Zelandeth

Update: Checked that I had a good spark, and indeed did. So definitely a fuelling issue. I just happened to have a spare carb floating around so threw that at it, no difference whatsoever. Now what are the odds of two carbs having the exact same fault? Pretty remote I reckon! ...also spotted when I did this that the heat shield under the carb was on back to front...wonder if that had anything to do with my hot starting issue... Having pretty much exhausted all other logical causes I've come to the conclusion that I've come across a contaminated batch of fuel. Topping the tank off (from another garage!) has improved matters and it will now idle, albeit not being too happy about it. So, will stick my main carb back on tomorrow (it's jetted for a 130 which seems to get around the pinking issues with modern fuels and gives a bit more get up and go), and then try to decide what to do next. Not sure whether to just burn through it or actually drain the tank (then what do I do with what comes out?). Either way, won't be filling up at the Texaco garage just around the corner again. If it's caused an Estelle to play up goodness only knows what it will have done to a modern car...

Reckon I have similar issues here - 95% of the online databases come up with my Citroen as a Saxo 1.1i - when it is in fact a Xantia 1.9TD. Right pain when buying parts...at least GSF know me these days so have started the manual model entry before I'm through the door. Reckon there must be a Saxo (probably long dead) with a very similar reg (878 is mine - bet it's 877 or something like that) which has found its way into the systems. Have never run a HPI check I have to admit...kinda curious to see if any of my cars do have a hidden past...ironically especially the Estelle which does have signs of (very, very old) accident repair.

Okay, so today she has decided to play up. Starts fine, runs fine under load but has decided that she won't idle for love nor money. Holding the revs up on the throttle there is a definite, erratic misfire. First thought was crud in the carb, especially as I changed the fuel lines this morning. Whipped it off and sure enough there was a fair amount of gunk in the bottom of the float bowl. So cleaned that out and set about blowing through all the jets etc with carb cleaner. What came out of several of the passages didn't smell, look nor feel like petrol. Made zero difference. Fine...checked the points, gap wasn't quite right so was duly set to 0.45mm. No difference. "Hmm" says me. Dodgy condenser? Need to get my testers on the HT leads so I can confirm whether the spark is dropping out or if there's still a fuelling issue. I do have a spare carb I could try if it comes to it. Ideas?

Thanks for the compliment! Still got a fair list of things to do though. [] Get the semi trailing arm bushes changed as they are beyond shot. [] Look into getting the rust sorted. Most notably the offside rear wheel arch and the offside front wing. [] Get the seats re-trimmed (as usual for an Estelle!). [] Sort the rocker cover oil leak - just needs a new gasket. [] Get the underbody properly rust proofed. ...that's the list as far as I can remember just now! Looks like we'll have a Lada Riva 1.5E Estate joining the fleet shortly, should make a good companion for the Estelle I reckon!

Here's one of the obligatory photos of her at the Briskoda meetup earlier today. Seemed to be pretty well received by everyone. Shame that there weren't any more Estelles in evidence, the only other rear engined car I saw was a rather heavily modified (and immaculate) Rapid. Think the 40-odd mile run each way has actually done the car the world of good, seemed to be running far more nicely on the way home.

So today she really had the first proper outing of the year, a leisurely drive out to Whittlebury where the Festival of The Unexceptional classic car show was taking place. Got quite a bit of attention, and drove well on the way there and back. Think there's still a bit of crud in one of the jets in the carb on account of slightly lumpy power delivery on light throttle - which immediately smooths out when the second carb barrel comes into play. Of course, a few obligatory photos from the day. Think I even managed to dodge the sunburn I think!

Zel was originally created far more years ago than I care to think about as role playing character, and has always since I first started using the internet back in 98 or 99 been used as my online persona as it saved me having to think of something more inventive. It unexpectedly made a jump into the real world when I was at college and ran into one class where there were no less than five Ian/Iains plus the lecturer - So I just used that there to save confusion - and it somehow stuck! That was *tries to do the mental math* somewhere around twelve years ago, and I can probably count on one hand the number of people who don't refer to me by Zel!

