[Mr Teddy Bear]

Keep this thread going I'm fascinated.

[Vulgalour]

You're in luck, I have a little update today.

Today, I coerced myself into going to the unit to do something on one of my cars and picked on the Rover. Just after leaving the house the rain turned to sleet and threatened to turn to snow, definitely not ideal for doing bodywork. By the time I got to the unit it was just rain again and Mike fired up the heater so the place was actually pretty comfortable for working in. Earlier this year at the house I was living in the Rover had been collecting more scratches in addition to the few it already had. It was annoying me and I'd got as far as putting the touch-up paint on and then completely lost my motivation to go further and my spare time to do anything about it because of the house move.






I know they don't look like much, but when they're all over the side of the car and you're picking more up weekly the car quickly starts to look really shabby. A couple of them were very deep too and looked deliberate given how much force would have been needed to gouge into the paint to the metal underneath. Funnily enough, since moving to the new house these scratches have stopped appearing and apart from collecting a dent in one rear door in a car park, the bodywork has been left alone.

Even though I'd already filled some of the scratches in, there were still more to do that I hadn't bothered with since being at the previous house. It's a case of painting the scratch, then carefully sanding it back with 1000 grit, then painting it again if needed... tedious stuff but worth it.


I'm only working above the bump strip for now and at this stage I've got the rear wing and rear door polished with the front door sanded where it's been touched up but not yet polished. No point doing the front wing as that's being replaced.


I was very impressed with the Meguiars Scratch X 2.0 which my brother put me on to, it takes a lot of the effort of the job out and gives a really, really good finish just for the initial pass. The fogging of sanded paint is cut out really quickly but it doesn't seem to obliterate the paint you want to keep on the panel. It's also much easier to clean up than Farecla G3 which tends to be difficult to get off unpainted plastics and even paint when it splatters and better on my hands too which were nowhere near as dry as usual after this sort of work.


There's more to do on this side of the car but for a daily driver in the winter it is perfectly acceptable as it is now and the worst of the unfinished scratch touch ups are gone. Better still, the thin white scratches on this side of the car are also now gone. Before packing up for the day I had a quick go at the bonnet which I'd partially resprayed but not finished. Same materials again and a power polisher to make life much, much easier and with very pleasing results so far. The colour match on the leading edge isn't perfect, Flame Red is a devil of a thing for that, but it's close enough to be acceptable.


I'm looking forward to getting the whole car sorted, this took me much less time than with previous materials so I'm happy to give it more attention when I have a bit more time. Fuel economy continues to impress, the last tank was a very surprising 31.6mpg for mostly urban driving, I think part of that is the short 50mph stretch between the new house and town allowing the car to warm up properly. When I'm doing any 50mph+ driving regularly the fuel gauge moves so little I've been worried it's broken a time or two now, I really am not used to this sort of economy from a car of this size.

In other news, my brother managed to swap the Xantia estate he bought back off me for an MG ZT saloon. On paper that's ridiculous, but in practice he's finding it more suitable for lugging all the family about because of the absurdly huge boot it has and he's getting an awful lot more enjoyment from driving the thing. He did the swap shortly after collecting a Proton Saga pick-up and a Daihatsu Applause so he's also got three cars now. It has left us in the awkward position of having a trailer and nothing to tow it with though.

[Vulgalour]

Not a picture update this time, but worth a read all the same as it reports on the general goings on with this car.

Last week, my housemate and I were heading to The South to visit friends. It was deemed cheaper to go in the Rover than in his Toyota Supra and since it should have been a straightforward trip to drop him off on the way down and pick him up on the way back I was okay with this. I should have checked the maps myself though, his estimate of a 4 hour journey ended up being 9! Thankfully, the Rover is the most comfortable car I've ever driven (suspension aside, Citroen and Austin have both beaten the Rover on that front with their fluid and gas systems) so apart from being grumpy about driving for so long it wasn't too bad.

That is until the M25 happened. The M25 with its bomb craters for potholes, one of which I hit so hard it put the tracking off on the Rover. When I got home and got it checked over 400 miles of horrible wheel-fighting later I discovered it was out by 11 degrees on the clobbered wheel! The return journey was a whopping 12 hours thanks to heavy traffic on the M25. It was not fun. We were restricted to 55mph on the way home, 65mph if I felt I could fight the wandering behaviour of the tracking being so far out but it was exhausting. Happily, I did get home after the 12 hour drive without pain of any sort, just tiredness as is to be expected, which is a first for me in any car.

After I'd had some sleep and recovered we went over to the tyre place to get the tracking fixed and they generously allowed me to get a look under the car while it was on the ramp. The mystery clonk appears to be the exhaust - which is practically brand new, still silver and still with stickers on - hitting the gear selector rods in a really particular way, everything else is nice and solid under there. Front driver's tyre has a flat spot and the front passenger wheel has a big old dent in it so that explains the vibration the car has always had that I'd put down to an unbalanced wheel.

The underside of the car is spotless. There isn't a speck of rust and it's all smartly and professionally by the looks of things, undersealed from nose to tail. I was seriously impressed with the condition underneath, easily the best car I've ever had in that regard. There are two tiny pinholes just appeared in the backbox that I want to replace anyway as I'd like twin pipes on instead of the funny single pipe but other than that I was seriously impressed.

With all of this the car is firmly cemented now as a keeper. It returned 44.4mpg on the run down and 47.5mpg on the run back over 650 miles in two days. I was comfortable for the duration, the car didn't use a drop of water (which is odd as it had been previously). I bang on about this car to everyone, it's impressed me so thoroughly at how competent, fun, frugal and comfortable it is. I am more than willing to throw money at it when I have it, this is a car that absolutely deserves it.

