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500 (Classic) '65 RHD F Restoration

Just dropping a quick update to say 'so far so good' on the Frankenstarter! It's starting better than ever and with the LED headlight bulbs and heater ducting all finessed, as in the past couple of posts, the 500 has surprised me with it's winter usability. 🙂

That said, after some internal debate with myself I have decided to spare the old girl from the salt this winter. I love using my classics all year round, but seeing how my nicely refurbed mechanicals on the (now sold) Daimler had suffered from a few years of that, did give me pause for thought. So I decided to let the 500 rest this winter and have bought a winter hack to knock about in instead. Can confirm that as it's a shade faster than the 17hp of my 500! haha.

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I'd toyed with the idea of one for years now, and you only get to live once so whilst had the opportunity I thought I'd go for it. It was only a cheap one and is a bit tired in places, but I'm not scared of taking it out in the salt so I'll have some winter fun with this for now and will worry about then future later, worst case I can sell it in spring when the 500 is ready to come out from hibernation.

In theory I'd like to do a few jobs on the 500 between now and when spring comes round, mostly cosmetic bits and bobs that I didn't do this year as I would always chose to spend my time driving it than working on it... How many of those jobs I get through might be an indicator of how much time I'm out having fun in the Abarth or not! haha.
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I’m pleased to report that the cheap starter core I picked up on eBay arrived a few days ago. I was able to swap the front aluminium casting with my broken one and I once again have a functioning 500! 🙂

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The starter sounds smoother and better than it ever has, so that’s good news.

I also fitted a hand throttle cable, which is helping to keep it idling when starting on these last few cold nights / mornings. Worth the £20 and 1/2 hour of fiddling to fit it, I think. 🙂
I'm pleased to report that the new engine has been a success. Several hundred miles in and there's no sign of the bearing issues I was suffering with the old engine.

I've been out driving as and when I can, used it to commute a few times and generally any time I don't need to take the family with me. 🙂

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With autumn underway and the nights drawing in, I've got a few things I want to attend to to help get the car ready for the coming months.

Firstly, I need to do something about the lights. I'm perfectly happy driving with the standard lights at night on my own... but as soon as someone is coming the other way in anything modern, especially SUVs, then I'm left blind. So an upgrade is in the works. My Daimler has been upgraded to 60w H4 Halogen bulbs, which is more than adequate, but I'm aware that to do that on the Fiat I'll need to set-up some relays and run new wiring. I can do that easily enough, but in order to keep the original wirings redundancy (with separate circuits and fuses for left and right headlights which seems a sensible idea) then I will need 4 relays, and 4 new fuses and the associated wiring... it starts to add a bit and soon the cost is similar to that of a pair of decent LED headlights bulbs.

I've always avoided LED bulbs due to the horror stories of poor beam pattern and the dubious legally. But I think things have started changing, with better beam patterns now available, along with a range of softer warmer colour tones. Also looking at the MOT manuals, the rules have changed and LED bulbs in cars first used prior to 1986 now appears to be acceptable. I may well order some in the next few days and see how they look.

I also need to investigate the headlight adjusters, mine wont quite adjust to where I need them, they're a touch on the high side at their limit of adjustment. Not a problem with 35w tungsten bulbs but if I upgrade I think other drivers might be happier if I fix the aim! haha.

The other thing I think I should look into is the heater/demisting. I can feel it working, but I can also feel a big draught of hot air escaping round my handbrake and out of various other joins in the system. So I think I will need to investigate sealing things up as best I can, to make the most of the air flow available if I want any chance of the screen clearing on a cold morning!
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Right, time to throw this engine together. The job I wasn't looking forward to was removing 60 years of slime off my spare crank case.

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Last weekend, I pulled myself together and got on with it. A couple of hours later I had something looking much more presentable.

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Not perfect, but good enough and properly clean in all the right places. Over the course of the week I cleaned up the internal engine parts and reassembled. No point going into detail here as it's just the same as the previous engine build in this thread. Friday night this is where it stood.

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And by Saturday lunchtime the neighbourhood resounded to the glorious sound of a parallel twin 'roaring' into life.



I did a test run Saturday night, didn't go too far. Did about 10 miles taking it easy, then just like normal (i.e. flat out!). I'm pleased to report that all was well; no nasty knocking noises upon my return home, oil light not on, no signs of glitter in the oil etc. Ask me in 1000 miles, but so far this appears a success! haha.

I did miss driving the old girl this past month, it was lovely to get out on the road. :)
Right, time for the always interesting but rarely enjoyable engine autopsy! haha

With the tinware and other ancillaries removed from the engine, the first thing I noticed if that my pushrod tubes are looking nice and dry and haven't leaked any oil, but interestingly there is some leakage coming down from the head studs.
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Should the washer under the nut for the head studs be a special sealing washer? Should I pop a bit of silicone under the washer when I reassemble the engine? or is this not a common leakage point?

Anyway, moving on, from here it was the work of just a few minutes to pop the engine on its side, pull the sump and get at the crank.

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The front main bearing, as expect, is totalled. Lots of deep scratches on the main bearing surface, both the front and rear thrust surfaces, obvious play on the crank. Somehow I managed to not get a picture!

The front main bearing journal on the crank is also fairly scored, I'm sure it could be ground undersize as its not that deep, but can definitely feel it with my finger nail, so this crank wont be going back in an engine without work.

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The rod journals have some light scoring, nothing like as bad as the front main journal, but not as clean as when I put the engine together.

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The from cam bearing is also heavily scored and the cam bearing surface in the crankcase has suffered too, which is not good news.

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The cam lobes look generally ok, theres some minor surface scratches visible on the cylinder 1 intake lifter but the other 3 look ok, and the rear cam bearing has some minor scoring, but like the rod journals, nothing too scary.

There's quite a lot of scoring on the surface where the oil pump pressure release rides against the cam, and more minor scoring on the internal surfaces of the oil pump.

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The good news is that the barrels, pistons and cylinder head all look fine.

A possibly interesting find was this damage to one of the oil gallery blanking plugs inside the bell housing.

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I had to remove this plug when I helicoiled the oil pressure sensor mounting. I knew I hadn't got it quite as far back in the block as originally installed, the head of the soft aluminium plug was starting to round so I stopped, but I had no idea it wouldn't clear the flywheel. There was a metallic noise when I first started the engine, but it went away after a while and I had presumed (and tired to remedy) misalignment of the fan housing. In hindsight I think that noise was the flywheel rubbing this plug.

This raises an interesting failure scenario. This plug pushing agains the flywheel would be pulling the crank backwards with some reasonable force. The thrust is all controlled by the front main bearing and the thrust surface on the front of the bearing, which is loaded when the crank is pulled backwards, is quite small. Could this excessive and constant thrust force have caused premature wearing that thrust surface, which in turn created a metallic paste of bearing material which then spread across the front main bearing axial surface caused the wear, and then spreading in to the rest of the engine caused the other damage? It seems a likely reading of the failure to me.

Another potential failure is that some debris got inside the oil pump and from where was fed into the oiling system, with the front main bearing and front cam bearing thing the brunt of the damage as they are first to be fed oil from the pump? I did shot blast the front cover, and it did cross my mind the possibility of a stray grain or two of aluminium oxide being stuck inside the oil gallery in the front cover could do some serious damage. The case against this is that I did clean the cover very very thoroughly as I feared this possibility and also while I was able to find plenty of fine smooth metallic bearing paste in the centrifugal filter and sump, there was no sign of anything gritty. I appreciate it may have broken down, or even that a single grain which would be near impossible to find could be the catalyst for this chain of failure events?

My money is on the oil gallery plug being the root cause here. I feel silly for not noticing there was a problem when first assembling the engine. It seemed to turn over just fine, a little tight, but fresh rebuilds often are and I dont remember it becoming noticeably tighter once the flywheel was fitted.

So where to go forward from here, given the damage, I think the best move may be to fit the top half of my original engine, all of which appears unscathed (from what I've seen so far at least!) on to the bottom half of my spare engine. Now I remember that the spare engine wasn't as good as my original engine, the head was worse, the bores were already oversize and worn and it was burning a lot of oil, but I think the bottom end was ok?

I found the box of engine bits in my shed and had a look. The crank will be fine once It's had a light polish. Importantly the case looks ok. It's clearly done more miles than my original engine and there is some wear on the front cam bearing surface, but it looks more like wear and less like damage.



My heart dropped when I looked at the rear main bearing though.

