Rover 200 & 400 Owners Club

You feeling any better you old goat ?

Yes! And less of the old, please :P

Went on a little daytrip yesterday. Big thanks, once again, to Krujoe for being, well, Krujoe. If he were a stick of rock he'd have GOOD EGG written through him. The drive over highlighted on one particular section of B road that my suspension can make you seasick when the undulations are just so, it's the first time the improved suspension has really made me unhappy since doing it. Still, got us to the destination without drama other than that and being such a narrow car, even road-hogging SUVs and the like could be avoided on the narrow North Yorkshire lanes. When I got home I had a boot full of goodies and stuff.
20180325-01 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

One thing that did surprise me was how well the Rover acquitted itself clambering up into the slightly damp field. The route in is two slightly deeper grooves in the muddy grass with some strategic grip-giving rocks which was fine the last time I visited, but now we're sitting a little lower. Made it without a hitch, all the same. It was a lovely day for this sort of thing too, bright and clear and with a cool breeze. I barely did any work, Joe and Mike just got stuck in and bish-bash-bosh everything was out. I mostly just took some pretty pictures and pointed at what bits were needed.
20180325-02 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

20180325-03 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Joe's camera is better than mine, he took some better pictures, and caught me putting my work boots on.
20180325-04Krujoe by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

20180325-06Krujoe by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

20180325-05Krujoe by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

It really is a super location and a beautiful part of the world. I was jolly tired because of the clocks going forward and being up, effectively, three hours earlier than usual. That meant we didn't stay as long as we might and even though I thought I'd be okay to drive back, Mike did have to take over while I had a nap in the passenger seat. One bonus of this was that Mike got to confirm that some of the niggles, and some of the things I really enjoy about the car, weren't my imagination. Overall, his impression of the car was much the same as mine that it's a very nicely put together thing now, that the gearbox isn't quite as good as it could be and that about 60-65mph is the sweet spot for higher speed driving with anything higher being a bit of a dronefest from combined engine and wind noises. Very, very strange being a passenger in my own car, but Mike is a good enough driver that I could relax once he'd got used to the very light clutch.

The scavenged parts then:
20180325-07 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

1 pair red rear seat back/parcel shelf supports
1 pair green rear seat back/parcel shelf supports (just in case I man bits up the red ones)
1 pair rear arch plastic trims - the saloon trim is narrower because saloon seats are wider
1 pair rear seat back locating pins - these are spotwelded with a bracket to the inner arch, we salvaged a large piece so it can be attached as per factory
4 captive nuts in plate - the plate is also on the saloon, but has no holes or captive nuts. This allows us to drill the relevant holes in the saloon so the seat back hinge can be bolted down.
BONUS - pair Kenwood speakers in good shape.

We did learn that underneath the captive nut plate there are fuel lines running. None of us especially wanted to drop the fuel tank on the spare car so Mike very skillfully sliced the section needed out without blowing us up. I won't be reusing the plate itself that we cut out, it's purpose is to be a template so I can save time figuring out just where to drill holes and fix nuts. The same is true of the inner arch mounted pegs. The base of the back seat is much easier as that lines up in the saloon without effort so there was no need to salvage any pieces from the hatchback body.

Actually converting the saloon body won't be that challenging. A couple of spotwelds and a couple of captive nuts are all I need to add. The large metal brackets need trimming down to lose the parcel shelf supporting bit, but the holes in the are identical to those in the braces already fitted to the saloon, so they're a bolt-in swap once the excess is trimmed off. The thing that might make the job a long one is dropping the petrol tank might be a necessity just to do it all safely so there are no lines or tank at risk of getting accidentally drilled through when sorting out the captive nuts for the seat hinges. Once this is all done, it should look perfectly factory, especially if I don't mess up trimming the red brackets which are an identical colour to the rest of the car.

You're probably wondering what's happening in here. Nothing. That's what. Two reasons, the first being repairing the rot on the Princess' front wing and driver's door, a job that got rather more involved than intended. The other reason is that I wanted to stagger the MoT dates of the Rover and Princess, so it made sense to take it off the road for a little bit.

Minor annoyance with the Rover is that I forgot to regularly start and drive it over the last couple of months so the battery went flat, as batteries do when you've got things like alarms. I meant to get one of those trickle charge solar panels and completely forgot. End result is now the keyfob won't talk to the car, even when I tried hooking jump leads to another battery. So I took the battery off, stuck it on charge, and when I next get chance I'll plonk that back on the car and see if I can get the keyfob/immobiliser to behave again. It's my one bugbear with this car, really, since it's nice to have the security but not if it locks you out of using your own car. EKA code doesn't work on my car either, it just results in a single horn beep rather than turning the immobiliser off.