[RoverRevival]

Said it before so i'll say it again.

The only people who don't like rovers are the people who have never driven one.

[Vulgalour]

Should've bought one YEARS ago!

[crepello]

I'm just wondering how the tracking jumped so much. Presumably the track rods and ball-joints were sound when the tyre guy got under the car. Can't imagine the track rod stretching into yield. This leaves deformation of the subframe in the region of the lower arm mounting as a possibility. That would show up in the wheel camber, wouldn't it?

I once bought a subframe off eBay for 50p. It was listed as for a manual rack, which may be why nobody else wanted it. The seller explained he'd bought it for his, but his garage rejected it as it wouldn't fit his power rack. I got it home, spent ages cleaning and repainting it, then when I went to fit it in place of my disintegrating original, found it was for a power rack. I turned a nylon adaptor bush to fatten up my manual rack to suit, and that went in fine. When I got to putting the lower arms back in, I had a devil of a job with the nearside one. Comparing the bolt centres between both racks showed the replacement to be 10mm different to the original. So I kept the original as a reference, as I knew its entire in-service history. I got another recently, and that exactly matches the original in this respect. So that's the one now on the car outvoted then. It did have a graze of blue to the nearside, so I reckon it must have been clobbered sometime, although no seams were gaping.

It occurs to me you might now like to know the measurement between lower arm bolts. I'll take a rule when I next venture to the garage.

[Vulgalour]

I'm really not sure how it was so far out but a correction to the tracking saw it all good. The track rod ends were done fairly recently but before I got the car so it's possible that one wasn't tightened up fully and the pothole jarred it into a new position but nothing appeared to be bent or misaligned under the car, it was commented on how tidy and suprisingly good everything looked underneath given how shabby the top side looked after the massive 600ish mile trip. It certainly drives nicely now, I get no feeling anything is wrong.

----

Sorted out a little job today. Since I got the car the dash clock has always worked but is barely even visible so even though I set the time on it there wasn't much point. Recently, on here and on another forum I learned that this is usually a duff bulb and replacement is fairly easy. Here's a little how to on it. To the right of the trim (for RHD models anyway), ease a screwdriver (or in my case some scissors I found in a Princess I broke because I was too lazy to find a screwdriver) and use firm but steady pressure to pry the wooden trim free of the dashboard. Work your way along the top edge and you'll find it slowly comes free of the holding.


Here is the clock. The clip on the back needs disconnecting and this is very easy.


Was quite surprised that it was actual real wood rather than plastic, sign of quality there. I'm guessing the RHD stamp is because this is a right hand drive car. You can also see the spring clips that push into the slots in the dashboard which helps explain how this goes together and comes apart.




The back of the clock has a single twist-fit bulb. Mine had blown so we went out to get a replacement. Halfords wanted £2.50 for one bulb so we went to the local motor factors and got one for just £1.50 which is still more than I'd like to pay. I'm sure dash bulbs like this used to only be 10p or something. Blue bulb on the left is the old Osram one that was fitted, black one on the right is the new one that I've put in.


Before refitting I turned the ignition to on to check it was working and huzzah! I have a visible clock. Pleased about that. I have to reset the time as it's currently wrong.


Last job is to push the trim back into place, start with the right hand side first and push until it firmly clips into place. Satisfyingly, it sits better now than it did, particularly on the left hand side. Not a big job, but a satisfying one.

[crepello]

Most of the cost in these bulbs is the holder! It's possible to get the right size pea bulbs with wire tails and re-use the old holder. I don't remember even having to solder anything when I did it a few years ago.

[Vulgalour]

I kept the old bulb just in case, I'll have a go at dismantling it to save future expense.

---

Today was a fortuitous one because everything was finally in place for me to kit the Rover out with a full set of five alloys (I like matching spares). I'm really happy with them and the car rides nicely on them too. Next job will be figuring out how to lower the car and there's a few options available to me. Coilover kits I've found so far are way too expensive for what I'm wanting to achieve but more affordable options are shorter springs of the correct size and rating or getting the existing struts modified professionally (surprisingly, this is cheaper than a coilover kit). I only want to bring the car down 40-50mm just to improve the looks, I'm not after sports car action or slamming it to the floor.

Really got to sort out those bumper brackets to get rid of the sag.




The other job I wanted to do was get the boot trims removed. I've noticed things have been getting wet in the boot again and with the excessive amount of rain we've had lately I've started seeing standing water in the boot so it was time to investigate. Look, matching spare!


The interior panels come out really easily, especially since Mike invested in some plastic trim removal tools that mean you can pull out the fir tree buttons without damaging them (well, unless they've gone really brittle which thankfully they hadn't in this case). Both side panels have half an inch of sogginess on the bottom of them, the boot floor board is soaked again and the carpet is damp so that's all drying out in the house. The water is sitting in the corners of the boot as photographed.




The only place I can see it might be getting in is the vents that are hidden by the bumper, you can see in that last picture that there's some water staining from it to the wetness in the boot. The vents looked in good order when I removed the bumper previously and I don't especially want to block them up to stop this happening so I'm unsure what the best course of action might be here.

Is this is a known problem on the 400 perhaps? I know Rover are historically big fans of letting water into the boot, see any SD1 for reference.

[gbs100]

Looks good i like the wheels they suit it. What did you do with your old rims.