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Thats no good. Thankfully the rear main bearing from my original engine seemed to have got away with minimal damage, so will do for now.

So I think I cobble something together and be back on the road in a few weeks, with just the cost of an engine gasket set and a couple of litres of oil. The downside is I now have a mammoth cleaning task ahead of me! I will need to extra carefully clean all of the original engine parts that I will be using to make sure I'm rid of all the bearing material that's floating in the oil and the spare engine parts are still as I purchased them, resplendent in 60 years worth oil and dirt! I shall be sure to stay away from the shot blaster though... just incase!
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The rollercoaster of 500 ownership eh?

There’s highs… a beautiful evening drive a couple of nights ago. Can’t beat having the roof open (or down if you own a convertible) with the stars up on a cool summer evening. Possibly my favourite time to drive.

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Followed by the lows… my car has been making a deep rythmic thud at idle sometimes when it’s hot. It goes away with light pressure on the clutch. It’s been there a couple of hundred miles, but it’s getting worse.

I rolled under the car tonight to give the flywheel a prod incase it had come loose, check the clutch pressure plate wasn’t loose that sort of thing.

What I found was if I pushed and pulled on the flywheel, the crank would slide backwards and forwards with a clonk. At a guess I’d say 0.020-0.030” of thrust movement.

I could see the front pulley was moving too, so it wasn’t the flywheel bolts. Then I tried moving the front pulley and it got worse. Not only did I have the same axial thrust movement, but I also had radial play, with a clonk.

No radial play at the flywheel, so I’m thinking my front main bearing has exited the building. 😭

Pulling the oil filter cover off, in the vain hope that the crank nut had come loose, or the pulley itself had the radial movement not the crank, and I think I’ve found where my front main bearing got to…

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Yup, nice silver metallic paste! Damn, looks like I best get the engine out and inspect the damage properly.

A small high, at least with the 500 being so beautifully simple, it only took me 25mins to get the engine out and on the bench, haha

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I imagine my next update will be the autopsy of this engine to try and work out what has happened.

I do have a spare used engine in bits, so if I can cobble another working engine back together to drive through the autumn, I think that will be plan A.

But if that’s not possible and I’m going to start buying new bits, or having machining work done, then I might have to take a step back and play the longer game. If I’ve got to spend the money, it might as well spend the money making it faster 😛
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It's been a while since I updated this thread, that's mostly because I've been out driving the car and enjoying it 🙂

I'm using it whenever I can (e.g. whenever it's just me going somewhere without the family!) I've done about 600 miles now since I got it on the road. I've not gone especially far from home, probably 80 mile round trip is about the longest, but now I'm through some of the teething problems (more on that in a moment) it's less to do with whether I trust the car to do it and more to do with just what time I've got available to go for a drive!

I'm really at home now in the car, and double declutching and rev-matching is subconscious now, it's just like driving any other manual car. I've been really enjoying driving it enthusiastically, it feels like the harder I drive it the more it gives back. As it takes a lot of time to get back up to speed there's fun in the game of trying to keep the momentum up with whatever corners the road throws at you! Definitely some of that fiery Italian nature in it.

Here it is on a very exciting (...) trip to a garden centre to buy a birthday present for my Gran!

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As mentioned, there have been some teething problems, as is to be expected with a complete rebuild like this.

I spent a couple of weeks chasing why my fuel warning light kept coming on when I had plenty of fuel left, which turned out to be because my new pattern part fuel level float had a hole in it and had filled with petrol and stopped floating! A replacement was only a couple of pounds but it was none the less a bit irritating to be replacing 'new' parts.

I came close to break down one night fairly early on, when after a long spirited drive the car lost power and wouldn't rev. Thankfully I was only 1/4 mile from home and it was late and the roads were quiet, so I was able to limp home in 1st with it popping and spluttering. It turned out that the valve clearances had closed up, causing a loss of compression. It only took 10 mins to readjust them and, touch wood, so far I've not had any sign of them moving further. So fingers crossed the movement I saw was part of the bedding in process since I'd had the head all apart.

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As mentioned in other threads I also played with tyre pressures a bit, as initially the handling seemed just a bit too wayward at speed. I had naively put too much pressure in them as I'd had other old vehicles where the owners consensus was that the original manufactures pressure figures were wrong for modern construction tyres. It turns out, as the 500 is so light, that the Fiat standard pressures of approx. 17 front and 24 rear are definitely the right way to go.

I still felt the handling could be improved though. The steering is really nice and playful and you can feel how light and nimble the car is. Yet somehow it's just a bit 'flightly' or 'loose' feeling at times.

When I first got the car on the road I was impatient to get out there so had done a very quick and basic alignment. I revisited this and found that the front was about 1mm toe out, I set it back to 0.5mm toe in, which helped a bit.


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More troublingly the rear, unladen, was showing 6mm toe out on each side. I know the geometry changes a bit when loaded up, but 12mm total toe out is a LOT. I was able to adjust the drivers side to get to to 2mm toe out, which is a good improvement and when loaded up would probably be about ball park correct, but it turned out I was at the limit of adjustment on the passengers side.

This is something I'm going to have to look into. It's possibly that the mounting points have moved a little when the floors were replaced prior to my ownership? Or that the car's had a bump at some point and put the rear geometry out a little? Or simply that my pattern part replacement rear suspension arms aren't very accurately made? (quite a likely option I fear...). Either way I think I'm going to have to modify the mounting point to allow me more adjustment.

Removing the positive camber by lowering the car a bit would also help with the handling I think, but that's the start of a slippery slope...

My Daimler is currently for sale, and when it sells I will have some money to pour back into my other vehicles. I'm currently weighing up whether the 500 will get a pile of upgrades to make it faster, handle better and therefore even more fun to drive... Or whether that to just keep the 500s simple charm as it is and to find something else to waste my money on! haha.

Either way I'm really enjoying my 500, and all those long hard months of bringing it back to life were definitely worth it. 🙂
Ok so, I ended that last update that 'hopefully within a handful of weeks I can get out on the road', and I'm pleased to say that the goal has been achieved! I pulled out all the stops, and with many late nights in combination with a couple of child free days off work, and I was able to blast through the remaining issues and hit the road! :)

Where I have failed, is in being a responsible build thread author, as I did not take many pictures in this last mad dash to the finish...

Picking ups where I left off, on the wiring loom. The headaches were mainly solved with 3 steps. Step 1, I realised I'd plugged the 'McLaren F1 inspiring interior light in the rear view mirror' in backwards. I had foolishly gone 'well theres two wires to it, theres a switch and a bulb in there, can't see it matters which wire goes where...' wrong! The light actually has 3 connections; +12v feed, earth wire which connects to the door switch and (crucially) it also earths through the mounting bolts should you wish to manually switch the light on. So I'd connected 12v straight to ground, that'll be why the fuse blew! Thank you fused electrics for saving me from melting the wiring loom / burning down my car!

Step 2, I had already hypothesised in the previous post the the ignition switch contacts could be dirty, and indeed they were. I took the switch to bits and cleaning out all out and now it was working reliably. Step 3, I found that several contacts inside my column switch gear were also not working. I had not initially realised that due to the way the car is wired. There are independent contacts in the column switches for left and right headlights, and these dirty contacts lead to strange seeming issues like dip beam only on the left headlight and main beam only on the right! I had already repaired my original column switches, the plastic arms were cracked, and the repairs were not feeling confidence inspiring so, rather than try to clean the contacts inside, I purchased a new set of column switches.

So that was the wiring sorted, and the same parts order than bought my new column switches also brought interior door handles and other little bits I was missing. With those bits all fitted I had, for the first time, what appeared to be a complete car!

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And so from assembly, on to preparation for driving. Now I had a complete car, I simulated the weight of a couple of passengers, e.g. plonked a bunch of bits of paving slab and various bits of scrap metal inside the car, and then torqued up all the suspension bush bolts now the car sat at the right ride height. I also did a rough alignment, checking the rear toe wasn't wildly out and doing a quick tracking.

And with that I was ready to see if it would run.... which it did! I thought it might take a while to draw fuel the length of the car from the tank, so while I cranked it over I had a friend watch the clear fuel line to see if they could see it filling up. Within a matter of seconds it had made a cough and run for a moment. So clearly it was going to go, and we caught the moment from there on camera.

