Re: Today I mostly .....
Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2020 10:56 am
Over the last couple of days my own fleet has taken a little bit of a back seat as a friend has dropped off something a little bit special for a little bit of electrical rehabilitation. The main complaint was that half of the dash lighting wasn't working. I quite enjoy little jobs like this so was happy to volunteer. It's quite a special motor though, which was another reason for jumping at the opportunity to work on it.
Yes, that is indeed a Lancia Trevi.
The poor thing has definitely been crying out for some TLC...Not really surprising given it was basically dragged out of many years of disuse and prepped for an MOT, then driven. Plus as with many 80s Lancias, it has obviously seen a fair amount of bodgery during its years before it was parked up and forgotten about.
Couple of day's worth of updates here on this subject...Here's yesterday's first.
-- -- --
On my first wander around I came up with the following to do list.
[] Heater inoperable. Fan would run, but while it made noise there was no airflow.
[] Spurious offside tail light failure indication.
[] Offside indicators slow down when tail or brake lights are lit.
[] Several dash illumination lamps out or intermittent.
[] Switchgear illumination very dim.
[] Heater air distribution control lighting inoperable (not actually sure it's meant to be lit).
[] Dash warning lights for parking brake & rear fog lights inoperable.
[] Horrendously rough idle.
I started out intending to look at the tail lights as I reckon a dodgy ground is probably to blame. There's signs of water ingress in the clusters, probably because the lenses are quite badly crazed and there are a few actual cracks.
Didn't actually get as far as looking at the clusters and their wiring closer as I noticed the moment that I opened the boot that there was a significant amount of water in there. This is because the rain is literally pouring into the boot through a rust hole in the surround. Did I mention that this car was very early in the days of restoration?
Bodywork isn't really my forte and I don't want to get involved in plastering a car that's not mine with filler or anything. I did want to do something quick to keep at least some of the weather out though. So I grabbed the ally foil tape and made a temporary patch.
It can just be peeled off and any residue removed with some solvent cleaner when a more permanent repair is done. This should keep at least most of the rain out though in the interim which was my main concern.
Seeing that I'll need to strip quite a bit of trim out of the back of the boot to get to the tail light wiring I decided to come back to that and see if I could find any obvious candidates for the lumpy idle.
Straight off the bat I found a vacuum line which had started to decompose. It didn't look too bad in situ but once looked at more closely...
Thirty second job to replace.
Sadly it didn't sort the horrible idle. However I spotted a very likely candidate for the dead heater.
That black cylinder is a vacuum accumulator and is part of the heating system...and one end should be connected to the inlet manifold. That vacuum line (and anywhere for it to go) was completely absent. My guess is that back when this car had twin carbs (the previous owner kept the twin carbs and associated manifold) there would have been a dedicated tap on the manifold for it. There was an additional attachment for it available though, just needed the blanking cap to be removed. I could then route a vacuum line for it.
Once this was hooked up I was happy to see that the push buttons controlling the air distribution now work correctly, and the heater seems to be mighty effective.
The party trick of the system has to the fact that when you switch it to cooling mode (which would probably bring the A/C on if the car was so equipped) that it automatically returns the temperature control to full cold.
Very brief YouTube video
That is something which will no doubt provide plenty of entertainment when stuck in traffic in the future.
Once I had confirmed this was working I tidied up the hoses I'd just routed a bit. When I went to restart the car I was met with a single click and a complete loss of electricity.
Tracking down the cause of that took about thirty seconds...the screws in the negative battery terminal were barely finger tight and the lead was totally free to float around in the terminal.
Another brief YouTube video
The end of the cable was pretty mangled as it had obviously been getting hot for a while so I trimmed it back and remade the connection.
When I had done that, I spotted the positive terminal smoking when the engine was cranking! Turns out the starter lead was connected to the terminal by three or four strands and was ready to break away. Fine...took that apart and remade the connections too.
I tweaked the alignment a bit so that neither the main feed to the car systems or the starter were jammed against the battery itself.
In the general neighbourhood of the battery I found this wire floating around in the nearside wing waiting to short out on something. No idea what it used to be, but it is long gone.
The barrel connector it was connected to is still there in the loom so it can easily be reconnected if necessary in the future, but doesn't this look better?
