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The embarrassing Herald restoration thread - footlin' and tinkering but no real motivation.


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1 hour ago, AlanT said:

Very jealous of your lift! Car is looking great 

Thanks Alan. It's just at a lovely height there for working on the headlamps and cleaning the boot floor. Making up brake pipes is a doddle when you can stand under and measure up or bend* as required.

I've just found a photo of it from 2010 which when enlarged revealed it was parked beside my GT6.... so future car beside present car... or present car beside past car, depending.

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*That's bend the brake pipe, by the way. I can't bend much this week, when I'm up I can't get down and when I'm down I can't get back up, neither arm wants to go above head height and my neck turns slower than a rotisserie. So: I just stand in one plane and move the car up or down as required.

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On 26/02/2022 at 21:02, AlanT said:

All I say Colin is that ‘I want one!’

I would concur, trouble is no head room in my "shed". 3-4ft max. There is a Company marketing 2t one`s for under 2K new. Dont know how they raise and lower? Screws and nuts?, or steel cable, (which in comercial use have to be tested every 6 months) or hydraulic?. The (very) old traditional single post ram type are just about extinct now. Huge ram`s buried in the ground, lifting up to 40tonne!! in tandem mode. Often just left in place and concreted over in old garages

Pete

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Watch The Great Escape for ideas on tunnelling... :)

Sorry for making you all jealous but it's a great piece of kit. You don't often need to go to full height, just have the wheels / brakes / engine bay at about chest height. Even cleaning the boot floor this past few days has been so much easier with the car in front of me rather than below, and prepping the bulkhead panels for respray is so much easier when I'm working slightly upwards rather than bending down.

It's due a service soon, at the very least a fluid change, as the local Club are starting to waken from hibernation and borrow the lift to service their cars.

 

DSCF1597.jpg

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Collin, I assume that especially as you say it is Hydrulic?. It has mechanical latches to lock it from accidentlly lowering?.

Paul, I looked at putting a Pit in. But our Water table is only  a few inches below ground. and would involve breaking through the concrete garage base. I suspect anything we put down would eventually float back up?.

Pete

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15 minutes ago, PeteH said:

Collin, I assume that especially as you say it is Hydrulic?. It has mechanical latches to lock it from accidentlly lowering?.

Paul, I looked at putting a Pit in. But our Water table is only  a few inches below ground. and would involve breaking through the concrete garage base. I suspect anything we put down would eventually float back up?.

Pete

Hi Pete , I had the garage floor cut through to fit the fibreglass pit . I added about 3mt of concrete to backfill and secure the pit as per the instructions  There was no water when the hole was dug . 
Paul

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7 minutes ago, Paul H said:

There was no water when the hole was dug .

Here I only have to dig a (relatively) shallow hole to find water!. We are on a mix of Boulder clay and sand/gravel, the area is full of old Gravel workings most of which are now Water parks, Caravan sites and Fishing lakes!. When we went to build the old house, we hit a seam of running sand. End result was 9M piles and a ring beam. £11grand underground before we started.😭

Pete

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1 hour ago, PeteH said:

Collin, I assume that especially as you say it is Hydrulic?. It has mechanical latches to lock it from accidentlly lowering?.

Yes, it's got fluid in a large reservoir that drops as it rises; although there are steel cables inside the posts so I suspect one side is pumped up and the cables then pull the other side parallel. Believe it or not I've never yet looked into how it works. As it rises a pair of spring-loaded bolts bang very loudly every few inches and these are the anti-drop latches; to lower you must pull them both out by orange handles then once you depress a lever it drops very slowly as the fluid returns to the reservoir. The arms lock in place once it lifts more than a few inches so they can't swivel.

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3 hours ago, PeteH said:

I looked at putting a Pit in. But our Water table is only  a few inches below ground.

I had that at my old place, although I was having a new garage built so the pit could be built before the floor. The structural engineer specified really thick walls made of concrete with an abnormally high concentration of waterproofing additive ("we build swimming pools with half that" said the builders). The extra thickness made it heavy enough not to float up and break the floor. The builders, of course, were not accounting for what the engineer realised - a pit needs to be much more waterproof than a swimming pool, because if a pool leaks you just re-fill it, but a pit that floods is a pain.

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The two poster I installed with a friend at his garage had a hydraulic ram that thro a set of pullies pulled cables in each tower, and it had mechanical latch's as per Colin's approx 150mm that locked the mechanism a bugger when lowering as each step had to be delatched.

The big issue to me as a civil engineer was the foundation under the towers to ensure the set up was stable, his tower baseplates would only have been 18in sq His shed was 60ft long by 25ft wide & 100years old and the concrete was rubbish,  I made him dig out a foundation 3ft  sq by 18in deep with a reinforced beam 18in sq between the tower foundations. I note more modern two tower hoists have a substantly bigger baseplates improving stability!