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As you can hear it's not running quite right... which began the first of several teething issues to solve. The engine seemed ok once given a reasonable amount of throttle, but wouldn't idle without lots of choke, even when warm and transitioning of closed throttle would stumble and almost stall before picking up. Attempting to tune the idle circuit made no difference and so all signed pointed to a non-functioning idle circuit. In hindsight I should have just pulled the easily accessible idle just out, and I would have seen that despite my efforts to clean the carb last autumn I had done a poor job of cleaning the idle jet and it was still partially blocked (it was blocked solid when I first stripped the carb). But I didn't do that, I took the carb off and went through the whole thing again just to be sure there were no other issues. Thankfully there weren't and when refitted to the engine, it now idled very happily and transitioned off idle very smoothly, an easy fix!

Other issues included; the low fuel warning light staying on even when I'd filled the tank (I took the sender out of the tank, found no problem and put it back it then the problem magically went away, I'm yet to use enough fuel to know if the light comes back on when it should!), the gear lever learning forwards a bit and making it hard to get 1st and 3rd even when at the limit of it's slotted adjustment ( I filed out the adjustment slots till the stick was vertical in neutral and this solved there issue) and a vibrating noise that just didn't sound 'right' when cornering left (which turned out to be the gearbox just touching its cross member, so a small tweak to the position of the mounting blocks lifted it a couple of mm and the noise was gone).

I did several short drives, just doing a few laps of the local backstreets till I was happy I'd ironed out the issues and could go for a bigger drive. Saturday morning rolled round bright and cheerful, and what a nice start to the bank holiday it was to take my little Fiat for its first proper run.

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So, the paint needs a wet sand and polish yes (and well just a wash to get several weeks of dust and grimy finger prints off it!) but she's looking good! The real question you'll be asking though, is what was it like to drive?

Strange, challenging, very noisy and slow...but ultimately brilliant is the answer!

There is so much sheer joy to be had in really having to 'drive', and with this little car you 'drive', it's busy theres lots to do and think about. It took me several short drives, before I was getting my double de-clutch heal & toe downshifts right, but I feel I've got a pretty good handle on it now. The focus, intensity and satisfaction of driving the 500 round town, getting those shifts right and feeling that nimble light steering talk to me, just keeping up with normal traffic, is like that of thrashing a much bigger faster car down a B road.

Since Saturday I've been using it whenever I can, whether its going out to a local classic car pub night (to which I was late and missed 90% of the cars!) or popping to the supermarket, I've done probably 80 miles or so now. I feel there's still some way to go before I've really mastered the car, and feel totally at home in it, but I love that challenge and I'm already looking forward to my next chance to go for a drive!

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Ok, so the big push of painting is over, thats a weight off my shoulders, but the car is far from done and I'd really like to be able to use it and enjoy it this summer. So the big push now is to get it put together and to get driving!

With that in mind, there's going to be some compromises made on the restoration to get the car back together nice and quick! Mainly with trim and other small details, things that are easily fixed in the future. For example, I can put the old warped and dog eared door cards back in for now, and in the future I can spend the time/money to get a nice set together and its only a 1/2 hour job to swap them over. Those kind of compromises aren't really possible when dealing with the body shell metalwork or paint.

Speaking of paint, I did have a couple of details left to paint. I had hoped to hang my doors to paint them, but that didn't work out, so a week or so after painting the main shell I went back and painting the inner edge of the doors where I'd repaired them.

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And then to avoid the risk of damage by having them about the shed, it made sense to get the doors and bonnet bolted on to the car.

They went on with all new seals and rubber pads and I'm pretty happy with the alignment. The drivers door isn't quite as good as passengers but I can fiddle and fine tune it in the future, it might help once the door seals have settled in a bit and aren't quite so big and fresh. Right now the doors need a hefty slam to get them to latch!

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With the doors on, it made sense to get the glass in next. The plan is to make the car weather tight, then I can give the inside a proper deep clean and start to put bits back in.

The rear window and side windows all had a plastic film on the inside that was yellowed and hazy, the windscreen was fine though. I don't know if this film was standard or not? Either way with some careful razor blade, scouring pads and thinners work I was able to get it all off and can now see through the windows!

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Much better! Rear window in first, and whilst it's never a super fun job getting windows back in, I have to say this went fairly smoothly. The small scale of the car definitely helped, as did the fact the the new window rubbers were quite soft and pliable. I used my usual technique. I put the rubber round the glass, wrapped some electrical wire (no strong to hand!) into the seal, lubricated the inner edge of the seal with a bit of washing up liquid and offered the window up to the car, then pulling on the wire while applying pressure from the outside was able to work the lip of the seal round the window frame and seat the window into the car.

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With the windows in on their rubber seals, I then went round and squirted a bead of Arbomast both between the glass and the rubber and between the rubber and the frame. I did all 4 windows. It's a messy old job but it's well worth it to avoid any chance of leaks. Once it's dried a bit more I'll go round with a cloth and a bit of water and wash the last of the residue away.

The car came with lots of random stickers, on the windows, dashboard and bumpers. It seemed nice to keep one as a memory of its previous life, so I put the 'blood donors love life' cling sticker back in the front window, and with that the glass is done!

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In terms of weather tightness, there's still a rather large hole in the roof, so I best do something about that.

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The new sunroof fabric went over the old frame fairly easily. I didn't take many pictures as I was just getting on, but I did clean and paint the frame also. Most of the rear edge of the sunroof is held down with a bar that bolts through to the underside of the roof, but the two outer corners go into a closed section of the roof structure and as such the factory just used self tappers... I wish I had realised this before I did the bodywork! A previous owner had just filled the holes and painted over them. I put new screws in, which was fine on the drivers side but on the passengers side the hole in the roof was clearly enlarged and stripped. I put a bigger thread screw in which is holding for now, but I think I will need to revisit in the future, might be a job for a rivnut or something.

Anyway, for now it's basically weather tight, excellent. So I was going to start on cleaning the inside... but putting the sunroof on hadn't taken that long, the night was still young and I was fed up of tripping over the gearbox in the shed, so I thought I'd put that in next instead,

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A combination of it's size and location in the back of the car, made this a rather easy job. Certainly it's a far cry from trying to get the big old automatic in from underneath the middle of the Daimler!

The next day I thought it would be rude to not offer the engine up now the gearbox was waiting for it. Again very straight forward, I got a jack under the sump and was able to just wheel the engine into the bay and jack it up into place while steadying it with the other hand. I did have 5 minutes of fun getting the input shaft to slide into the clutch splines... but it was nothing in the big scheme of these things of putting engines in to cars on my own!

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The first of the compromises... as you can see the back panel is currently just in satin black. It's not in great shape, with various dents and scrapes, and I'd kind of forgotten about it when I was painting the rest of the shell! So for now I've given it a quick blast of satin black, which think looks quite cool against the rest of the paint, and it will stay like this for a while :)

So engine in, thats another nice little milestone! Looking at the nice shiny car that's coming back together theres one big eye sore, the crusty old wheels and ancient tyres (two of which of remoulds... mmm safe).

While I had daylight and could run noisy tools I thought I'd get on and get the wheels off, to give them a quick wire wheel down, coat of paint and then I could put the new tyres on. But as I started to let the air out of one of the front wheels, I found the rim around the valve stem was really only being held together by the paint, damn!

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The other wheels aren't holed but after I'd removed the tyres and bee over them with the wire wheel, I could see that they were all very heavily corroded and pitted around the valve stem opening.

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I could put the new tyres on and you'd never know, but having seen the other wheel gone to holes, and seeing the depth of that pitting, I don't think I'd feel safe doing that. So that rather stopped me in my track. I best get on an order a new set of wheels :(

I'd really like to get some 10" wheels for this. From pictures online I think lowered on 10" wheels with some chunky tyres, they look great, much as Mini's do in the same style, but 10" wheel options are neither cheap or easily available, and it would look silly without the lowering and other mods. So for now, and to get me on the road to see if I actually enjoy driving her car before throwing more money at it, a set of standard replacement wheels will do.

Plenty to be getting on with while I wait for those to arrive...

I was able to find a few minutes to bolt the rebuilt pedal box, steering column and speedo back in.

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And made a start on one of the less exciting jobs, threading the loom back through. I don’t mind electrics and, as you’d expect, it’s a pretty simple system on the 500, but as I started with a stripped down car I don’t have many reference pictures for where the loom runs. There’s a fair bit of trial and error and studying of wiring diagrams to be done to work out where it all plugs in…

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Having decided that wiring needed too much brain power for what I had left most nights by the time I get out to work on the car, I side tracked on to the control cables that run through the centre tunnel.