That's about all I had time for yesterday other than having taken five minutes to track down where the screws holding the dash together are. Looks like this shouldn't be too hard to get into to change the dash lamps...the main task I originally set out to do!
I've got a hunch about the running issue. I note that there's a solenoid on the carb - a solenoid which is currently connected to nothing...and which appears to have an open circuit coil. If that's something to do with the idle circuit (i.e. an anti-dieselling system to cut fuel when the ignition is turned off) this could be causing all sorts of trouble.
I'm not going to waste too much time on this just now as the car is perfectly drivable. A bit of vibration through the car at idle is the only sign anything is awry really. I'm also not about to go twiddling things on the carb as I recall it being mentioned that it wasn't easy to get it set up in the first place. If I can diagnose a possible issue though I'd like to have a clear recommendation to give. I will stick it on the gas analyser tomorrow though so I can see if it's rich or lean...smells rich, but I've been wrong before.
Only other things I noted down on my notepad from today we're regarding the cooling system. The radiator is weeping from a couple of spots. One around the base of the bleed line to the header tank, the other appears to be along the actual seam between the top plastic header and the core itself.
That connection to the expansion tank in particular makes me uneasy as it's clearly already been subjected to an epoxy or similar repair.
On the same subject, the coolant has turned to rust soup again (it spat it all out a week or so back in Tesco carpark in Buckingham).
It doesn't smell of fuel and there isn't any in the oil, so I reckon it's still just flushing old crud from years of neglect out the system.
I wonder if the incident in Buckingham the other day where it barfed a lot of coolant out was due to a chunk of gunge getting flushed out of somewhere. We'll get a couple of flushes done on the system and see how things go.
Final task before I locked up and went to cook dinner was to reset the wonderfully 80s clock to the right time following the battery removal earlier.
-- -- --
Fast forward to today!
Closer examination of the carburettor revealed that someone has definitely been in here before me when I removed the solenoid to see what was going on...
There should be a pin in here with some form of fuel metering device on it! It's *possible* that it's wedged in the carb body, but I'll need a mirror on a stick to confirm that. It doesn't feel like there's anything in the hole in the carb body though.
I'll need to tweak things a bit anyway though as having now fixed a not insignificant vacuum leak the idle speed has dropped to the point that it's a 50/50 game of chance every time you stop as to whether the engine will stall.
Looking at the coolant today before the engine was started shows that it looks like there is a distinct separate concentration of sediment floating around which has settled out overnight. So hopefully a decent flush through will help things in that department.
Will get that changed later and try to get as much flushed out as I can, hopefully befor this lovely new header tank gets any more stained.
Also noted that there is a worrying absence of hose clips on the fuel tank return line...and original fuel hose on the pump feed line.
The return line isn't a particularly tight fit on the rigid line either... I'll get a hose clamp on there!
I don't have any line in stock the correct size to replace this or I'd do it as a matter of course (especially as it's identical to the vacuum line I found falling to bits yesterday). Definitely doesn't appear to be a fuel filter fitted either. That at least I do have the parts in stock to remedy.
A slight problem generated by having fixed the vacuum leak found yesterday was that it had dropped the idle speed a touch - which given how badly the car was missing at idle resulted in there basically being a 50/50 chance of the engine stalling every time you came off the throttle. I tweaked the idle speed up a little to compensate for this. I need to look up the details for the carb to confirm that I've done that the correct way...but either way it worked and has stopped the stalling nonsense I had yesterday.
Here's the details of the carb, courtesy of my phone as I couldn't get my head into the necessary location to read this!
Hopefully those in the know will be able to confirm whether this is reasonably well suited to the car or not.
If that solenoid is meant to have a needle or other metering device attached to it I suspect that's going to be the source of our problem as it appears that the entire plunger assembly and whatever was once attached to it is missing. This makes sense as the main jet side of things seems to be working just fine - when you give her some beans she picks up smoothly and especially at the top end feels nicely punchy as you'd expect from a Lancia TC engine. It's just the idle that's screwed up.
I'm not going to delve too far into this issue as it's kind of beyond the scope of what I was planning on - but I'd like to be able to at least give an idea of what's going on for the final report I'll hand back with the car. One key bit of information I wanted was to see whether she was overfuelling or underfuelling at idle. Out with the gas analyser.
