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Post by pyoorkate on May 16, 2009 16:11:36 GMT
Well, I thought it was about time Vixy got a thread to herself, frilly round the edges as she is, since she's been heading to-and-from Kathryn's work every day with her she's won the right to stay part of the family. That and I'm annoyingly fond of them. They're quite fun - and when things have gone wrong they've got me home. Unlike the Viva which was fond of expiring in the least convenient place. Anyhow, here's some pics of 'er: Anyhow, I spent some time on the Vario today, apart from a prolonged fit of swearing when I realised I'd misattached the cover at the end (since the book states it needs to be done on the flat, I didn't have the car up on ramps, and the whole adjustment experience was one which made me want a lift) it went really smoothly (heh) - and she's much quieter at speed, and take up of drive seems better - more even, if that's sensible. Kathryn also reckoned she was perkier, but that might just be my driving... One thing that amazed me was just how gooder condition that vario area is in: It looked (apart from the layer of rubber filings) almost new. It's especially odd to look at 'cos the sills have been patched a few times, and the back of the car's a bit frilly... And it's not just the edges that are frilly, unfortunately... That hotspot pipe's mostly gun-gum now Anyhow, next week (since the drums won't come off for me) she's off to my local pet garage to have the brake cylinders changed on the back. I sourced two from e-bay (20 quid as opposed to 120..) - I wasn't in too much of a hurry, but then the other cylinder (which had not shown any external signs of leakage) decided to start gently dripping brakefluid out the drum... Ah well, Kathryn can take Jejy and I'll take the MZ...slowly.
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Post by dafdaffer on May 16, 2009 17:18:55 GMT
i think that i may have spare rubber bits for the end of the bumper. nice to see the pair in white
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Post by pyoorkate on May 16, 2009 21:10:24 GMT
I've got the rubber bit - it was knocked off by a cyclist (apparently) while the car was still at the garage in London (before I picked it up). I've still not managed to get one of these things to stay on properly, I think I just lack the strength to get the rubber fully on to the metal, so haven't yet tackled the one that's missing from Vixy. The one on Jejy is held on with duct tape... Macplaxton - at only 21k miles, and garaged, she's probably not been washed that much!
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Post by pyoorkate on May 30, 2009 7:37:13 GMT
Well, she's back from the garage - apparently the brakes are a bit soft (probably need more bleeding...again), and they informed me that she wasn't the easiest to get the hubs off - in fact, even having borrowed my hub-puller they found it somewhat of a struggle. But she now sports two non-leaky wheel cylinders. Anyone know anywhere in Slough that does brake-shoe relining, out of interest? And, I know I asked this before - but I've been unable to locate the post and was silly enough not to write it down - but anyone know the paint-code for the DAF white these 44s of mine are? Only I've got a door to spray
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Post by pyoorkate on Jun 1, 2009 20:22:44 GMT
Ta very much for that reference number...
And no, I know of no Howard..
[Should I buy a welder? I'm going to have to fork out around 100 quid for whathisface to do the welding on the floor for the other car for the MOT, but I'm (hoping) to move to Canada at the end of the year and thus any welder should ideally do 110v/240v, and I've no idea where I'll be living so it'll have to go into storage...]
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spunkymonkey
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Post by spunkymonkey on Jun 1, 2009 20:34:10 GMT
You should definately buy a welder at some point, Kate. At £100 or so a time for repairs - and there'll always be something else to do - they don't take very long at all to pay for themselves. From what I've seen, though, prices the other side of that big swimming pool tend to be a lot lower than here so it may be worth thinking about waiting till you know where you'll be. If you do decide to get one here there are (I believe) a couple in the Clarkes range that are dual voltage - check www.machinemart.co.uk . You can always buy elsewhere but they do list more comprehensive specs than most sites.