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Which turned out to be a fairly time consuming job. I wasn't helped here by the fact that my car came to me already disassembled, so I was relying on pictures found online (and a few helpful forums posts!) to work out where all the different cables would run. There's also an order to which they need to go in, and some cables thread from front to back and others from back to front, it was quite the puzzle!

After that I had another look at the wiring, it continued ot be a challenge! I've worked out where most of it plugs in now, thanks to some late nights studying the wiring diagrams, but I'm suffering with an old loom with many connectors in poor condition. The fuse box is a prime example of this, lots of corrosion...

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So I've stripped that down and cleaning it all up, and now some power is circulating in the car I can see that the ignition switch is only intermittently working, so I suspect the inside of it will also look like the fuse box did! I think I might have to take all the dashboard switches apart and clean up the contacts. Some more hours of wiring needed!

To build up the enthusiasm to tackle that, I wanted some nice quick wins, so I thought I'd start putting the interior back in. As previously mentioned, this is where I'm going to switch gears from 'full restoration' to 'just get me on the road this summer', so I will 'make do and mend' with what I have and can give the interior a full make over at some stage in the future.

So the first job was to give the bits I have a damn good clean. I tried out using magic eraser sponges, as I saw them recommended on another thread as good for vinyl, and I have to say they did a great job. Just water and the sponge brought these sun visors round with minimal effort.

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The sun visors could now go in the car, along with more of the switch gear (which now needs to come back out...), new dash pads and new heater hoses.

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When I had some daylight I gave the rest of the interior the same treatment, with mixed results. The sponges dealt with general dirt and mildew staining really well, but couldn't touch where there was under seal overspray on the seats and obviously the front seats are badly discoloured with what I presume is sun damage. I did try some more aggressive options, isopropyl alcohol got the majority of the under seal off, but nothing I tried could improve the sun damage. Seat covers are available and not especially expensive (well not compared to Daimler prices anyway!), so they will get swapped in due course. The door cards are badly warped and mildly discoloured, but again they will do for now.

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It was at this point that I realised that as far as I can tell, my 'complete' car in pieces did not include any of the internal door hardware, so I will have to order new door handles and window winders! Not the end of the world, but all these little bits do add up!

Anyway, time to put some interior back in the car. I started by putting some fresh modern sound deadening in. I didn't go wild, 500s are not quiet at speed, and never will be, but it can't hurt to try to take the edge off it! haha

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I followed this up with some closed cell foam to replace the original jute and then laid the original heavy sound deadening mat that forms the parcel shelf and rear seat back. For the floor I rescued the original rubber mats. My mats were torn and splitting in many places, and most would bin them and replace them with a new carpet set which is 1/3 of the price of new replacement mats, but I like the utilitarian aesthetic of the mats. After a hose down and clean up, I made patches from some pieces of the old inner tubes and glued them to the back of the mats to join the splits. It's far from perfect, but it's a great improvement from where I started. I still need to fit the sill covers.

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And with that the seats could go in, for an almost completed interior.

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My new wheels arrived a few days ago also, so I have been able to get them painted up and fitted a new set of tyres and tubes. I'm really placed with the black wheels, they do exactly what I wanted them to.

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I stuck the bumpers on too while I was at it, and no I didn't stop to polish them up, I can see light at the end of the tunnel now and it's a mad dash to the finish and to a first chance to drive it!

There's quite a few 'finishing off' type jobs on the list still, but I'm hoping it will only be a handful of weeks now till I can go on that first test run. There's a classic car night at a local pub in a fortnight, maybe I'll even see if I can make it there!

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Not a big update today, but not an inconsequential one either! Today I had a rare day when I was neither working nor parenting and the weather was dry (if rather breezy). It was about good as things were going to get and so I should get on put some paint on the car :)

Masking up always takes longer than I expect it should, and with a bit of tidying up and cleaning the spray gun out that took me till lunch time.

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After lunch I got right to it. Ominously there was already a layer of dust / pollen on the car. There are some big trees not far from my carport and the wind was busily knocking the last removing catkins off one of them. Anyway, as I already mentioned I'm not going to get a better opportunity for a while so I wiped the car down again, mixed the paint up and got the first coat sprayed.

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Not too bad, no major drama, a bit heavy in a couple of places so I turned the paint delivery down a touch on the gun and gave it a few minutes before getting coats 2 and 3 laid down.

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And there we have it, a blue car once again. Overall I'm pretty happy, yes theres a couple of runs and plenty of dust in the finish, but its a single stage paint so in a few weeks will get wet sanded and polished and you'll never know the surface finish wasn't amazing from day 1. The main thing for me was that there were no major disasters! No crazy paint reactions, I didn't drag the air line over any wet paint, it didn't come on to rain while I was in the middle of a coat, etc!

It feels like a major milestone in this project to have it painted. I have a big pile of bits that I can start bolting back on to the car, so hopefully with some things like doors on, glass in and a few bits of trim on, this will really start to feel like a car again :)
Well it's been a couple of months, so I'm definitely due an update! Despite looking like I had a complete engine at the end of the last update, there was in fact still a lot of work to do...

The dynamo was first on my list, getting pulled apart, inspected for wear, cleaned and painted. This picture is from part way through the process. All looked ok, the brushes were about half worn but still had life in them and the bearings felt good. So I chucked it beck together for now.

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The starter motor was a similar task...

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The key difference here being that 2 of the 3 mounting ears had been broken off, that could be a problem. Unfortunately despite many Fiat 500 parts being extraordinary cheap, starter motors do not appear to be one of those parts! Upon closer inspection the ears had both clearly been repaired (badly!) before, so I thought it worth another go at a repair before I scrapped it.

After a trip through the blasting cabinet to get things nice and clean I clamped the broken section back on and cut a nice deep V into the metal to help weld penetration. You can see one of the previous repairs on the right, very porous weld.

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And then I blasted it with the MIG. Yes MIG. My cheap Clarke MIG welder with some aluminium wire, a small disposable bottle of argon, a tip one size larger than the wire (1.0mm tip with 0.8mm wire in this case) and the wire speed cranked up to 11 (well 8.5 actually but it doesn't sound as good) will do some ugly but functional aluminium welding.

With the excess weld roughly ground off (it's not pretty I know!), this will now bolt back up to the gearbox and we will see how long it lasts!

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After that the distributer was next to get the full strip down and clean up treatment. I didn't get many pictures, but here it is back in the engine with a new set of points in.

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At this stage I also marked up the crank pulley and got it static timed.

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So the main thing left on the engine now was the tin wear. After many evenings scrubbing 50 years worth of oil, dirt and general slime off it all, I had a big pile of parts that definitely didn't look as good as the rest of the engine.

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Clearly some paint was needed, maybe the fumes in the shed were getting to me but I decided to go a bit wild with it. The first stage was primer...

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...then a black base coat....

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...then a blue/purple colour shifting pearl, topped with a spatter paint effect with the same pale gold that I've used on all the suspension and brake components.

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I think that came out rather well, and realistically it's only me (and you guys reading the thread and maybe the AA man) who will ever see, it so that's what counts.

I could now assemble all the ancillaries to the engine and actually 'complete' the engine part of the project.

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I did also bolt it up the gearbox at this stage, to make sure it all went together ok, which it did, but I didn't think it warranted a picture!

In and around the engine work, I have also been progressing nicely with the body work. Lots of this...

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Which brought me to this stage, where I was happy with the shape so had put down the coarse sand paper, given any filler a covering of high build primer and then guide coated the whole care ready for the next stage of finer surface prep.

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Many hours of sanding later and the whole car is now '400 grit smooth' and primed where necessary. There's just a few imperfection that I've spotted that need a bit of fine filler to fill some pin holes and alike. I'm hoping to get those sorted this coming week and maybe be ready for paint next weekend if the weather is on my side. Fingers crossed!

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These past few weeks I've been working on my budget engine rebuild/reassembly.

Starting with the head, I had decided to replace the valve guides, so the first step was to remove the old ones. Having watched various videos online about changing valve guides, I made a little tool up from an old bolt so I could drive the guides out with the air hammer and was pleased to see it made light work of it.

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Now with the head fully stripped I could get it cleaned up. I got the worst of the grime off with some white spirit and brushes and then threw it in the blaster to tidy it up a bit further. It's not perfect, but its plenty good enough for now :)

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After that I heli-coiled the exhaust bolt holes, I will probably use studs instead as I have seen others do, and then drove in the new guides and then ran a reamer through them to make sure they would be the right size for the valve stems.