Well that won't be helping matters. The red section on the gauge is the general range expected for carb fed engines...I have a sneaking feeling that the whole idle circuit is fouled up and it's running from dregs from the main jet. Especially as adjusting what appears to be the idle fuel screw has absolutely zero effect on anything - so I put it right back where it started out and left it well alone.
It's obviously a fuel mixture issue as you CAN make the car idle smoothly by manually choking the carb with your hand (carefully). She sounds really lovely then actually! Is just starving for fuel if left to its own devices.
Unless when I look up the service/adjustment guide for the carb there's some blindingly obvious adjustment that I've missed I'm leaving this well alone and simply noting down "Carb needs attention" and leaving it at that. She starts, drives, stops and doesn't stall every time you stop at a junction - basically back to how she was behaving when she arrived here. Just with all the air now entering the engine via the carb rather than sneaking in through leaks.
Right...Enough faffing around with running issues I wasn't told to look into! Onto lighting issues the car actually arrived on my drive to sort!
First one was a nice easy fix!
Dirty lamp holder contacts. Sixty second fix.
Next up I needed to start pulling the dash to bits.
To be honest this has to be one of the easiest cars I've had to tackle a job like this on. Half a dozen easily accessible screws and the whole face just lifts off the dash.
A further four release the panel which holds the warning lights and switchgear, likewise four release the instrument cluster.
There's even bags of slack in the wiring harness and speedometer cable so disconnecting them is a doddle, and with the steering wheel adjustment dropped down to the lowest level it just lifts out.
Before I started on the instrumentation though I wanted to take a closer look at the heater air distribution controls, which I wasn't sure if had any provision for illumination.
Hey look a that! It even highlights which mode it's in.
Neat. That's one more thing ticked off then.
Again just a dirty lampholder. Not even any slight blackening of the bulb so I left that be.
While peering at things back there I was able to confirm that the main swithgear was in fact lit by a single light source and fibre optics. I'll dig my way in to that tomorrow and look to replace the lamp in it to see if we can get a bit more light out of them.
On to the dash proper. Getting at a few of the lamps on that is a bit of a pain as Lancia decided that it would be smart to position the control module for the gauge pack on top of several of them.
So you have to unscrew that to get to four of the lamps. Not the end of the world as it takes all of five minutes to remove and reattach, but it's still the sort of design decision that makes you roll your eyes a bit.
For reference, this is how the dash looked when we started.
After an hour of cleaning contacts and testing things, this was the result.
Doesn't that look happier? It's actually a really nicely lit instrument panel, never mind by the standards of 1983.
Couple of close ups...Just because I really enjoy photos of instrument panels in the dark.
I did annoyingly managed to nudge the tripometer reset while I was manhandling the instruments in and out of the dash. Luckily however I had taken precautions against that and noted down the reading before that. If that reading is being used to track fuel economy, the owner will simply need to add 34.2 miles to the reading.
In addition to the illumination, the fuel warning light apparently was also out beforehand, it now lights as part of the test sequence at startup.
What I didn't realise was that the car *knows* when there is a light out on the dash. The big red warning light which I'd assumed was simply Lancia's answer to the "stop" light on PSA cars, now lights up green when you turn the ignition on rather than red!
Shouldn't be a problem to get this finished and back together tomorrow then tackle the remaining to do/investigation list.
[] Investigate fibre optic illumination to see if there's any improvement to be made.
[] Investigate non-functioning rear fog lights.
[] Reassemble dash.
[] Attack a few key areas with Vactan.
[] Cooling system drain, flush and refill with proper coolant (it's had water in for the last week following the coolant loss incident).
[] Get a proper photo of the dash once everything's working.
Oh...Pretty sure I found all the necessary bits in the glove box to reassemble the lower heater vents on the dash as well so will put those back together before screwing the dash back together.
Plus it will get an interior valet before it goes back to the owner...because I'm me and that's how I operate.
I've really been enjoying getting to do these little jobs on this motor, these are the sorts of things I really enjoy and find satisfying. Plus getting to work on such a rare and interesting motor is a privilege I feel.
The question I've got on my mind having had a chance to briefly drive this and having been a passenger in a Gamma Berlina...How on earth did Lancia manage to make cars ride like this with conventional springs? Both of these cars seem to hover along a few inches over the surface of the road without ever actually touching the tarmac...it's uncannily smooth, and so quiet!