Air conditioning is your friend. Hoping to get a proper permanently installed split system installed in the next couple of years - especially as two of the bedrooms in this house don't have windows to the outside (rather into an atrium which is pretty darn warm in the summer). Having grown up in Aberdeenshire, I didn't take kindly to dealing with 35C weather here this week...Nope, just hid in a room with the A/C until things cooled down to a sensible level!

Well as of yesterday afternoon this Estelle has been officially back on the road after £180 worth of welding, which was a lot less than I was honestly bracing for. Off to the first show of the year on Saturday. Today's orders of business will include attempting to get the rear view mirror to remain affixed to the windscreen (again) and rustproofing.

Well with temperatures well over 30C today I spent the vast majority of the day hiding in a room with air conditioning. Spent the vast majority of my life up in Northeast Scotland so don't handle heat all that well! Still, gave me a good opportunity to start wire brushing and slapping some rust converter on a lot of the areas underneath the car which have a lot of surface corrosion on them. My going theory is that this car has spent a lot of its life sitting somewhere slightly damp. Everything seems to be perfectly solid under that crud (the offside sill excepted), but it looks like something dredged off the Titanic. Yes, the camber on the offside rear wheel is off, one of the semi-trailing arm bushes is to blame for that I believe - it's about number three on the to do list (weld sill, change brake lines, then sort that). The other thing a 30+C day is good for is a cooling system stress test. Given I've just had the head off, this seemed a prudent thing to do. Firstly I crawled around under the front of the car to link out the thermoswitch to ascertain that the cooling fan did indeed actually work - I was showered with a mixture of bits of rust and cobwebs as confirmation that it did indeed work. Nice and quiet as well with no sounds of protesting bearings or anything. Kept myself a wire link on hand so that if the thermoswitch turned out to be duff I could easily dive under there to get the fan going to cool the car. Then started up, using my highly technologically advanced broom handle set the idle to about 1500rpm, and waited what seemed like an eternity...thermostat works just fine, but it doesn't half take a while for the cooling system on these cars to *all* heat up! Eventually crept up to about a needle's width below 90C on the gauge, then the fan kicked in and it sat pretty much rock steady here. Then sat there for a good 20 minutes or so - checked with an IR thermometer and it was showing sensible temperatures relative to the reading there though I forgot to actually write them down. Also showed me that the whole area of the radiator core is doing its work. She's going into the garage on Thursday to get the sill sorted out - crossing my fingers I'll get the car back before the weekend as there's a show on not far from here - the Festival of The Unexceptional - that I'd love to get her along to!

Well somewhat to my surprise the only fail items were the expected holes getting poked in the offside outer and inner sills. Everything else went through fine. Still plan on changing the brake hoses though as I just don't trust them. She ran well to and from the test station, though a fuel vaporisation issue did raise it's head when doing a hot start there - manually priming the carb the next time seemed to resolve it - this car has always been a bit prone to that, have to look into it further once we've a bit more time. Also identified a fuel leak on my post trip check over - dripping right onto the front branch of the exhaust manifold. Just needed the union on the carb nipped up a bit - but goes to show you *why* it's so critical to go over a car that's been off the road for a while with a fine toothcomb once it's had a proper run. Will be attacking the underside with rust convertor and Dinitrol on Sunday probably (now I know everywhere other than the offside sill is sound). Would do it tomorrow but off to a get together in London tomorrow so will have to wait till Sunday.