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The valve gear got an overnight bath in some TFR, which did a reasonable job of cleaning the worst of the grime off. I did still need to manually remove the worst of the carbon build up from the valve heads with a wire brush in the drill though. You can see how much grime had come off the valves by the disgusting colour of the TFR I the morning! haha.

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I could now put the valve back in the head, but this is where I ran into a problem, and one I had potentially foreseen. Despite my best efforts to keep things aligned, the new valve guides were holding the valves at a fractionally different angle to the originals (possibly even just how the valve seats had worn with worn guides?) and so the valves were not seating right. Demonstrated here by the light you can see between the valve and the seat when it is touching the seat on the other side.

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Having the valve seats re-cut I would presume is the 'right' thing to do, but if I was doing that I would also be silly not to have the valve seats changes for ones that are 100% unleaded safe and obviously fit new valves, then I should probably put a set of valve springs in really... and so on. As this was meant to be the budget option, I thought I'd try just giving them a serious lapping, worst case it didn't work and all I'd done it knackered some valves and the seats that would be junked otherwise anyway. I'm pleased to say, while it was a slow and tedious job, it works and there is now good seat contact all the way round. No light shining through this picture now!

I read mixed things about unleaded on the stock valve seats, same as I did with my Lancia and Daimler. Both of them, like the Fiat, had aluminium heads but there was concern that the material the standard valve seats were made from would still not be up to it, either way I did 20k miles on my Lancia engine on unleaded with no valve seat issues and have done 5k so far I the Daimler with no problem so I have no intention of doing anything different with the Fiat!

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With that done it was time to look at the bottom end! The bottom end work started with cleaning the best part of 60 years worth of slime off the crank case.

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Much better!

With it all clean, the next job was to heli-coil the threads for the oil pressure switch. Picture of case with stripped out threads before I started, didn't take an after picture apparently!

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The engine came with a random bolt wedged in the case here with lots of PTFE tape and RTV. It was only after I'd started on the rebuild I realised this should have been the oil pressure switch. Fingers crossed it was just a 'solution' to the stripped threads and not that someone removed the oil pressure switch to hide the low pressure! (On the autopsy stage there was nothing to suggest a reason for low pressure...)

Next the crank got cleaned, and I removed one of the freeze plugs so I could clean out the sludge trap. Not too much in here, which is good news.

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I fitted a new plug and firmly staked it in. I'm aware that these plugs can loosen or even fall out when the engine is run at high RPM, causing catastrophic oil pressure loss. The fix is to weld them in place, but as this engine is standard with no intention to do the mods required to run it at higher revs I decided to just go for a standard staking this time round.

The crank could now go in the cases, with the cleaned up original bearings.

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I put the cam in next, with a new timing chain and sprocket set. The old chain was noticeable slack, whereas this is taught, so definitely a wise choice to replace.

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The timing chain cover was looking a bit grim still.

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So that got a blast and clean up, and I stripped and cleaned the oil pump too and packed it with vaseline to give it something to suck on for first start.

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Time to look at the barrels next. I gave them a light home hone, which they seemed to respond to well. Checking the new rings in them, I had gaps that were just larger than the factory spec, but well within the wear limits. So as expect the bores have some wear but it's not too bad.

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Now I knew the bores were ok, I gave the barrels some cosmetic clean up. I'm trying to minimise oil leaks and get all of the engine parts nice and clean, because the heating uses the air thats been blown over the engine for cooling. I'd like to minimise the amount of hot oil smell inside the car, haha.

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I could then install the pistons with said new rings in the barrels. It turned out I'd lent my ring compressor to a friend, so I just eased the rings in one at a time by hand, made possible/easler working with an air cooled engine with separate barrels :)

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Might as well get them fitted to the engine, and then the sump can go on and it can be stood up and starting to feel like we're getting somewhere!

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And then the head could go on too. The pushrod tubes aren't great cosmetically, but they are clean and will do the job and I put a smear of RTV round the new seals to give them best chance of not leaking!

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Excellent. :)

Flywheel and clutch was next. A new clutch seemed a prudent choice as while both the clutches I had were not 'worn out', they were worn.

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And then the oil filter/front pulley assembly.

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Fuel pump was next, I pulled apart my old one intending to clean it, but it was not looking healthy...

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With rebuild kits looking thin on the ground, a new one was at least an easier solution and not expensive.

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I thought I'd look at the carb next. It's a bit of a tired old thing, plenty of bodges along the years and has a section of casting missing from where the intake air tube mount to the top. The important bits are there though, so will do for now! Clearly a deep clean was needed though.

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Good job I did a big clean, here's a before and after of the emission tube! Would have never run right like that...

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I also checked the carb mounting flange on a flat surface and found it to be warped, very common on these which is why I thought to check! With some oiled wet and dry I was able to flatten it back out easily enough.

At this point I ran into a snag that it appears I've managed to order the wrong carb rebuild kit, so there gaskets I have wont fit. Easily remedied, but not this weekend!

So that's where I've got to on the engine front. :) On the more mechanical side I've go the distributer and dynamo still to clean up / sort out. Other than that it's just cosmetic tidy up of the fan shrouding and valve cover, and that will be the engine part of this project done :)

As the weather is starting to warm up a bit this past week, I have also started making use of a couple of daylight hours I can grab to get stuck back in to the body work. Lots of sanding, endless sanding but the filler on the rear quarters is coming along. I'm working in thin passes, filling in low spots and finding high spots, just a few details to sort on the passengers side (pictured) but there's further to go still on the driver side still.

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Still it's positive to be able to be back on the bodywork. I will be very pleased when its painted and done, it will really feel like I'm on the home leg of the project then and the idea of getting to drive it will feel within touching distance.

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Engine autopsy time! Always interesting, often a bit depressing for the wallet! haha.

So here is the 'new' engine, I bought last year. It was 'a good runner' when removed but you never know how these things are stored, and it was under a tarp in a garden when I picked it up...

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Let's start by pulling the head and looking for any obvious problems.

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I think we've got a bit of an oil burner here, especially on the cylinder nearest camera. Not a great start. Disassembling the head I found that there were no valve stem seal o-rings, along with a reasonable amount of valve guide wear. So that could well the be culprit of the oiling.

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Flipping the head over and we can see that one of the cylinders has eaten something at some point as theres some good dents / marks in the combustion chamber. There is also signs of minor cracking between the valves in both chambers, which from searching up some old threads on here I've read is common on these engines to the point where most cylinder heads would have some level of it if removed and inspected. I gather some people are concerned that the cracking can cause the valve seats the loosen and drop out, with obvious catastrophic results, and if the cracking gets bad it will go deeper than the valve seat and allow air to leak between the intake and exhaust ports. Comparing this to images posted in those threads, this is very minor, and having cleaned the carbon off the port just behind the valve seat I can confirm that the cracks do not extend past the seats.

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Working our way down the engine. The barrels/bores have got plenty of vertical scratches / scoring, they also appear to be over bored to 68mm, from the standard 67.4mm. So this engine has done some miles and had some previous work I think.

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I gave the piston tops a quick clean up and found matching foreign object damage on top of the one piston. A quick check of the top ring gap showed it to be 0.65mm, which is past the 0.5mm suggested wear limit in the manual.

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Moving on to the bottom end, pulling the sump I unsurprisingly found a bunch of sludge. this was fairly dirty / gritty at times and there were some little bits of what looked like coarse wire wool, both in the sump and stuck I the bottom of the oil pick up, not promising!

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Fearing the worst I pulled the rods and was surprised to find that the rod bearings looked really good (to my amateur eyes, happy to be corrected!)

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The rod journals on the crank too looked good, better than any of the ones on my Daimler crank did...

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... and I was pleased to see no signs of scoring or damage on the cam.

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At this point I thought it worth a pause to collect my thoughts and also to go back and compare these findings to my original engine. So far I'm not seeing anything catastrophically wrong with this engine, but it's looking like its lived a fairly hard life!

So back to the original engine. I had already seen some signs of cracking between the valves in the head (which I now think I was over reacting to) and knew the top piston rings were broken with some scoring in the one bore, fearing the worst this is why I'd bought the replacement engine, but what else would I find?