Have I added another car to my wish list? Um...Yes.
Yes, that is indeed a Lancia Trevi.
The poor thing has definitely been crying out for some TLC...Not really surprising given it was basically dragged out of many years of disuse and prepped for an MOT, then driven. Plus as with many 80s Lancias, it has obviously seen a fair amount of bodgery during its years before it was parked up and forgotten about.
Couple of day's worth of updates here on this subject...Here's yesterday's first.
-- -- --
On my first wander around I came up with the following to do list.
[] Heater inoperable. Fan would run, but while it made noise there was no airflow.
[] Spurious offside tail light failure indication.
[] Offside indicators slow down when tail or brake lights are lit.
[] Several dash illumination lamps out or intermittent.
[] Switchgear illumination very dim.
[] Heater air distribution control lighting inoperable (not actually sure it's meant to be lit).
[] Dash warning lights for parking brake & rear fog lights inoperable.
[] Horrendously rough idle.
I started out intending to look at the tail lights as I reckon a dodgy ground is probably to blame. There's signs of water ingress in the clusters, probably because the lenses are quite badly crazed and there are a few actual cracks.
Didn't actually get as far as looking at the clusters and their wiring closer as I noticed the moment that I opened the boot that there was a significant amount of water in there. This is because the rain is literally pouring into the boot through a rust hole in the surround. Did I mention that this car was very early in the days of restoration?
Bodywork isn't really my forte and I don't want to get involved in plastering a car that's not mine with filler or anything. I did want to do something quick to keep at least some of the weather out though. So I grabbed the ally foil tape and made a temporary patch.
It can just be peeled off and any residue removed with some solvent cleaner when a more permanent repair is done. This should keep at least most of the rain out though in the interim which was my main concern.
Seeing that I'll need to strip quite a bit of trim out of the back of the boot to get to the tail light wiring I decided to come back to that and see if I could find any obvious candidates for the lumpy idle.
Straight off the bat I found a vacuum line which had started to decompose. It didn't look too bad in situ but once looked at more closely...
Thirty second job to replace.
Sadly it didn't sort the horrible idle. However I spotted a very likely candidate for the dead heater.
That black cylinder is a vacuum accumulator and is part of the heating system...and one end should be connected to the inlet manifold. That vacuum line (and anywhere for it to go) was completely absent. My guess is that back when this car had twin carbs (the previous owner kept the twin carbs and associated manifold) there would have been a dedicated tap on the manifold for it. There was an additional attachment for it available though, just needed the blanking cap to be removed. I could then route a vacuum line for it.
Once this was hooked up I was happy to see that the push buttons controlling the air distribution now work correctly, and the heater seems to be mighty effective.
The party trick of the system has to the fact that when you switch it to cooling mode (which would probably bring the A/C on if the car was so equipped) that it automatically returns the temperature control to full cold.
Very brief YouTube video
That is something which will no doubt provide plenty of entertainment when stuck in traffic in the future.
Once I had confirmed this was working I tidied up the hoses I'd just routed a bit. When I went to restart the car I was met with a single click and a complete loss of electricity.
Tracking down the cause of that took about thirty seconds...the screws in the negative battery terminal were barely finger tight and the lead was totally free to float around in the terminal.
Another brief YouTube video
The end of the cable was pretty mangled as it had obviously been getting hot for a while so I trimmed it back and remade the connection.
When I had done that, I spotted the positive terminal smoking when the engine was cranking! Turns out the starter lead was connected to the terminal by three or four strands and was ready to break away. Fine...took that apart and remade the connections too.
I tweaked the alignment a bit so that neither the main feed to the car systems or the starter were jammed against the battery itself.
In the general neighbourhood of the battery I found this wire floating around in the nearside wing waiting to short out on something. No idea what it used to be, but it is long gone.
The barrel connector it was connected to is still there in the loom so it can easily be reconnected if necessary in the future, but doesn't this look better?
That's about all I had time for yesterday other than having taken five minutes to track down where the screws holding the dash together are. Looks like this shouldn't be too hard to get into to change the dash lamps...the main task I originally set out to do!