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Post by pyoorkate on Jun 3, 2009 20:37:16 GMT
Well, I have to admit to feeling terribly defeated today. Vixy wouldn't start for Kathryn yesterday, so today we went down in Jejy - having diagnosed that the choke cable retaining ring had come loose at the steering column end, reattached and did it up sufficiently to close the choke, she started (somewhat unwillingly) and I headed home (in Vixy,) leaving Jejy, (ironically the more reliable of the two cars) with Kathryn. Vixy *still* won't do over 65 - have sorted but don't have a new exhaust for her yet so she's attrociously noisy; I think the first set of clutch shoes that engage are worn*, I suspect slippage - she's dead slow to pull away until revs get quite high... and she's running like crap, tbh. I was going to pull her off the road this evening, but it turns out that, to top it off, Kathryn couldn't get Jejy to start (I'm hoping that she pulled out the choke because Vixy needs choke to start, well, most of the time, and Jejy...well, I've never needed the choke except when it's been really cold). So after a disasterous (awful) shift I'm going to eat dinner and then we're going to have to take Vixy to get Jejy, and pray I can coax Jejy into starting and we can head home I *really* don't know where to go with Vixy though, now I've got new plugs in I'll see if she's still running rich, we do get some sort of afterfire - but I'm not sure how much of that is just the enormous hole after the first silencer (essentially the rest of the exhaust is mostly ornamental) - yeah, so, really this is just a whine and a - I'll feel better tomorrow (assuming we get Jejy home) and perhaps this weekend attempt a really thorough look over her. Difficult, though, because Rebecca remains immobile on the driveway * There are two speeds of engagement, aren't there?
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spunkymonkey
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Post by spunkymonkey on Jun 3, 2009 21:04:20 GMT
You need to coax her along to Lichfield at the start of July and we'll do a collective sort-out on her for the punters' entertainment ;D
Oh, and yes - there are two speed for the clutch. First stage engages around 1000 rpm, second around 2200.
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Post by pyoorkate on Jun 4, 2009 9:27:25 GMT
...and the judder came back today (when we went to retrieve Jejy, who promptly oiled her plugs en-route home; not exactly surprising given how much oil she's been burning recently). Bringing her to Lichfield...*grins*. I'd love to make it to a meet; depends on my shifts and patience... Travelling with a peak top speed of 65 is a bit....painful. Hopefully, Kathryn'll make it home with her this evening and then I can give her a good going over this weekend. Hopefully I'll be feeling a bit less negative about the whole thing by then!
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spunkymonkey
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Post by spunkymonkey on Jun 4, 2009 10:35:17 GMT
With Betty, more than 65 is pushing it anyway and she'll be driving down through the Welsh mountains so no sympathy there They doaccept entries on the day, btw, but it costs £5 instead of £3 if you just turn up
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pauldaf44
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Post by pauldaf44 on Jun 4, 2009 10:53:43 GMT
I must say Gladys will go faster but I don't I tend to stick to 60 she seems to like that speed and I am pretty sure I wont be going at that speed over the welsh mountains either. Our cars are quite elderly now and need to be treated with a bit of respect.
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Post by pyoorkate on Jun 4, 2009 21:17:11 GMT
Bah, I've never been one for respect. Insanely regular servicing and careful maintenance, but never one for mollycoddling.
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pauldaf44
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Post by pauldaf44 on Jun 4, 2009 21:27:19 GMT
Working an insanely temporamental Fiat Uno that had nearly 200,000 miles on the clock and could take 2 hours to start and would stall and flood a traffic lights if you weren't carefull tends to give you a kind of manic respect for anything that is old and doing what it is supposed to. That Uno was really several years past its sell by date and in a lot worse condition than the DAF and it broke my heart to see it go to the scrappie after it blew its cylinder head. I have found that if you treat a car with respect it seems to go wrong less.
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Bob Scrivens
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Ex owner of the green machine
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Post by Bob Scrivens on Jun 5, 2009 2:04:15 GMT
Hi Kate With both your cars some think is not right in the engines department. I would recommend starting with isolating the engine from the rest of the car i.e. take the vacum pipe off the manifold, and then block off the manifold with a bit of tube and a bolt stuck in the end. Get the engine to run and start with THIS SET UP. If you can not get this to work right you will have to look a bit deeper i.e compressions or carburetter fuel levels. If you need a bit more advise put a message on my PM and I can give you a call.