So it's probably about time that my car got a thread in here given that I've finally got off my lazy backside and created an account here and all that. I first actually picked the car up back in 2014 from an eBay classified ad that was local to me. Probably paid a bit over the odds for it, but the car being localish (I was based in Aberdeen back then) rather than at the other end of the country I figured was worth a bit extra and with them getting rarer, decided just to grin and bear it and pay for it. The initial impression was of a car that had spent a long while sitting and had never really been properly recommissioned. The suspension was creaky, a heap of bushes could really do with changing, the brake discs looked like something dredged off the Titanic, miles of that horrible green fabric hose were still present, the exhaust was blowing, it wouldn't idle for love nor money, and most terrifyingly it was still wearing the original tyres. It also had the look underside of a car that had been stored for a long time, the front suspension in particular features lots of that "fluffy" looking surface rust, everything seemed solid though, you just had to attack it with a wire brush first. It also decided to dump all of its coolant halfway home from buying it, with an intermittent overheating problem which was pretty quickly diagnosed as being due to a dodgy expansion tank pressure cap. It never got that hot while I was in the car as I'm paranoid about such things and shut the engine down pretty much the moment I spotted the gauge heading north of its normal range, but I can't say what happened before I had it. Sure enough the head gasket announced its failure by letting water into cylinders two and three if you didn't take the cap off when you shut the engine off. It didn't actually cause any real problems, though I won't be surprised if that turns out to be somewhat responsible for the lumpy power delivery. The tyres were the first item on the list though once I got it home, the originals were truly terrifying. Going around a roundabout at anything more than 10mph resulted in tyre squeal that you would expect from a 70s US action film, and power slides were entirely possible (and at times unavoidable) even with 54bhp less however many had escaped on tap. Ended up having to get them shipped over from Germany as nowhere in Aberdeen could track any 155SR13 tyres in the UK...not that surprising these days I guess. Still, new rubber on there and both the ride and handling returned to about where they should be - and the wonderful steering feel I remembered from my first Estelle was restored. It also meant that I could stop in less than half a mile which was a plus. The next order of business really was just a decent service - the oil looked like something that you'd put in a fountain pen rather than engine oil, the coolant was brown rather than green, and the points were so far out of adjustment that I'm shocked the engine was even running. The plugs were the original PAL branded ones and actually were still in fine shape, just needing the gap brought in a fraction. Carb also got a clean, and that in conjunction with adjusting the idle speed meant that I could actually drive it in town without needing three feet to keep the engine going. Made things a bit less stressful! I also discovered about then that I needed new HT leads after I got an almighty belt off one of them one evening. That's basically how things progressed for the next year - The head gasket remained predictable and stable and due to a house move and an Excess Of Real Life as I put it getting in the way, it just never made it to the top of the to do list. In fact, I ended up spending several months at the far end of the country to the car due to how things worked out. Still, eventually retrieved it and got it to a few shows here, when right at the end of the show season, literally a few hundred yards from home the head gasket finally decided that enough was enough and the temperature started to rise. I coasted into the drive well before it headed anywhere dangerous, and decided that she could be put away under the cover until the Spring as I wasn't going to use the car in the Winter anyway. ...Fast forward nine months until last weekend when I finally convinced myself to get off my lazy tail and sort the Skoda before there's no show season left this year - especially as I really want to get it along to The Festival of The Unexceptional which is on the 23rd July. Having been living with a classic Saab (which has no right to be difficult to be work on, but somehow always seems to manage - I love that car, but I hate working on it with a passion - not least because components which need to be held in place by no more than an 8mm nut tightened to 10Nm will instead be held in place by a 19mm one which was tightened by Thor himself), and a 90s Citroen (lovely car to drive, but goodness it's complicated, and very much suffers from the "this car would be easy to work on if the entire car wasn't in the way" syndrome), working on the Skoda for a change was a breath of fresh air! Head was off in less than an hour with one sheared exhaust manifold to silencer stud being the total drama other than me nearly knocking myself out on the corner of the engine cover at one point. Conveniently the old gasket decided to come out in one piece entirely stuck to the head, which made