Starting at the top, under the cap in the valve cover I found this disintegrating oil vapour filter. It's filled with wire wool type material... this was missing from the other engine so I presume it had been previously removed due to it falling apart. Another reason for the oily piston if the engine is breathing a lot of oil vapour back into the intake...

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And so checking the sump I also found bits of the same wire wool type material in the pick up. A lot more black sludge in this pan, generally the inside of the engine is covered in a much deeper coating of carbon, but it was smooth and not gritty like the other engine.

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Anyway, we were looking at the heads. Comparing the combustion chambers, only one of the chambers in my original head has a crack in it, and again it's small and doesn't extend below the seat.

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The seats themselves are noticeable less worn, suggesting the other head had had them recut / lapped and done more miles. The valves are still sloppier in the guides than I'd like but they are better than the other head. You can also see more of a lip at the edge of the combustion chamber in this head, suggesting the other has been skimmed in there past (or at least skimmed more than this one?!)

The rod bearings, rod journals and cam looked pretty identical to the other engine, you can see the layer of carbon covering the inner of the engine here in this picture of the rod journal.

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Revisiting the bores, they appear to be stock size, and the scoring in the one bores actually doesn't look too bad now I've got the piston out and wiped it down

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As the original engine is actually looking better now than the replacement, I carried on and completely stripped this down, only really the crank and timing gear left to remove anyway!

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I didn't photograph it, but the timing chain seemed fairly slack to me, so one to replace I think. The rear main bearing and the cam followers both looked great to me, which is good news.

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The front main bearing is the only one really showing any signs of wear. It's lightly scored with a fair amount of ingrained dirt. It's worth remembering these engines only have a centrifugal oil filter, so as the first bearing to receive oil from the pump I guess this is the one that bears the brunt of that.

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The front main journal on the crank was also lightly scored but again probably less so than all of the journals on my Daimler crank and that's happily done 5,000 miles since I put it back together.

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So lots to take in there, but once again good news of nothing really horribly wrong, just some wear and tear.

I think my plan will be to do a budget rebuild on my original engine. I will clean everything up and then reassemble it with a minimum of new parts to get me out on the road. It will obviously need a set of rings, I'll give the bores a light DIY hone and a new timing chain & sprocket set makes sense. I'm not sure what to do about the front main bearing, my first step will be to finish stripping the new engine incase that bearing is better but I'm not holding out any hopes? Otherwise I'll probably just clean this one up and reuse it, Im sure it's been like this for thousands of miles and will be fine for a while yet. It's easy to get paranoid about these things! The head will mostly just get cleaned and reassembled but I am going to change the valve guides. I've seen some things online about changing valve guides at home, so I'm going to give it a shot.

I'm going to try and not get carried away and just focus on getting an engine together that will get me out of the road this summer and then I have got a complete spare engine here in need to rebuild which can get the full works and performance improvements for the future. :)

I gave to say it’s been a pleasure working on this little engine. It reminds me of working on a motorbike engine, so much easier than dealing with the bulk and weight of a ‘normal’ car engine, certainly so than the v8 I last rebuilt!

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Now seems as good a time as any to do an update on the gearbox!

Had I realised what a pain it was to change the drive shafts when I purchased them, maybe I'd have been more inclined to stick with the bodged originals, haha. Anyway, last time the diff/bearings/shafts assembly was out of the gearbox.

The centre of the diff is two sections bolted together, this both allows for adjustment of the spider gear mesh via shims (more on that later) and that once separated you can slide the driveshafts out of the centre out of the diff. It was only when I'd got it in two halves that I realised that my welded up shafts woulds have to be cut before they could slide out. I wish I'd realised this when the box was fully assembled as I didn't have to be quite so careful of metal filings getting about the place!

Anyway, with that sorted it was fairly straight forward to slide the old shafts out, slide the new shafts in and bolt it all back together again.

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Excellent, apart from the diff now wouldn't turn! It tuned out that somehow the shim or the side gear that rides on the shim, had hung up when I was assembling the diff and not seated properly jamming the whole unit. Once I'd finally figured that out I was able to reassemble it while keeping pressure on the side gear so that it couldn't drop out of place again. Bit fiddly, but glad I noticed now and not later!

I had mentioned in the previous post that I wasn't sure if the input shaft bearing was a bit rough as there was some noise. This turned out to be a false alarm, as having moved the gearbox off the resonant table top, then the noise totally disappeared! I think the noise was just the sound of the constant mesh gears turning and resonating through the work bench. I took the inspection plate off the top and had a look around and could find nothing too concerning.

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So there was nothing for it but to do a bit more cleaning up of the critical surfaces, where the case halves meet for example, and to freshen up a few of the covers with a bit of satin black paint and to bolt it all back together!

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So close, but falling at the last hurdle, I managed to pinch the new o-ring seal on the input shaft seal/bushing holder thing. It might have been me, but I felt the new o-ring wasn't a great fit when I put on and might have been part of the problem, so I measured up and ordered some new o-rings with a slightly smaller ID and will try again.

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So, presuming the new o-ring goes in without snagging, that should take just 5 minutes, then I can put a tick next to project gearbox and move on to the engine! Thats exciting.

I've not dug the engine(s) out of the other shed yet, but in the mean time a bit of back story and a plan; My car came with the original matching numbers engine, which looked fairly complete if a bit rough. But it turned over ok by hand and had some form of compression. The seller claimed it ran when he poured a bit of petrol down the carb and stuck a battery on it.

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Way back in December 2021 when I was bored one afternoon I decided to investigate a bit further and whip the head off and have a bit of a poke around.

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What I found wasn't promising. For a start the bores were scored and the top piston rings fell out in two parts...

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The cylinder head didn't look amazing either, with some possible cracking between the valves which I believe is not uncommon. Anyway, I didn't look too deeply as I knew it wasn't a priority, I just packed up the parts and buried it in the corner of the shed for later.

Fast forward to April 2022, and I was browsing eBay when I spotted an auction for a 500 engine just 5 miles up the road which wasn't attracting much attention, it seemed worth a punt, especially if it went for less than the cost of a rebore and pair of pistons for my original. I stuck in a low bid and a couple of days later won it for £80!

I was told it was a good running engine when it was removed from the car to be replaced by the usual 650cc 126 engine, but aside from checking it turned over by hand before lifting it into the boot of the Daimler (not a great move as I didn't think about the fact that the distributer was missing when I laid it down and it dumped a bunch of oil in the back of the Daimler...) I've not looked into this any further!

Plan A is to go through both engines properly and then see how cheaply I can put together a reasonable standard engine. Best case scenario I can do some cleaning up, a new set of gaskets, a bit of valve lapping, maybe just break the glaze on the bores with a home hone and have a standard engine that I can hit the road with? Then in time (presuming I enjoy driving the car as much as I expect to!) I might look to build up a tuned up engine using my spare engine parts as a basis.

If this is not possible, for example if I find the bores are damaged in my eBay engine too, then Plan B is to jump right to a moderately tuned engine. I don't really want to start spending lots of money on standard parts, when performance parts cost essentially the same! I'd be thinking something like a 540cc build (or 595cc depending on the price of having the cases machined) with a cam, bit of porting, exhaust and carb change?

Fingers crossed for the cheap option A though, as ultimately that way I'm more likely to get chance to get out and driver the car sooner :) I'm hoping to start investigating the coming week so should have a clearer plan soon!
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So speaking of muddling on... what have I been up to these past few weeks I hear you ask?

Picking up where we left off, I was continuing to potter on with some of the smaller mechanical bits. The handbrake was looking a bit crusty.

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So thats got pulled to bits...

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... before cleaning, polishing of sliding surfaces and a quick lick of paint.

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The windscreen wiper mechanism got the same treatment.

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And that essentially brought us to the end of the mechanical bits in my boxes of part!. I did have the fuel tank on my list at this point but one quick look inside...

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... and I decided that it would not be in my best interest to do battle with trying to save this one. If, like my Daimler, a new tank was north of £500 then I'd be out there now trying to clean it before using a fuel tank liner to seal it and trying to clean and repair the sender. But as a new 500 fuel tank comes in around £150, so I think I'll just put my old tank I the scrap pile and move on!

As I still had a couple of weeks till I would be able to make my next big parts order, I thought I'd make myself useful and start on some of the more cosmetic cleanup needed on some parts.

I started with the hub caps. They needed a good wash first, with hot soapy water and fine wire wool getting the heaviest corrosion off. After that a bit of Autosol and a buffing pad on the pillar drill made light work of giving them some shine. I did do all 4!