Bob.
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Post by dafdaffer on Jun 5, 2009 8:26:54 GMT
Kate, i have a center box that you can have, it needs to be repaired as one of the tubes broke away because the engine mounting became loose on Gladys, i will try and take it work to get it repaired, Ester has got a brand new one on the front which may go up for sale if i go stainless, ester currently has a home made system strait through with a maxi tail box, it goes much better now, before i removed the old center section which had no baffles in it was low on power and would never tick over correctly fast or slow.
Paul
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Post by pyoorkate on Jun 5, 2009 18:44:52 GMT
Paul - that's a possibility. Vixy's got a bizzare exhaust on; and currently a hole the size of the exhaust, more or less, in the front silencer (essentially where the pipe exits, the whole area around that has given up; the two supporting metal bits are just about clinging on to rusty metal).
Does the engine need some back-pressure from the exhaust then?
John - I cruise between 65 and 70 all the way to work (unless I'm late, then I'm a bit quicker); Jejy seemed pretty happy at that speed; Vixy however won't always get to 70, indeed today she was struggling to hit 65...
Paul - I've driven a Minor for the last 7 years (100k miles and counting), and before that a Mk 1 golf and a Yugo 45. I've never had any real problems with my approach (apart from the gearbox catastrophe in the Minor* which I knew was coming and am still 'waiting for a part' from the 'engineering' company who are reconning the gearbox) - which is to get them as close to as-new mechanical condition and treat them as such. I'll nurse cars home (like Jejy and the sickly Viva), but when they're well and being regularly serviced they're driven rapidly, but with respect.
* And the Viva which I could never get right, but it was a heap.
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Post by dafdaffer on Jun 5, 2009 22:46:16 GMT
i will get it repaired for you, let me know if you want to come to litchfield, there should be spaces plus support and bits etc
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Post by pyoorkate on Jun 7, 2009 14:48:46 GMT
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Post by pyoorkate on Jun 10, 2009 2:39:36 GMT
Augh! Just to round off the list of unfortunates, the clutch shoes are - I suspect - dead. She's been sounding like they were slipping a bit (a lot) and I'd been hoping that she'd make it through this week of nights - but on the way to work tonight I got that sound of 'metally scrapes on starting to move' and the jerk on pulling away Hired a car for the rest of the week (3 cars! I've got 3 cars and not one is roadworthy ). Looking forward to a busy week of DAFing next week :-)
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Post by pyoorkate on Jun 11, 2009 0:47:35 GMT
Yeah, bit of a nightmare... Mog's off the road waiting for suspension parts that are currently out of stock and have been for a year (King pins, two of). MZ (1) is off the road, MOT expired and I am building up the other one, so I don't want to reMOT this one. MZ(2) is meant to be being transported to Slough, but the bike-moving-people haven't moved it yet, or rung me. Vixy - No clutch, knackered exhaust, not running rihgt Jejy - No rings, no compression, needs new clutch drum fitting, new shoes fitting, new inlet manifold.... Busy week. Oh, and just to make things really shiny, the shower's started to leak ((
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daf44
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Post by daf44 on Jun 17, 2009 21:46:35 GMT
hi kate. this is slightly off topic, but if you are looking for moggy parts ring MOOR PARTS in devon 01769573525. it is a small garage in a very small, country town, in the middle of nowhere. BUT he used to be a british leyland dealership and bought the place when british leyland was bought out, complete with stock. last time i was in there a few years ago i wanted a steering bush for a mini. he knew exactly where the box of bushes was and showed me the price marked on the box. 1s2d. for those too young to recognise it , the price is in shillings and pence, pre-decimal. he told me that the box had been there since 1967. my cousin has a minor as well, and bought brake parts off the shelf last year. this place is just as likely to have a pair of kingpins on the shelf that he bought in the 70s. he will probably do mail order, but if there is a problem i can get my cousin to buy the parts there and post them. ring and ask. let me know what happens. paul44
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Post by pyoorkate on Jul 6, 2009 16:01:10 GMT
Argh! I just had a call from the garage - they put 'er back together over the weekend and she's not disengaging the clutch - I advised them to take the engine out and check the clutch again - I'm assuming they've assembled it wrongly*, but is there anything else I should be getting them to check?