The next problem has height clearance of the towers he was a house renovation tradie so measure thrice cut once, YES? He assured me the tower tops would just clear the corrugated iron roof, NUP missed by 2in as the foundations were slightly higher, he had to fit two skylights over the towers to get the reqd clearance, he just happened to have two skylights spare he'd removed from a previous job! The upside was one of the towers acted as a support/brace to the ageing roof structure which had seen dubious modifications and repairs and had been damaged by fire over the 100yrs, when in a previous life it had been the maintenance workshop for a sand quarry. 

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10 hours ago, Peter Truman said:

I made him dig out a foundation 3ft  sq by 18in deep with a reinforced beam 18in sq between the tower foundations. I note more modern two tower hoists have a substantly bigger baseplates improving stability!

The next problem has height clearance of the towers he was a house renovation tradie so measure thrice cut once, YES? He assured me the tower tops would just clear the corrugated iron roof, NUP missed by 2in as the foundations were slightly higher, he had to fit two skylights over the towers to get the reqd clearance, he just happened to have two skylights spare he'd removed from a previous job! 

When I was having the garage floor laid I measured and marked the location of the lift pillars and we dug down an extra two feet of concrete for a square metre all round. I was amazed at the relatively small base of the lift, I had assumed they would require projecting feet to prevent forward or backwards tilt and for the first few times was paranoid it was going to topple over.

One thing to remember with height is that although the arms don't go right to the top of the pillars the vehicle does sit quite a bit higher so it's quite possible that with a low roof you could raise the car through it... the photo below isn't great quality but when I was rebuilding a Gt6 Mk2 for a mate in Belfast, the ramps were the type that the car drove onto. In order to work on the suspension we had to put it on axle stands on the actual lift itself. The roof was quite low and we had to remember not to raise the car by much when going underneath otherwise it would have come out through the perspex skylights...

806391072_Mk21.jpg.365ce17a4d4d81dcc2e6f40764e35021.jpg

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Friday again and time for an update on the white 13/60, the rest of the Heralds currently being ignored.

The mate has once again let me down on the spraying.... his shed has another vehicle in it and needs cleared out to make room. I'm now into about six weeks max to get the Herald back on the road before the first TSSC Run of the year, so will have to start gentle pressure. I could always tell his father who is an ex-boxer and will probably kill him on the spot for letting me down, but that won't help the paintwork...

So: front of the car left alone in favour of the rear end.

First problem came when my beautifully renovated and awaiting-top-coat fuel tank decided to spit petrol out onto the floor. It was only a slight rinse and spit to clean out any debris, but it spat from an unexpected area. Of all the places to leak, I never expected a pinhole in the filler neck. This is an area that's usually neglected in our cars, but exposed to a lot of road dirt between the filler cap and the area where it enters the rubber seal in the wing. I'm happy it can be brazed at some future date but in the meantime, back to the original tank.

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The entire boot floor has been cleaned - the ultimate recycling as I'm using the petrol that came out of the tank, regardless of what it's worth these days. A plastic scouring pad, an old toothbrush and an even older towel to clean up the resulting sludge, and we're back to pristine white paint. I've cleaned one half so far in order to get the fuel line made up and the tank back in place. The fuel line caused a lot of head-scratching as I couldn't find a photo of the proper factory route, so ended up following the curve of the wheel arch along the boot floor and up inside. I've used 1/4 inch kunifer pipe and it seems to have used the greater part of a 25 foot roll, so I only had one go at it. Fuel tank now fitted and even the spare wheel back in place.

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I also made a new boot board out of plywood; or a sort of plywood as it's a sheet given to me by a man who renovates vans for commercial use, and so appears to be a mixture of card and wood combined. He used it to line the sides of the van, and one sheet would make me three of those boot boards. I'm quite pleased with the way it has turned out. Sadly the better some things look, the worse others. The inside area of that rear spring tunnel has the same greasy residue, as has the rear floor pans and the area under the rear seat. It is a horrible dry brown material, like dead adhesive or very dry Waxoyl, full of grit and dirt. The amazing thing is that it cleans off with petrol and a good cloth.

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I've no idea of what it is or how any PO allowed the car to remain in such a state. It really makes my skin crawl even looking at it. That's all the floors, front and rear, the boot area and even the door shuts, but amazingly NOT the inner wings, or any of the areas where you'd expect rustproofing. A lot of elbow grease required, but off it comes.

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That's just the first initial wipe with petrol. A toothbrush into the seams and crevices will flush out most of the rest, then I'll stick some soundproofing over the floor and it'll be just a memory.

