitted the new oil pump. Then we checked the end float on the crank. It's within tolerance but not by a huge margin.
At this point we shall mention paint.
I'd been deliberating on a shade for ages and had come to the conclusion I wanted BRG, specifically Triumph's own variant. As per this:
There was a 2k paint kit on eBay for "BRG" from a supplier in the Midlands but not specifying an exact shade, so I phoned up and enquired and the bloke on the phone said that although they did have a generic "BRG" shade if I specified the colour code in a message with the order it could be mixed up and that they did do the correct Leyland BRG. Belter.
The paint arrived. It's labelled as "BRITISH RACING GREEN RAL6009" and is a putrid shade of very nearly brown and a consistency of water. GR9.
I'd ordered it straight to the workshop so the first time I actually saw it in person was today. It was just as horrible as it looked in pictures. So we went down to a local paint supplier and deliberated over swatches for far too long before picking an appropriate looking shade. They tap the code into the computer "it comes back as Leyland Brooklands Green". After all that we'd managed to pick out
the exact colour the had been when it rolled out of the factory...
On the scrap plate to the left is the RAL6009, the paint on the tin lid is BL Brooklands and the paint on the car is... Something random it's been sprayed in the past. One thing is for sure and it's that it'll look ace in the proper colour!
By the time we got back from the paint shop it was packing up time so work shall continue tomorrow. I think the plan is to have the engine assembled so it doesn't get filled up with filler dust during the sanding marathon...
Due to personal issues with Mr Herald's family I couldn't work on the car myself last week so had a nice weekend off... Working on this Morris Oxford (owned by the chap who dailies the Seat Toledo above).
I certainly keep myself busy these days.