If I can get the keyfob to behave again I'll see about making a start on some interior work on the Rover over the weekend, I've got doors I can be stripping down to build a good set, after all, so I should really be doing that in readiness for welding once the new gas bottle arrives and I've finished repairing the Princess panels.

I've been rather distracted by the Princess and having that as my daily for a while so the Rover got somewhat neglected. As a result, it flattened its battery and then refused to talk to the keyfob when trying to jump start the car with said Princess. Took the battery off, recharged it and left the battery off the car for 24 hours. Today, after a bit of a dance of keyfob button pressing and manually locking/unlocking the doors it finally decided to play nice and talk to the keyfob again.

I then went for a bit of a blat around the yard because the brakes had stuck on a bit. Of course it's perfectly fine now and talking to the keyfob normally, I shall just have to remember to give it a little excercise a little more frequently so this doesn't happen again. It's looking rather sorry for itself too since the yard gets fairly dusty and you can see the rust creeping back on the door bottoms that I need to sort with the spares I acquired a while ago. I've almost finished the jobs I need to do on the Princess so once those are done I can get stuck in on this one. I'm rather uncomfortably aware of the time limits between now and moving house but I should be okay, nothing that I need to do is too difficult, it just needs me to have some indoor time and space to work through.



Nugget has been keeping the Rover company so it hasn't got lonely.

Loving this thread (which I’ve just read in a oner - well , there was nowt on the telly!). You must know every inch of that car now after all the work you’ve done to it! Keep up the good work!

Glad I could inform and entertain! There's not much I don't know on this car now.

Hey look, an update!

Today I finally got to start work on the Rover. It's been a long old wait to get here. I started by emptying everything out of the car and then cracked on working out what order I needed to remove the various trims and what I could get away without removing. First was to remove all of the boot trims, since they all overlap and join onto bits I need to remove anyway. The two braces that support the saloon rear seat back unbolted easily except for one bolt that sheared. This isn't a problem as that particular bolt isn't needed for the folding seats.

20180806-02 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Front seats were easy to remove, suprisingly so for a modern car, and the instructions for disarming the seat belt pretensioners were clear and easy to follow too. The seats themselves were one of the easiest sets I've ever removed from a car, so that was a satisfying thing. With the rear seats, boot trims, and rear seat support braces removed, even more broken glass appeared as did quite a few dead insects. The mounting points for the folding seat brackets all appear to be in place in the car already so it looks like it's going to be a very easy job to swap them over.

20180806-03 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

The saloon carpet is a shorter than the hatchback carpet as normally the rear seat is never moved. Fortunately, the carpet I dyed is from a hatchback so it will cover that bodywork you can see here that was under the rear seat.

20180806-01 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Down the side of the driver's seat, wedged between the seat runner and carpet, was some treasure. There was also an old twisted barley sweet, which wasn't really treasure. It's a spot you can't get to with the seats in place, or even see really.

20180806-04 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

I've got the door cards, centre console, and carpet to remove now. Once that's done I can get the car on the lift and get the petrol tank off so I can weld in the captive nuts for the folding rear seat base. On the saloon, they didn't add the captive nuts or drill the plate it goes through, the shell is otherwise identical. I didn't have enough time to remove the rest of the interior I needed to today, so instead I hit the arch with tools to see how bad the rust was. Happily, it's actually a smaller repair than I expected and the repair panel I've got is much larger than I need for this area.

20180806-05 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

More when I do some.

Well get doing some then !

I did some more. First job was to finish stripping out the interior and to do that I had to start with the centre console. Mine differs from the HBOL because it's got the higher spec armrest centre console. To remove this you pop off a little plastic cover (annoying cigarette burn on mine) to get to the two bolts at the front.

20180808-01 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Then lever out the insert for the arm rest which allows access to the bolts hidden in there, specifically the outer two to the left of the second photograph. With those bolts undone, the whole piece just slides back and off.

20180808-02 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

20180808-03 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Then I removed the front half of the centre console which is held in with two easy to find screws on either side, and the gear knob that you just unscrew, before lifting the whole panel away. This gives easy access to the carpet which can then be removed from the car. With that removed, it reveals some very dense sound proofing foam which explains why the cabin is so much more refined than you might expect. I noticed the passenger front one was a bit wet There's no obvious sign of water ingress here and it's not a huge amount of water, but it's obviously coming in from somewhere. You can just about see it if you look carefully, quite difficult to photograph.