I bought a large quantity of Dodomat insulation recently, believe me it pays to shop around. I was all set to bid on 40 sheets for £79.99, which I've been watching all week, and something made me hold off... a new search revealed a seller selling 50 sheets for only £60. That amount would almost do three cars. It is heavy stuff though so watch the weight.

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I also managed to get a few steps further on with the dashboard instruments. Easy to dismantle but not to reassemble, due to new seals being much thicker than the old; I had to compress the seal, hold the glass and chrome bezel in place, squeeze and twist at the same time. It's not easy and in fact quite painful, but I didn't want to bend the tabs which, often with me doing it, damages the chrome bezel. I got there in the end and it looks almost new.

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So that's it for this week; I might get back to it tomorrow for more cleaning, although the splitting head from the petrol fumes makes me wonder if it's worth it.

I also have the rear brakes to attend to; this is the state of the handbrake lever clevis pins which I removed earlier.

IMG_1839.thumb.jpeg.b45575cefb7efe25cde4f58443c04d2d.jpeg

One badly worn pin, one substitute drilled bolt which wiggled about like a cat in a carrier bag. The handbrake was surprisingly good when last on the road, so this means I've disturbed things now and it'll never be the same again. Par for the course, but we'll see...

                        

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Your description of the fuel line routing sounds right. It clips to the wheel arch seam a few inches above floor level. I do have my original pipe that I recently replaced, but it’s both too late to be of use and likely the shape will be hard to represent in a photograph.

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2 hours ago, Josef said:

Your description of the fuel line routing sounds right. It clips to the wheel arch seam a few inches above floor level. I do have my original pipe that I recently replaced, but it’s both too late to be of use and likely the shape will be hard to represent in a photograph.

The easy part is following the main chassis rail clipped to the same brackets as the brake line; I followed the same route around the rear chassis upright and under the halfshaft but to go straight to the hole in the boot floor meant a lot of exposed pipe. There's a lot of in/bend/round/bend/up/bend in that last little bit, and I added a suitable p-clip to the bodywork to hold it in place. I'm happy it won't move nor will it snag on anything if I drive over anything nasty. I had two reference photos of cars on my ramps but both have been modified by current owners so not original and in some cases not very tidy...

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Try a Vitesse Mk2 Rotoflex rear pipe from the rear outrigger, along the outside of the chassis around the back of the diff bridge upright, then along the top of the chassis, but then how to get to the rubber pipe connecting to the steel pipe thro the boot floor! It has so many bends and offsets that it has that many potential alignments but only one right one, but first you have to work out which end of the pipe is front or rear, I nearly went mad lying under the car with the pipe fouling everything, and wishing I'd taken photos, the coloured Triumph Ad photo I had of the Roto chassis set up bears no relationship to reality either!

I fully understand why people start from scratch and do a DIY set up!

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  • Colin Lindsay changed the title to The embarrassing Herald restoration thread - who needs mates?

Well here I am again, Billy No Mates but who needs help? The Herald is sailing along.

The mate never replied to my last tentative query about spraying the Herald, so that's that. He'll no doubt apologise profusely about having a new baby and being busy etc but an apology and £2.30 will buy a coffee these days. No £2.30, no coffee, so that's what an apology is worth.

So: how hard can it really be to paint a Herald? Under all that grease and gunge there's relatively solid metal. Looking logically at the setup it's a) only the underbonnet bulkhead areas, b) if I leave the vertical panels black it's less to spray and c) if I make a hoo-hah who will ever see, if I keep the bonnet closed? Suitably resolved, off I went, stripped it all down, cleaned everything, rubbed it all back; the bits that the sander couldn't reach, well, the drill and wire brush got in there. Tons of masking tape and a month's worth of newspaper and off we went.

It started off like this:

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Went to this stage:

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The only slight problem there being that I lifted a tin of high-build primer off the shelf by mistake, so had to wait for it to harden and then flatten back before reverting to the proper grey primer. Once I was happy that all the intended areas were covered, no drips sags or runs - no idea how - then let it dry for a day or two before the top coat of brilliant Delftweiss.

And this is the result:

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I'm immensely pleased with that. Sadly the door wouldn't come off; someone has replaced one of the bolts with a large countersunk setscrew and I just couldn't get it to shift, otherwise that whole area at the hinges would be white too. Still, it's almost pristine. I think, as a relative novice, I took more care than I needed to, but the end result is a real morale-boost. As you can see, the parts have started to appear back in place, with a large-reservoir brake cylinder on which for some amazing reason the rubber boot fitted first time. That's never happened before. This afternoon had the clutch cylinder fitted, the control box, and a new rubber grommet for the wiring loom, which needs rewound in places but that'll be wee buns now. Onward and upward as they say.

