BLOG: A tale of two lucky VDP's - part 6

by Andy Perman

Early April saw the cold weather come to an end and the temperature start to rise. That coupled with the lighter evenings gave me more time and I was going to need it! I basically had a month to finish the car, get an MOT and tax it before the Gaydon show in early May. Being a 1974-built car it missed the frozen nil duty on classic cars by one year so I had to pay up!

I’d ordered a new exhaust system a few weeks before which had now arrived, so there was that to fit plus changing all the suspension metalastic parts including the engine mountings as the engine was definitely not sitting level. Oh, and a new set of tyres and tidy up the wheels at the same time. A steering rack to change and finally there was a series of interconnected rods that I found in the boot that turned out to be the kick down mechanism. Why they had been removed was unknown so I had to figure out how they went back on and how it worked, but more of that later. I roughly worked out to get this all done over the next three weekends leaving one spare weekend for wiggle room before the MOT.

I decided to lift the front of the car first so I could remove both wheels and tackle the engine mounts and suspension bushes. With the wheels removed I rubbed back the scabby paint, rust proofed and treated it to a couple of coats of wheel Silvereene. Not perfect but certainly presentable. So off to the tyre fitters they went for a new set of boots.

Now I could tackle the engine mountings and the decidedly wonky-sitting engine. The workshop manual said to lift the gearbox and power unit to just take the load then remove the 4 bolts securing the mount to the body, remove the top engine stabiliser bar, then to lift the whole power unit 4 inches before taking off the inner nuts connecting it to the gearbox housing. Then repeat for the opposite side. Amazingly it all went textbook. The new mountings went back in and I got my first look at the engine now sitting level.

So next I removed the tie bars and the bushes to replace them. It was weirdly cheaper to buy the whole tie bar and bush kit than just the bushes, so whole new ones went back on. While removed it gave me a chance to rust treat and paint the front under body heavy gauge parts that would otherwise have been difficult to get to. 

Next job for the front of the car was a new steering rack. There was a lot of play in the passenger side arm so that clearly had to be rectified. What I was unaware of at the time was this was a simple bush change, but more of that later! Removing the rack was very simple. Separate each track rod end ball joint. Undo the 4 clamp bolts, then finally undo the lower steering clamp bolt. As I did so I heard the clonk of the rack dropping free onto the inner wings. With the rack removed I lined up both the old and new racks on the drive to set the track rods as I was seriously running out of time and didn’t think I’d get the opportunity to get the tracking professionally checked and set, so I could get it damn close myself just in case. Then before fitting the new rack, injected the gear oil into each set of the bellows.

The re-fitting was fairly straightforward except trying to get the lower clamp connection to line up. I spent ages climbing in and then under the car trying to get the two parts together and not getting anywhere, then swearing at the stupidity of the design making this such a difficult part to fit, before I realised you simply slide up the steering column then drop it onto the rack spline. Simples!! Last job for the front was to re-fit the newly shod wheels and lower it to the ground.

I could now raise the rear of the car and again refurbish the wheels so I could send them to the tyre place. However the job I’d been dreading was changing the cross tube mounts. Both mine were shot and had come apart like the engine mountings had and there is no way they would get past my MOT guy.

​The big issue was that the full force of the suspension fluid cantilevers on the mountings, so you really need to de-pressurise the system before removing them. Problem was I didn’t have a pump unit so I had to use method 2 in the manual which assured me by the use of 3 jacks and wood packers it was possible to carry out the job without de-pressurising, but it looked terrifying.

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With the three jacks in place and the radius arm packed up I undid the main bolt and………. well, nothing happened. I didn’t all fly apart and squirt fluid all over the workshop as I’d feared. It was actually very straightforward and was all done in 6 bolts and half an hour. Result! With the opposite side also changed I refitted the newly tyred wheels and lowered the car. Job done. Last job of the day was to fit the new exhaust. Really simple, one bolt on the manifold clamp and three rubber hangers saw the job done in an hour.

That just left the puzzle in the boot - the kick-down linkage. There was little information in the workshop manual and very few people knew much about the auto gearboxes, so I was on my own. I had found a diagram online for a Mini automatic set up and that turned out to be really useful. It enabled me to lay the parts out on the bench and work out how they connected together. With that done it was fairly easy to then connect them to the appropriate throttle arm point and onto the governor housing lever via a cam on the gearbox. I’d spotted the odd looking lever not doing anything whilst fitting the exhaust but now it all made sense.

One final job; I’d bought a Boyer Bransdon ignition amplifier. Simple four-wire fit and it removes all the points issues. It certainly improved the running of the engine when I fired it up. Quick check of the dwell and timing - it wasn’t perfect but good enough given I was now out of time. So that was it; I’d done it. MOT was 8am the following morning. The Gaydon show was 10am the day after! No pressure then. The car was on all 4 wheels for the first time in over 2 years. I shut the workshop for the night and had a well earned beer.

To be continued……