* Although the shoes that went off to be reconditioned were a bit rusty - could they be sticking badly enough to cause a problem? It seemed unlikely to me...
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Post by dafdaffer on Jul 6, 2009 18:37:08 GMT
are linings the correct thickness? if they are thicker they wont disengage, or the springs could be wrong way around. with the engine off see if you can turn the engine without the car moving or turn the prop. this could meant that they are too thick if you cant.
Paul
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Post by pyoorkate on Jul 6, 2009 21:24:14 GMT
They're made the same thickness as the ones on the other DAF (1/8") - and the other DAF's fine... I think he may have screwed up the spring positioning. He said he'd recheck the diagram with the engine out tomorrow - and if he can't spot anything wrong he'll give me a shout before putting it together so I can check it over
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Bob Scrivens
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Post by Bob Scrivens on Jul 6, 2009 23:38:07 GMT
Hi Kate If the clutch will not disengage it is either the engine idle speed to high, springs fitted wrong, linings too thick or the clutch bearing damaged. Clutch drum should be free after fitting to the engine.
Bob.
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Post by pyoorkate on Jul 8, 2009 9:46:07 GMT
I got a phonecall from them yesterday apologising, he said that despite him checking twice, drawing a diagram before he took them off, and checking in the book, he still put them on wrong. It's fixed now and she's back... 'cept I noticed as I got up to around 35 there's a knocking noise - I'm not sure if it's the exhaust (which is larger than normal) fouling against the body (it sounded and felt like it might be that) or if it's something else. If it's something else she'll have to go back for them to work out what they've done, but I suspect since she's got a 46 silencer (with the shorter end) that it may have moved the whole exhaust forward about an inch, and it may be knocking. The O-rings that support it were pretty knackered too, so maybe a new pair of them...
She's also really unwilling to start moveing, which she was before the new clutch went in - I'm not sure if that's mixture or timing related, but I guess that gives me something to do with the weekend... Once she's going she's fine. Not as nippy as t'other one, but not bad. But starting is a bit painful. With the knocking noise I didn't really want to take her out on the motorway tho', so I'm not sure if we've gained any improvement in top speed...
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Post by dafdaffer on Jul 8, 2009 20:08:20 GMT
possible that the engine was not in the mountings correctly when the previous exhaust was fitted, after i found that my mountings were loose and tightened them up it use to bang on the floor.
the other thing is without having the hot spot pipes and the old clutch shoes it would have been easier to pick up engine revs without them biting so now you will have the biting point where it has no power. you can normally get away with slightly adjusting the kick down to eliminate this, or timing may help
44 and 46 box should be the same
Paul
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Post by dafdaffer on Jul 8, 2009 20:11:01 GMT
oh and make sure that the vac pipes are all in the correct place.
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spunkymonkey
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Post by spunkymonkey on Jul 8, 2009 20:27:42 GMT
And try setting it to "winter" on the aircleaner - with no hotspot the warm air intake helps quite a lot (although you lose a little on economy)
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Post by pyoorkate on Jul 11, 2009 11:44:04 GMT
Okay, so I've replaced the vac pipes today without making her actually move any better. What happens is the engine revs rise to the biting point on the clutch and then a little further and then resolutely stay there. It is, indeed, like trying to pull away in 4th. She is, at this point, undrivable. On several occasions I've had to have a run-up just to get her on the driveway (slight incline) and even turning around the circle at the end of the road is incredibly slow (think minutes to get from stationary to moving). As I said I've changed the vacuum pipes without success - and unfortunately I've lent my manuals to the garage (both of them, I know...I should have kept one), so can anyone suggest how to adjust the kickdown. As a side point - I had a little dink with the two tubes that go down to the varios - the smaller tube has a vacuum that increases with revs; the larger of the pipes...doesn't appear to have any significant vacuum at any point - should it? She always seemed to struggle with the slope in the multistory at work, but now I doubt, even with a run up, that I could actually make it up there
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