20180808-04 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

That said, the floors were exceptionally clean inside, I was a little scared I might find some rot hiding but they actually still look factory fresh which I'm delighted about. I also found a very shiny 1p coin dated 1994, the year of the car's manufacture, underneath the carpet underlay. Coincidence, or did someone put it there when the car was built?

20180808-05 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Because of the water in the footwell and the shocking state of my windscreen I decided to use some of my savings to get it replaced. I didn't bother going through the insurance because there's no saving to be had, my excess is about the same as a new screen fitted. I'm pretty sure this car has had a windscreen in its past too and I'm wondering if it could be letting a bit of water in. I've gone with a local fitter that did Mike's Supra windscreen and they did such a good job I trust they'll be well able to do this one. To help them, and so I can give it a clean up, I removed the trim that goes along the bottom of the windscreen and the wiper arms. I'm going to freshen the wiper arms up since they're looking a bit grey.

20180808-06 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

The door cards were all removed too. I'll be salvaging the wood trim from them because the wood on my new cards doesn't match my dashboard wood. All of my original interior is very sun-bleached, including the wood, so I'll stain and varnish the original inserts anew so they all match properly.

20180808-07 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Then Mike and I got the car on the lift and prepared to remove the fuel tank. What horrors would be hiding, we wondered.

20180808-08 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

After undoing the tank straps, there's an assortment of pipes to disconnect on the passenger side of the car and an awkward electrical connector on the driver's side. Happily, the tank was empty enough that it didn't spill more than a few drops of fuel and wasn't too heavy.

20180808-09 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

The tank removed it revealed that the underside of the car was as exceptionally clean here as everywhere else. There's some minor surface corrosion on the exhaust side that I'll clean and paint and then all of this will get a good smear of underseal to keep it this way.

20180808-10 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

20180808-11 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

20180808-12 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Likewise the tank is in reasonable condition and will also get a clean and fresh underseal where required.

20180808-13 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

The last job of the day was to load the Princess with all the plastic trim so I can clean it at home. I also found what I hope is the source of the occasional odd smell in the car which is that something had been spilled down the side of the centre console a long time ago, before I owned the car, and got into the carpet in a spot you can't clean without removing the seats.

20180808-14 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Next visit to the unit should see the tank refitted, Friday the new windscreen is fitted, and I could be ready for new MoT as early as the end of next week.

On the left, an original saloon seat brace. On the right, a cut-down hatchback seat brace. They're similar enough in the right places that they are interchangable with some jiggery-pokery of the hatchback piece. The modified hatchback piece also bolts into the existing fixing points in the saloon body, as I hoped it would.

20180809-01 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

With the modified brackets fitted, you'd be hard pressed to see what I've done, which is perfect.

20180809-04 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

For the seat back bracket, we had a look under the car and found that two of the captive nut holes are pre-drilled in the strengthening plate which made lining up for the other two holes really easy, especially since we had the piece cut from the donor hatchback to help make sure all the holes were in the proper places. This was a pleasant surprise as this was potentially one of the more difficult bits to get right.

20180809-02 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Once drilled out, the bolts could be dropped through from the top, bolted from below (I hadn't welded the nuts in yet, since we were trial fitting) and the seat catches aligned properly. Everything fell into place with minimal fettling, it was surprisingly easy.

20180809-03 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

The rear seat base needed two holes drilling for the captive nuts, only afterwards did we realise you can't actually get to the other side of this so instead the holes were made big enough to accept the bolt heads and they'll become captive bolts instead. Alignment on this was also easy since there's cut-outs in the sound-proofing foam in exactly the right place and the seat base sits in the saloon's seat base location perfectly, probably because my suspicion that the shell is identical up to the rear suspension turrets is correct.

20180809-05 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

I didn't get as far as welding in the captive bolts for the seat base today, and only three of the captive nuts decided they wanted to stay welded, so I'll go back and do those tomorrow probably. I also haven't fitted the seat back side pegs yet that serve to allow the seat back to fold down without going all wobbly sideways, but again, that's not too bad a job to do and they look like they'll go straight in on the car easily enough. However, enough fixing points were secured that the seat could be trial fitted and I can say with confidence that you can indeed fit a hatchback seat in a saloon body and it works rather well.

20180809-06 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Nice work Angyl. Impressed with your determination.