Today I mostly .....

[Tom.]

You know there will be two Ladas for sale in your street tomorrow.

[Zelandeth]

...Was about to go to bed.

Suddenly I hear two distinctly separate loud echoing sounds of *BEEEEEP...BEEEEEP....BEEEEEEEP* from down stairs.

Fight my way to the alarm control panel, and sure enough it's flashing "TELECOMS FAIL" at me. Into the lounge...yep, phone line has gone down.

Has come back and gone out again three times so far, each time causing the alarm to freak out.

I'm tired, I have a headache, and I want to go to sleep, yet now I'm half listening out for that thing going off again. I know why we have an alarm and all that, but there are times that it's a royal pain in the rear. ...When BT are doing work on the phone lines being one in particular!

[mt500]

You know there will be two Ladas for sale in your street tomorrow.

Hope so I'll buy them as well

[mt500]

Had another look for a lada niva on eBay again.Must get a new hobby not involving finding a niva

[Zelandeth]

Today was mostly Saab MOT prep.

Has already had two new tyres and a new front exhaust section fitted for the cause, but today added a new set of front brake pads, new spark plugs, good clean of the throttle body and air metering unit, setting the idle speed, checking the handbrake adjustment, checking all the lights and then drowning the thing with an unreasonable amount of wax as the weather finally allowed me to do that.

Always figure that turning up to a test with a clean and tidy car with evidence of recent service activity can never hurt.

[mt500]

Cut the floor out of my disco commercial ready for the new one to be fitted.

[Zelandeth]

Over the last few days...

On Friday morning, my Skoda's engine bay looked like this.



Roughly an hour later, this was the scene of devastation which greeted me!






(top)

(bottom)

Open to theories as to the failure mode. Symptom was combustion gases finding their way into the cooling system (and the reverse when the engine was shut down if you didn't loosen the expansion cap).

Saturday was mostly spent (well, among normal daily duties, walking dog etc) cleaning everything up. Head scrubbed up not bad.

You learn something every day...I've owned three of these cars and never before realised that the heads were originally painted grey!



Head scrubbed up not too bad actually. Given that I'd had no issues with low compression or anything and the car only has 18K on the clock I made the decision not to disturb the valves. Worst comes to the worst it's only an hour to get the head off!



I found this mark in the combustion chamber of no 2 cylinder interesting. Have to wonder if there's a story behind that. No signs of damage to the corresponding piston.



This morning I spent a good few hours wrestling the mangled remains of a snapped stud out of the exhaust manifold, before finally being able to start putting things back together again.

Aside from A: Spilling oil all over the driveway on account of the drain plug on the sump being the size of the channel tunnel (and larger than the drain hole in my drain pan!) and B: Having to resort to the old approach of hammering a screwdriver through the oil filter because it would *not* come off for love nor money, that went pretty smoothly, and was as the manuals always say, the reverse of disassembly.

The "bolt left over" syndrome did strike however - managed to completely forget to attach the bracket with the lifting eyes to the engine. It's held on by the top four head bolts, so no easy way to resolve that! It'll just have to live in the boot for the forseeable future...I'm sure not about to take the head off again for the sake of refitting it! Only thing it means in normal use is that the air filter is held in place by two bolts rather than three.



Oops.

Initial run up test seemed to be positive, bit smoky (to be expected given the bores were manually oiled prior to reassembly) to start with, but seemed to be running a good deal better - the strange whistling/hissing noise that I'd never been able to track down the source of is conspicuously absent now, so I do wonder if that had actually been coming from the head gasket from day one.

Further testing tomorrow and setting the valve clearances as I wasn't able to do that at the time because my feeler gauges had gone walkabout. See how she runs then. Will probably do another oil and filter change as well once I've had the engine running for an hour or so.

If everything goes well tomorrow, never know...might get her booked in for an MOT!

[Neil Chowney]

Having owned more than a couple of the old Estelles i can empathise with overheating issues.

Did you skim or check the head for flatness and warp when it was off? They are VERY succeptible to the heads warping.

They tend to distort the head when they overheat.

[Zelandeth]

I still reckon that the root cause of the overheating was the previous owner not replacing a dodgy expansion tank pressure cap - though it never got (in my ownership) particularly hot - I'm paranoid about such things, so the moment I saw the gauge starting to climb we went into emergency shutdown mode. Think the highest I actually saw was 100C, which is right at the top edge of the green on the gauge.

I did check the head for flatness as best I could with the equipment I had to hand (steel ruler and bright light), and it certainly seemed to be flat along all axes as far as I could tell - also laid it on a sheet of glass and looked for any wobble. Given that to get it skimmed I would have had to totally dismantle the head, which in turn laid me open to the high likelihood of snapping yet more studs trying to get the manifolds off, and would have required me to actually buy a valve spring compressor, I figured to believe my checking and just count myself lucky!

Time will tell I guess!

[Neil Chowney]

Hopefully be OK then.

I think the main problems with these was when they ran out of water and the temp gauge didnt go up accordingly as it used to sit in air if it got too low.

[Zelandeth]

Keeping my fingers crossed basically! Guess at the end of the day it's only a couple of hours work and a seven quid gasket to strip it back down if it causes problems in the future...Having done it once (and removed that blasted exhaust manifold stud) it would be a lot quicker if I had to do it again.