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I then turned my attention to the steering column. The steering wheel was covered in a sort of baked on dirt, the best way to shift it again seemed to be to go at it with some fine wire wool, and then polish it back up with some cutting compound. I also painted the column itself and glued my light/indicator stalks. If they do fail I will still be able to operate the switch and then can swap it out for a modern replacement, so I figure its worth a punt on repairing the originals first.

I also had a go at the speedo. Again it was covered with baked on dirt and also appears to be sun damaged on the top, with some heavy brown staining. Again wirewool was able to cut through the dirt and then I polished the plastic back up with compound. The speedo itself comes apart easily enough and the staining on the dial cleaned up surprisingly easily.

Here's a before:

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And after:

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At this stage I had been paid and could order the next pile of bits. This meant I could continue to put the rear suspension back together. The rear wheel bearings were first on my list.

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All fairly straight forward. Getting the preload right with the crushable spacer took a little careful work but was not as bad as I was expecting from some of the things I'd read online! Next I could assemble the rear brakes.

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Like the fronts even with the shoes fully retracted I struggled to get the drums on. But this time I found a clearer problem. The pins on my original handbrake linkage were all seized solid so I had purchased replacements. Comparing the old to the new, one of the new link was approx 2mm longer than the old.

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And this was enough to hold the shoes out a touch even with the handbrake arm fully retracted. A little tickle with the angle grinder adjusted my new linkage and now I could get the drums on.

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And then my last job on this little assembly was to run a bit of brake hardline from the wheel cylinders to where the Flexi lines mount on the suspension arm.

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So now I've got a pile of nice shiny mechanical bits cluttering up my shed, and with the underside of the shell now complete, it seemed only logical to start bolting some of them on! Front suspension and steering first.

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And then the rear suspension (note to self wipe those oily finger prints off! haha). My Haynes says the rear suspension arms should be shimmed to make sure the track width is equal each side, but I'm not finding much information about it online? All my original shims were rusted to bits and these are new arms anyway, so would need different shims I presume. For now I've just used some washers to centralise the arms in the adjustment. A quick check with a tape measure suggests they are probably close enough! Any advice on measuring this on the car (I've seen the post about the special Fiat tool!) would be greatly received?!

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And then, I couldn't not bolt some wheels up. This is the first time the car has sat on its own wheels in my ownership, so quite a little milestone. The wheels themselves will need a clean up and paint and the tyres are definitely going to be replaced bone there car goes on the road, the rear tyres are remoulds which is enough to scare me off using them even if they weren't heavy perished and hard as plastic. haha.

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It's sitting a little high... There's still an awful lot of car left t bolt together, not least the engine and gearbox!

Given that the weather is not yet really suitable for bodywork, it seemed logical to tackle the engine and gearbox next. By the time I've dealt with them spring should be on its way and I can go back to paint prep and painting before continuing to assemble the car.

So let's start wit the gearbox. It's a dirty old thing...

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I presume it was a mixture of waxoyl, road dirt and baked on gearbox oil. Either way the engine degreaser spray I'd bought made no dent on it. White spirit and lots of elbow grease had a better result, not perfect yet but plenty good enough for now to get it inside the shed and to not risk dirt falling inside when I open it up. Cup for scale here, its like a toy gearbox!

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The main job for the gearbox is to replace the driveshafts. A previous owner has decided to weld together what should be a splined joint, not quite sure why?!

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Anyway, new driveshafts seemed a sensible move! It was at this point I realised that replacing the drive shafts is not as straight forward as it sounds, the differential needs to come out and be split in half to extract the shafts. This is as far as I've currently got.

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With the gearbox this far apart I'm not 100% confident that the input shaft turns as smoothly as I'd like, theres a bit of a bearing noise. So I suspect I will be digging into the rest of the gearbox after all!

Thinking of the gearbox, can anyone confirm if the gear selector should be sprung to hold the stick upright when in neutral? I can select all 5 gears (4 forward + revise) fine by moving the selector on the gearbox, but when in neutral there's no resistance to twisting the selector / moving the stick side to side. I would expect it to be sprung to the centre?

As I'm going to be pulling the box apart anyway to look at the bearings I'm sure it will be obvious if there's a broken spring or anything, but never hurts to ask!

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Things have been progressing nicely over rather past few days, I've been working through my boxes of mechanical parts, nice to have bits to be working on in the comfort of the shed on a blustery damp autumn evening.

With the front kingpins and uprights sorted in the pervious update, I could now assemble the brakes, with blasted and painted backing plates, new wheel cylinders and new shoes.

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Before fitting the new wheel bearings into new drums and getting this little section finished off.

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Getting the drums on was a bit of a challenge! I presume the new shoes are just a fraction big, I spent ages fiddling about repositioning the self adjusters and trying to centre the shoes in order to get the drum on with no luck. In the end I filed 1/2 a millimetre or so off the end of each of the tangs on the shoes where they go into the wheel cylinder and then I was finally able to squeeze the drum on.

The steering box was next, it was a big greasy mess as can be seen in the previous update where I had all the parts on the bench, but after some clean up it wasn't looking too bad.

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My plan was to do a full rebuild on it, but the castlated plug that adjusts preload on the input shaft bearings was firmly seized. I bought a special tool for it, and the tool destroyed itself before the nut moved, that was after copious amounts of heat and penetrating oil. So yeah... that's not coming out without risking damaging of the main casting. Luckily the input bearings felt fine with no play, and I was able t clean it out, replace all the seals, paint it, fill it with fresh oil and adjust it for a nice smooth action with no play. If it's done 57 years without the bearings developing any slack, then I think it will do a few more yet!

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That basically covers all of the front end steering, suspension and brakes, excluding the bits that will be replaced e.g. track rod arms, so time to start on the rear!

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The original rear arms are not in a good way. Some seriously dodgy plating work going on and some major rust. Also, these lovely reassuring wheel bolts, looking like the are only moments away from snapping with thread stretch like that!

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So most of this will be going in the bin. This is all that was worth saving (and this handbrake arms will be swapped for new in the end also)...

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And then after some cleaning, blasting ,wire wheeling and painting those parts are looking a bit better.

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I didn't buy rear wheel bearings with my last parts order, an oversight, so I put these bits to one side till I'm ready to make another parts order and had a rummage in my box of bits waiting ot be restored. The pile is getting much smaller, especially with the big suspension and brakes bits out of the way, but there's still a bunch of fiddly bits to deal with.

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This "lovely" custom clutch pedal stop caught my eye...

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.. and so the pedal box was the next item for clean up. I went to town polishing all the pivot points, a trick I learnt from classic motorbikes, it can make a surprising difference to pedal/lever actions once they're loaded up with some force. I figure anything gain I can make, no matter how small, will help make the most of any power the brakes will have!

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I also stripped and cleaned up the gear shifter linkage. I didn't go to town on there paint as it's 90% hidden, but again where it slides on bushes its polished and the corrosion and old grease is gone so it should have a nice smooth action.

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I think the last 'mechanical' components that box are the handbrake and the wiper motor assembly, the rest of it falls more under the category of trim / cosmetics. Still I will work my way through the pile cleaning things up and then it's probably time I should get back to sanding the body work... so I think I'll start looking at the gearbox instead! hahaha.
2 months since the last update, I've no idea where the time went! As usual I've been chipping away at the project, but maybe not making the leaps and bounds forward that I'd like to, haha.

The enthusiasm to push on with the bodywork drained away fairly quickly as the weather started to drawn in and I realised just how many hours of paint prep were ahead of me. I've made some progress on that front though, and the left hand side of the car is mostly roughed out. Still a fair way to go on this though.

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In the mean time I've retreated inside the shed and started with some of the mechanicals. Starting at the front made sense, so I rounded up all the front bits to have a look at what I had to work with.

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Mmmm yeah, its all a bit rough! I worked my way through dismantling it, while making a shopping list. Corrosion seems to be a bigger issue than wear, for example the ball joints for the track rods were fine, they just needed new boots to replace the perished originals, but the threaded section to allow you to adjust the length was just rusted solid, to the point that I bent one of the arms trying to free it off.

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Oh well, at least the parts are available and not overly expensive! Good job it's not too pricey as there was a rather large list of things to buy, including a new RHD steering idler as mine was seized solid and then the main casting proceeded to snap when I attempted to press the old bushes out.

