Author: adrian

It’s been a busy few days and last night I had my doubts the car would ever be ready in time but today all the effort was worth it as I got a MOT certificate. Thankfully my local garage is very understanding towards classic cars and on the few items he could have failed the Marcos on he quickly fixed for me or pointed them out to me so I could fix them after the MOT before taking it out on the road in anger.

Although I have an MOT I won’t be able to take the car out for the next week or so as I’ve removed the seats to have the head rests recovered. The rear screen needs to come back out as the seal needs to be replaced and the most serious issue is the seal around the petrol tank sensor is leaking. Luckily the strong smell of petrol alerted me to this fault when I filled the car up for the first time on the way home from the MOT testing station.

Still making slow progress on the car. The majority of the day was spent rubbing down, filling and then painting the battery box and mud guards. the photo below shown these with the primer applied along with some filler in all the small holes that suddenly became a lot obvious once the paint had been applied. The rest of the day was spent fitting the door handles and fixing a couple of other small issues such as a leaking oil pressure gauge pipe and a couple of faults with the car electrics. On Monday I’m going to see if I can get the car booked in for on MOT on Wednesday,

Spent today fitting the window into the drivers door and then fitting the door to the car. I then spent the rest of the day stripping down the window electric motors as they seem very reluctant to work. On stripping them they seem to be in far better condition than I expected and the man reason I could find for them not working was the large amount of dust, muck and carbon stuck between the gaps of the copper rotor. All I really did was carefully scrape out this muck using a feeler gauge and then clean up the rotor with some emery paper before using and air line to blow out all the loose dust. Once this was completed the motors were reassembled and they now seem to be working much better.

Well I’m still working away on my car. However even simple thinks seem to take a lot longer that they should, for example today I connected the battery to check the electrics and even though every thing was connected correctly a few things didn’t want to work. These were mainly caused by bad connections, but even simple things like this waste half a day to track down and correct. However on a more positive note I also managed to fit the passenger side door to the car today. Its the bit items like this that make a dramatic difference to the car. With a bit of luck I will get the drivers side door fitted tomorrow and than I can work on getting the electric window motors fitted.

Spent the day trying to fix the heater blower motor today. The photo below shows the badly worn rotor of the motor. All that was required was to have a local machine shop to skim the rotor and to replace the brushes. Although this cost 20 quid I could have tried buying another motor from bay but their would be no guarantee that it would be in any better condition! That’s the problem with owning a car that is almost 40 year old.