Rover 200 & 400 Owners Club

Great to see an update on this legendary car

Wow. A car thats been off the road longer than mine ( was)

Mine has been off the road since 2000

Been a bit longer than I'd hoped since the last update, the arrival of our first child at the end of 2021 meant I needed to complete some essential tasks on the house refurb ready for the arrival and all the left over building materials ended up in the garage, largely under, in and on top of the 420 So over the course of the last summer I spent what spare time I had tidying up the garage so that I could actually start working on the car again when I wanted to, so this is where I got to at the end of the summer.


Today I finally started actually working on the car again. Today's objective was to remove the entirety of the rear suspension so that it can be refreshed and fitted with new bushes. I have some new H&R lowering springs and a set of NOS Koni Reds to go on it too. This is where I got to by the end of the day. Still got a few parts to separate ready to go off for powder coating, but it's all off the car as planned.




Unfortunately in the process of stripping the rear end down I encountered a few unexpected nasty surprises.

I've got some rust manifesting at the trailing edge of the nearside rear arch.


There was a large bulge in the underseal in the area around the rear offside seatbelt mount. Curiosity got the better of me and I started poking and revealed this delightful hole *sigh*


While removing the two trailing arm bush bolts on the offside the outboard bolt spun freely, so the presumably captive nut has broken and is spinning freely meaning I can't get the bolt out at this stage. To remove the arm I ended up cutting the trailing arm pin - thankfully the steel used is quite soft and was easy to cut with a hacksaw.


This is what is still left to remove from the car - more unexpected holes here too


Finally, while removing the rear lower arm from the body, the captive nut and associated reinforcement plate broke away so that will need repairing now too.



Once the front suspension, subframes and fuel tank are all off the car, it will have to go off for an unexpected trip to the body shop to sort the floorpan, there's no way it will pass an MOT in its current state. Given that it has never had any work on the floorpan, I shouldn't complain too much, it is a 31 year old car with 213k miles on it after all!

Ouch.

I’ve had a similar experience with my 416. A couple of pokes at suspect areas of bodywork has cost me a fortune over the last few years.
Still worth it in the end
Good luck with all the work.

It is great to see some updates Tom.

Nice update Tom!

Do you have any experience with a welder? Will you tackle these jobs yourself?

Spent this morning clearning some the last bits of the garage around the front of the 420 so that I can strip the front suspension off it tomorrow.

James3990 wrote: ↑Sat Jan 20, 2024 12:24 am Do you have any experience with a welder? Will you tackle these jobs yourself?

Never done it and even if I wanted to it makes more sense to ship the car off to a bodyshop to sort the welding so it gets done quicker and then in parallel in can be recommissioning the engine and getting all the suspension components refreshed ready to throw back on it when it returns, otherwise this will just take longer and longer to put back on the road.

Great to see that there's still life in the old dog