I've got a hunch about the running issue. I note that there's a solenoid on the carb - a solenoid which is currently connected to nothing...and which appears to have an open circuit coil. If that's something to do with the idle circuit (i.e. an anti-dieselling system to cut fuel when the ignition is turned off) this could be causing all sorts of trouble.
I'm not going to waste too much time on this just now as the car is perfectly drivable. A bit of vibration through the car at idle is the only sign anything is awry really. I'm also not about to go twiddling things on the carb as I recall it being mentioned that it wasn't easy to get it set up in the first place. If I can diagnose a possible issue though I'd like to have a clear recommendation to give. I will stick it on the gas analyser tomorrow though so I can see if it's rich or lean...smells rich, but I've been wrong before.
Only other things I noted down on my notepad from today we're regarding the cooling system. The radiator is weeping from a couple of spots. One around the base of the bleed line to the header tank, the other appears to be along the actual seam between the top plastic header and the core itself.
That connection to the expansion tank in particular makes me uneasy as it's clearly already been subjected to an epoxy or similar repair.
On the same subject, the coolant has turned to rust soup again (it spat it all out a week or so back in Tesco carpark in Buckingham).
It doesn't smell of fuel and there isn't any in the oil, so I reckon it's still just flushing old crud from years of neglect out the system.
I wonder if the incident in Buckingham the other day where it barfed a lot of coolant out was due to a chunk of gunge getting flushed out of somewhere. We'll get a couple of flushes done on the system and see how things go.
Final task before I locked up and went to cook dinner was to reset the wonderfully 80s clock to the right time following the battery removal earlier.
-- -- --
Fast forward to today!
Closer examination of the carburettor revealed that someone has definitely been in here before me when I removed the solenoid to see what was going on...
There should be a pin in here with some form of fuel metering device on it! It's *possible* that it's wedged in the carb body, but I'll need a mirror on a stick to confirm that. It doesn't feel like there's anything in the hole in the carb body though.
I'll need to tweak things a bit anyway though as having now fixed a not insignificant vacuum leak the idle speed has dropped to the point that it's a 50/50 game of chance every time you stop as to whether the engine will stall.
Looking at the coolant today before the engine was started shows that it looks like there is a distinct separate concentration of sediment floating around which has settled out overnight. So hopefully a decent flush through will help things in that department.
Will get that changed later and try to get as much flushed out as I can, hopefully befor this lovely new header tank gets any more stained.
Also noted that there is a worrying absence of hose clips on the fuel tank return line...and original fuel hose on the pump feed line.
The return line isn't a particularly tight fit on the rigid line either... I'll get a hose clamp on there!
I don't have any line in stock the correct size to replace this or I'd do it as a matter of course (especially as it's identical to the vacuum line I found falling to bits yesterday). Definitely doesn't appear to be a fuel filter fitted either. That at least I do have the parts in stock to remedy.
A slight problem generated by having fixed the vacuum leak found yesterday was that it had dropped the idle speed a touch - which given how badly the car was missing at idle resulted in there basically being a 50/50 chance of the engine stalling every time you came off the throttle. I tweaked the idle speed up a little to compensate for this. I need to look up the details for the carb to confirm that I've done that the correct way...but either way it worked and has stopped the stalling nonsense I had yesterday.
Here's the details of the carb, courtesy of my phone as I couldn't get my head into the necessary location to read this!
Hopefully those in the know will be able to confirm whether this is reasonably well suited to the car or not.
If that solenoid is meant to have a needle or other metering device attached to it I suspect that's going to be the source of our problem as it appears that the entire plunger assembly and whatever was once attached to it is missing. This makes sense as the main jet side of things seems to be working just fine - when you give her some beans she picks up smoothly and especially at the top end feels nicely punchy as you'd expect from a Lancia TC engine. It's just the idle that's screwed up.
I'm not going to delve too far into this issue as it's kind of beyond the scope of what I was planning on - but I'd like to be able to at least give an idea of what's going on for the final report I'll hand back with the car. One key bit of information I wanted was to see whether she was overfuelling or underfuelling at idle. Out with the gas analyser.
Well that won't be helping matters. The red section on the gauge is the general range expected for carb fed engines...I have a sneaking feeling that the whole idle circuit is fouled up and it's running from dregs from the main jet. Especially as adjusting what appears to be the idle fuel screw has absolutely zero effect on anything - so I put it right back where it started out and left it well alone.