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Quite the haul of parts there, including all new dampers, full brake system inc drums, wheel bearings, all suspension bushes, new rear suspension arms and the list goes on...

So where to start... the from uprights and kingpins made sense as I know these can be a bit tricky.

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I could feel very little play in mine by hand, but I know when they are packed with old grease it can be misleading just trying to move them by hand. A full strip down and potentially rebuild was the only thing that made sense.

I have a cheapo table top blasting cabinet and so the front uprights, steering arms, brake backing plates and various other small components all got treated to some compressed air and iron grit. The budget nature of the tools shows, but it got the job done eventually and got underseal and rust out from corners I'd have never managed with a wire wheel.

I treated all the bare parts to some anti-corrosion primer and then a splash of paint to brighten things up. I went for a light gold / champagne kind of colour, as I thought this would contrast nicely with the dark blue body without being too stand out. Hopefully no-one but me really gets to see the underside on a regular basis anyway, but I'll know its there and feel better about it rather than it all just being a bit rusty / flat black!

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The first king pin assembly went back together nicely, and with a new pin and a carefully fitted spacer there was no play. The second one was more of a fighter! The pin that came out of it was heavily corroded (on the right of the picture obviously!)

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And the new pin would not go in, so I think someone had either fitted new bronze bushes and reamed them to fit the old worn pin, or possibly not reamed them at all. The bushes themselves were badly scored and the top one was loose and half slid out when I removed the pin.

I was able to draw a new bush in using some threaded bar, nuts and various washers .

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And eBay supplied me with the longest 19/32" hand reamer I could find, as reccomended in the helpful king pin pinned-thread. It still wasn't quite long enough, as the reamer doesn't get to its full size till about 1/2 the way down it's length. I went as far as I could from the one direction before swapping over and coming at it from the other.

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This was obviously close enough as the new pin is now a good fit and I was able to assemble this side also. Both uprights got new bushes at the top also, where the upper suspension arm mounts.

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The front spring also got stripped down, cleaned, painted and reassembled, and you can see a few other bits that have been blasted and painted in the mean time also.

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I'm just waiting on some bolts and washers in there post but then hopefully the front brakes and hubs should all go together fairly quick, especially as most of it is new!
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What was I saying about getting it painted before autumn?...

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That has turned out to be an impossible task. I've been pushing on with all the spare time I have, but I do feel like I'm spinning plates a bit here with 4 vehicles, 3 of which are currently in bits! It was quickly apparent that I was not going to get all of the paint prep done this summer.

So I focussed my efforts on getting the interior painted, along with window frames and door shuts. Painting the window frames leaves me the option to re-fit the glass and make it weather tight should I get to the point of assembling any of the interior this winter. This way, if things go well, I'm hooping to essentially complete the rest of the car over winter leaving me just to wait for a warm spring day to paint the exterior and then I can go for a drive!

In the process of prepping the inside, I did discover some more rust in the drivers rear window frame, but thankfully it was only minor and was easily rectified.

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Many late nights of sanding...

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... resulted in a car that was ready for painting.

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Prepping the dashboard wasn't too bad, but I never want have to prep the underside of a roof for paint ever again! haha.

Anyway, with it looking like the weather is due wet for a few weeks, I was just ready in time yesterday to get the paint on it.

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It all went fairly smoothly, though painting the underside of a roof with dark paint looking top against the dark sky, I might as well have been painting blind! There are a couple of runs to sort, but as its a single stage flat colour that is far from a disaster. :)

I will still carry on with the exterior paint prep for now, who knows, if we get another dry bright spell in early October I might be able to paint the exterior then... but I'm doubtful that the stars will align so won't be rushing for that goal.
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One of the previous owners of this car decided that the best way to preserve the new floor pans that had been welded it was to waxoyl them... inside the car??! Nice sticky black goo all over the inside metal work, that ~30 years later is not really doing a great job of stopping the rust either.

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I wasn't happy to just ignore it, so like the underside it all needed stripping off. This is a time consuming dirty job, and one I hope to not have to repeat any time soon! I used a mixture of sharp chisel and white spirit with a scouring pad. Slowly but surely I was able to remove it all.

The end result looked arguably worse than when I started! But with the addition of some primer things looked much better!

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Now to repeat the same task in the engine bay...

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I found that the underseal in the engine bay was so old that it had dried out to the point where I could attack it with an angle grinder with a knotted wire wheel on it, and instead of melting it just turned to dust. A rather large amount of unpleasant black dust though, which seemed to just stick to everything, especially me as It was a warm day! Anyway, it was done and so I could get a bit of primer on it and feel better about the world.

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Seam sealer was the next task. I tried a different brand of seam sealer, as it came in a nice tube and would go in my calking gun, making hopefully a neater job than the usual brush on type. Sadly though, it reacted badly with the primer I'd used and cracked. So I had to dig that out and went back to the old trusty Upol seam sealer I've been using for a decade. With that dried out nicely I could mask up and prepare to get the spray gun out.

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On top of the primer, I went with a rubberised stone chip, which went on fairly well. It should give me a decent level of protection in those hard wearing areas.

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And now it was ready for some paint! In most of my previous builds I'd gone for black underside. I like the look when its all fresh and shiny, but the downside is that very quickly, once it's been driving out in the real world, the black seems to just look like an old car, and can give off that 'slathered in underseal 'bodge job vibe. So for this car, I decided I would go with body colour for once.

I mean its such a dark blue it'll probably just end up looking black under there anyway! haha. I do like the colour though, and I think this mix I've had made up might even look a touch more grey than what was previously on the car, which I like. It's even more understated and is a wonderfully elegant colour.

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I'm pleased with how the paint went on, it feels like a fairly easy colour to work with. It always makes such a difference to see things painted.

At one stage I was considering stopping the body work here for a while and focusing on getting a rolling chassis together, but having thought more about it, I'm going to push on and try to finish out the body shell before the warmth of summer leaves us. I don't know if I'll manage it, but it's gotta be worth a shot! I don't want to risk micro blistering from damp under the paint, like I've had issues with on the Daimler, so if its not ready to paint before autumn starts to really bite I'll have to wrap it up and wait till spring to paint it I think.

With no clean running gear I repurposed the box tubing I'd bought to brace the shell into some stands so that I wouldn't damage the fresh underside when I roll the car the right way up.

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I think a couple more cross braces would be wise, so I'll sort that I the next few days. Then it's time to get the car rolled the right way up and time to break out the sandpaper I think!
Picking up where we left off... I got that passengers inner arch finished off.

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Which is a nice feeling, because the next move was starting to offer up all the new panels. It felt like a huge leap forward.

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...well it did till I saw the sort of panel gaps I was faced with on first attempt, haha.

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It was like trying to do a jigsaw, knowing some of the pieces were the wrong shape, but not knowing which ones! I got the doors and bonnet on and spent many hours trying to work out some datums and work out which panels were right and which needed tweaking so things would line up.

Ultimately I found that the front edge of the wings was very flexible, so was likely knocked out of shape in transport/warehouse and so I bent them to match the profile of the front panel. After much head scratching about the inner wing fitment, I decided the repairs I did to the inner arch lip was where the misalignment had originated, so some of that was cut out and repaired for the second time. I also found that my drivers door hinges were slightly bent, causing the door to sit too far backwards in the aperature. That, at least, was an easy fix with a hammer! So many hours later, things were finally starting to line up.

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At this stage I'd just been clamping and screwing the panels into place with some self tappers. But now I was getting somewhere close with the alignment It was time to take the panels off and turn them into Swiss cheese, ready for the millions of plug welds I'd be doing to fix it all together properly.

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Lots of work in there, much more than I thought it would be to be honest! Still, now its all together, and its looking pretty straight and kinda like a car, which is great. The welding was nearly done, but now I had quote a few small cosmetic jobs to finish off before I could actually pack the welder away for good. First up was the top of the front wings. The previous repair job had involved hammering this area in and covering it thick filler, so months ago I'd just cut it out and decided to deal with it later, unfortunately later had now arrived!

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I also had the nasty extra holes that had been drilled into the car for the radio areal and for extra dashboard switches to deal with.

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And small areas of rot in the bottom corners of both doors.

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But finally, after 9 months of hard work, I could remove the bracing from inside the shell, and step back and admire my rust free Fiat!

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That's a nice feeling indeed! I've got heaps of tidying up to do now, lots of underseal still to scrap from the inside (why would you do that previous owner...) and engine bay, then on to paint prep :)
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