Still...it better behave.

Today has mostly been "spit and polish work" in preparation for it being seen by the outside world.

Having been parked in the corner since last September it was understandably full of spider webs and similar invasive insect life. So attacked the interior with the vacuum cleaner and gave all the plastics a good clean down.

Next was something I'd been meaning to do since I got the car. It suffers from the usual disintegrating seat syndrome that afflicts virtually all Estelles.

The problem is that the fabric is not UV stable, so on exposure to sunlight it starts to disintegrate. They all do it (the basic cloth seats anyway - the velour and some of the other cloth ones you saw on the Rapid/130GL aren't as badly afflicted), so the only real solution is to get the seats re-covered. At least a few hundred quid work, so it's a little ways down the to do list yet.

Still...something needed to be done about this as it was driving my OCD crazy, and is the first thing your eyes were drawn to the moment you opened the door.





So...Re-covering the seats is out for now, so seat covers are the order of the day - and you'll be doing well to find ones made specifically made for an Estelle these days. Fifteen years ago maybe...but not today. So generic ones it is.

I discovered something today. Fitting modern seat covers to not modern seats is an exercise in frustration and annoyance that will test anyone's patience to the limit and most likely be a project during which you learn (or invent) several new swear words.

The basic problem is that modern car seats are not shaped like old car seats. Modern seats are physically larger and more sculpted generally, but have far less in the way of actual padding. The Estelle has a good three or four inches of padding at the thickest point of the driver's seat - that's why they're comfy (and by extension why I tend to find that sitting in modern cars - especially VW/Audi or modern Skoda to cause me physical pain after anything more than about 15 minutes)! The upshot of this is that the covers *really* aren't the same shape as the seats.

After a good hour and a half this was the result.





Okay, fine...they look like cheap seat covers, but I still reckon it's a marked improvement from beforehand. ...even if the "airbag" labels have got to go. A lot of the wrinkles have started to settle out even since I took the photos, imagine some re-adjustment will be needed once the fabric has stretched a bit.

Finally was a quick check of the ignition timing and points clearance, both of which were exactly where they should be.

EDIT 14th July (rather than making another post).

Well we sadly definitely won't be going straight through the test - managed to poke a hole in the offside outer sill this afternoon. Few areas of the underside of that sill don't look too clever either, so some welding will be needed. Meh, not the end of the world, nor unexpected really on a 30 year old car - I can't find any evidence of it having been welded before, which is quite a surprise given the tendency for these cars to dissolve on contact with water.



On the plus side, compared to sorting this on a modern car with all manner of complex curves, this should be relatively easy to sort - it's also in an area which will be getting a fresh coat of black hammered finish stone-chip resistant paint rather than body coloured, so no mucking around having to match colours. Funnily enough, the sill on the nearside looks immaculate both outside and under the car from the quick look I took.

Did the last walk round checks today though just to make sure it doesn't fail on something else daft, so checked all the lights, horn, windscreen washers (which didn't work until I wiggled the connectors on the pump - that's why we do this!) and such like.

Finally slapped two coats of wax on after a treatment with the clay mitt and polish - then finally gave all the plastics a good going over, I always forget how massive a difference just dressing the plastics makes to how tidy (or not) a car looks.





...Really need to get some white paint and touch in the lettering on the mudflaps, that's really bugging my OCD now I've noticed it...

Well, I'll report back tomorrow once I have the shopping list from the MOT.

Expecting:

At least two or three patches needed on the offside sill now I've looked at it.
Brake hoses.
One or two rear suspension bushes.
Possibly brake discs - they look like something dredged off the Titanic, but the brakes still work (very) well, so we'll see.
...and of course the emission test where you just have to cross your fingers on any car this age.

[Zelandeth]

Yesterday I mostly...

Attended the Festival of the Unexceptional classic car show over in Whittlebury.







Skoda was very well received and got a lot of interest. Ladas were very conspicuous by their absence though - not a single one there. We even had a Yugo, but no Ladas...

[Zelandeth]

Picked up a new phone. Been with Samsung since 2010 or thereabouts and while they've been decent enough there have been a few niggling issues which have been present on my first S2, the S4 Mini I've just replaced and the S6 one of my housemates has. Just silly things like an alarm clock that periodically decides not to go off for one that springs to mind...in six years they should have fixed nonsense like that I feel.

So decided to try something a bit different. Picked up a Huawei P9. Couple of folks I know have them and seem really happy. Early days here obviously but inital impressions are very positive. Camera (which I was well satisfied with on the S4) is a definite step up - especially in that it offers a heck of a lot more manual control which is nice. Feels really nicely put together too.

Have to see how it fares in real world use now.

[Zelandeth]

Today I mostly...

Picked up a little present for my fleet. Especially the Skoda with the old school ignition system where everything needs manual adjustment.



Got all the probes I need for the inbuilt functions, though there exists a companion unit which allows this to also show a %CO value, would be handy to find that!

...All else aside, let's face it that is going to look the part in the garage!

[excossack]

Looks a good bit of kit.

Serviced the Tohatsu 3.5hp Two-Stroke, pumping water better than before.
Almost time to sell it on.