It's obviously a fuel mixture issue as you CAN make the car idle smoothly by manually choking the carb with your hand (carefully). She sounds really lovely then actually! Is just starving for fuel if left to its own devices.
Unless when I look up the service/adjustment guide for the carb there's some blindingly obvious adjustment that I've missed I'm leaving this well alone and simply noting down "Carb needs attention" and leaving it at that. She starts, drives, stops and doesn't stall every time you stop at a junction - basically back to how she was behaving when she arrived here. Just with all the air now entering the engine via the carb rather than sneaking in through leaks.
Right...Enough faffing around with running issues I wasn't told to look into! Onto lighting issues the car actually arrived on my drive to sort!
First one was a nice easy fix!
Dirty lamp holder contacts. Sixty second fix.
Next up I needed to start pulling the dash to bits.
To be honest this has to be one of the easiest cars I've had to tackle a job like this on. Half a dozen easily accessible screws and the whole face just lifts off the dash.
A further four release the panel which holds the warning lights and switchgear, likewise four release the instrument cluster.
There's even bags of slack in the wiring harness and speedometer cable so disconnecting them is a doddle, and with the steering wheel adjustment dropped down to the lowest level it just lifts out.
Before I started on the instrumentation though I wanted to take a closer look at the heater air distribution controls, which I wasn't sure if had any provision for illumination.
Hey look a that! It even highlights which mode it's in.
Neat. That's one more thing ticked off then.
Again just a dirty lampholder. Not even any slight blackening of the bulb so I left that be.
While peering at things back there I was able to confirm that the main swithgear was in fact lit by a single light source and fibre optics. I'll dig my way in to that tomorrow and look to replace the lamp in it to see if we can get a bit more light out of them.
On to the dash proper. Getting at a few of the lamps on that is a bit of a pain as Lancia decided that it would be smart to position the control module for the gauge pack on top of several of them.
So you have to unscrew that to get to four of the lamps. Not the end of the world as it takes all of five minutes to remove and reattach, but it's still the sort of design decision that makes you roll your eyes a bit.
For reference, this is how the dash looked when we started.
After an hour of cleaning contacts and testing things, this was the result.
Doesn't that look happier? It's actually a really nicely lit instrument panel, never mind by the standards of 1983.
Couple of close ups...Just because I really enjoy photos of instrument panels in the dark.
I did annoyingly managed to nudge the tripometer reset while I was manhandling the instruments in and out of the dash. Luckily however I had taken precautions against that and noted down the reading before that. If that reading is being used to track fuel economy, the owner will simply need to add 34.2 miles to the reading.
In addition to the illumination, the fuel warning light apparently was also out beforehand, it now lights as part of the test sequence at startup.
What I didn't realise was that the car *knows* when there is a light out on the dash. The big red warning light which I'd assumed was simply Lancia's answer to the "stop" light on PSA cars, now lights up green when you turn the ignition on rather than red!
Shouldn't be a problem to get this finished and back together tomorrow then tackle the remaining to do/investigation list.
[] Investigate fibre optic illumination to see if there's any improvement to be made.
[] Investigate non-functioning rear fog lights.
[] Reassemble dash.
[] Attack a few key areas with Vactan.
[] Cooling system drain, flush and refill with proper coolant (it's had water in for the last week following the coolant loss incident).
[] Get a proper photo of the dash once everything's working.
Oh...Pretty sure I found all the necessary bits in the glove box to reassemble the lower heater vents on the dash as well so will put those back together before screwing the dash back together.
Plus it will get an interior valet before it goes back to the owner...because I'm me and that's how I operate.
I've really been enjoying getting to do these little jobs on this motor, these are the sorts of things I really enjoy and find satisfying. Plus getting to work on such a rare and interesting motor is a privilege I feel.
The question I've got on my mind having had a chance to briefly drive this and having been a passenger in a Gamma Berlina...How on earth did Lancia manage to make cars ride like this with conventional springs? Both of these cars seem to hover along a few inches over the surface of the road without ever actually touching the tarmac...it's uncannily smooth, and so quiet!
Have I added another car to my wish list? Um...Yes.