Next step was the front suspension; both turrets blasted and repainted, and all suspension components already refurbished and ready to go.

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There was one slight foo-pas when I reckoned that the shock absorber and trunnion bolts were rattling in the wishbones, so thought maybe the holes were ovalled, but I found later on that I had used 3/8 bolts instead of 7/16. No worries, they're only loosely fitted. One thing I have found is that the supplied bolts - the usual 'front suspension nut and bolt kit' from many suppliers - are often right on the length limit. This means that on tightening they barely reach the end of the nyloc nut, and it was an MOT Inspector many years ago who pointed this out on my GT6 and told me they like to see threads protruding out of the end. Consequently where it says 2 1/4 inches I'm using 2 1/2, the 2 1/2s are getting 2 3/4s and the 2 3/4 are getting 3 inch. That extra 1/4 inch just gives peace of mind.

I've also gone for polybush trunnions rather than the old plastic / tin shield / rubber ring setup. Two minutes to fit and only two hands needed.

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And yes I did clean that trunnion up before fitting...

Next step is my favourite job - brake pipes. You know the one that goes: right angle, under turret, right angle across chassis, right angle under other turret, up side of turret, bend, bend again, bend down... yes that one. Why does it always kink on the last bend and then what on earth happened to the female flare on the replacement? It's like a top hat gone wrong... third time lucky; it went well, followed the bends, didn't kink and the last flare - done on the car when all was cut to length - flared perfectly. Job done, on that side at least.

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The other side being shorter was easier; for a start it doesn't go under anything, but it still ended up at a profile I'm not happy with. I'm not. It fits well, doesn't rub off anything, doesn't get in the way... but I just know that by Monday I'll be replacing it for a slightly longer one that gives a more acute bend against the turret. It's just me. I don't like the jaunty angle that the four-way connector sits at, either, but the bracket is completely level to the chassis. A little bit more inspection required.

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So that's the progress this week, and huge leap forward, too. I've completed the stripdown of the interior, which is now a bare shell, and found these interesting spacers under the carpet, below the seat runners.

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 I suppose that's one way of raising the runners when you have no metal spacers. I'll have to come up with something more.... aesthetic... and less of a fire risk. On the subject of wood my replacement dashboard arrived - £25 on eBay - and it's interesting. No varnish at all, maybe even no veneer, but most importantly no damage. It's a great starting point for a restoration - solid, undamaged and bare.

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I won't get near it for some time but it'll make a nice project. I'll read the very interesting thread on the forum about reveneering dashboards and then see what finish I want, and work from there. 

That's it for this week; if I had suitable washers I'd fit the other side of the front suspension and have the car back on all four wheels again. Next step is refitting the engine and gearbox which to be honest would be easier if I removed the bonnet first. Not a job I can do myself though... must phone the mate again. He's got to be feeling guilty by now...

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Well done with painting. There's a good U tube (Trev's Blog) where he works on a pretty bad respray and the result appears really good. just flatting down and the polishing done in stages. Also he has 2 vids on flatting down runs using body filler1, which is good, I thought. 

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19 minutes ago, daverclasper said:

Well done with painting. There's a good U tube (Trev's Blog) where he works on a pretty bad respray and the result appears really good. just flatting down and the polishing done in stages. Also he has 2 vids on flatting down runs using body filler1, which is good, I thought. 

Another vote for Trevs Blog 

Paul 

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The bulkhead looks great! Fresh paint is always a bit of a boost I think, especially after fighting through muck and rust. Your reasoning of ‘rather than wait and wait on someone else why not have a go’ is why I ended up picking up a welder myself…

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21 hours ago, daverclasper said:

There's a good U tube (Trev's Blog) where he works on a pretty bad respray and the result appears really good.

PS, Oh, by the way, I was in no way implying your work was like this, more a bad scenario, that can maybe, be pulled back, so not necessarily the end of the world if things don't go to plan 😃

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15 minutes ago, daverclasper said:

PS, Oh, by the way, I was in no way implying your work was like this, more a bad scenario, that can maybe, be pulled back, so not necessarily the end of the world if things don't go to plan 😃

Didn't think so for one minute Dave BUT, at present, you could say it's the worst job you ever saw and I'd still think: so what, I did it.... :)  I just know too many people who'll do it for me; the Estate, the GT6 and the 948 Coupe were all professionally resprayed in two-pack for no cost to me at all, but admittedly it is time I did it myself. Next step will be the welding on the 1200 tub. I'm on a roll. Still happy to watch others, though, and realise I don't know it all. Yet.

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