cleaning the engine side of things massively easier! Aside from having a right old time getting the broken stud out of the exhaust manifold, the rest of the cleanup process and readying things for reassembly went pretty much to plan. I decided not to disturb the valves as I'd had no problems with low compression, and the engine only has 18K on the clock. Plus I didn't have the tools to hand to disassemble the head any further. Was really curious to know if this mark in the combusion chamber of cylinder number two has a story behind it though... There is evidence of the head having been off before (the cooling pipe clip has obviously been disturbed for one), so I wonder if this was somehow related to that. There's no sign of damage to the piston or bore there...just this little mark. Manufacturing defect maybe? Reassembly was as they so enjoy saying in the manuals, the reverse of disassembly save for the additional step at the end of adjusting the valve clearances. Finally got to actually use the torque wrench that I bought about five years ago for something useful! Manual didn't state what stages to do things up in, so I went for 10Nm steps for the main head bolts and equivalently spaced steps (can't remember the math!) for the nuts on the plug side to keep the pressure even. Oil, filter and coolant were then changed (during which I managed to make a terrible mess all over the driveway - completely forgot how big the drain hole in the sump was and it completely overwhelmed my poor drain pan), a new set of plugs went in and I had to take a brave pill and see if it would start (well, after cranking over for a while to build up oil pressure anyway). Somewhat to my surprise she did start, first turn after I connected the coil back up and immediately settled into by far the most even idle I've ever heard from the car - if a little smoky, but having just deliberately poured oil into the cylinders as part of the reassembly process that was expected and soon cleared. Cooling system was then bled and I looked around for any problems. It turned out that the rocker cover was completely incontinent, but that was the most serious problem we found, and was one that could easily be resolved with a tiny smear of instant gasket - and I've got a proper new seal on the way anyway. Now I haven't driven the car yet, but it sounds massively more responsive than before, so it may well be that I was missing quite a few horsepower due to the issues with the head gasket. I have noted that the odd whistling/hissing noise from the front of the engine that I never managed to track down before is conspiciously absent now...so maybe it was actually leaking that badly... Then set about tidying up my engine bay which actually looked like an engine bay again. (ten points if you can spot the thing I forgot to reattach because I'm stupid) So without further ado, I got her booked in for an MOT and then started tidying things up...as the car had been sitting in a corner (albeit under a cover) for nine months, she was a mess. Externally dull paint, dry plastic and more cobwebs than you could shake a stick at were dragging the tone down, and the interior was equally full of spiders, pine needles, and the seats were disintegrating as is so common to Estelles. On that note, does anyone know a source of fabric that looks close to the original? I'm planning to get my seats retrimmed at some point. Firstly...those seats. They look horrendous, are the first thing you notice when you open the door (or sooner) and really offend my OCD. I can't justify the cost of a few hundred quid to retrim them just yet, so covers were the order of the day. This was the point at which I discovered to the cost of my sanity that old car seats are emphatically not the shame shape as new car seats...and as a result the exercise of attempting to make modern generic seat covers fit old car seats is an exercise in frustration that will leave you with several bleeding knuckles, several years taken off your life, and leave you having learned (or invented) several new swear words. I did eventually manage to make them "mostly fit" as I put it. Far from perfect, and yes it looks like the seats have cheap covers on them, but at least they are relatively inoffensive now and don't immediately leap out at you - even if the "airbag" tags on the bolsters have got to go... While doing the final checks today for the really stupid stuff that everyone forgets to check before they leave I discovered that the windscreen washers weren't working (that's why we do these checks!) which was resolved by wiggling the contacts on the pump and that one number plate bulb was out - because I'd nicked it for one of the Saab's running lights and forgotten to replace it...oops. Annoyingly, I also poked a hole in the offside sill, so there will be welding on the cards. There are a few areas on the underside of this sill that don't look too clever either. Will get it sorted no worries, just annoying. Not that surprising really that some is needed given that I can't find any evidence of this car having been welded before and we all know their tendency to dissolve on contact with water. At least compared to doing the job on a modern car with tinfoil thick metal and complex compound curves it should be a (relatively) easy job on the Skoda. Garage will be doing the work as my welding is (at best) poor, and the welder is currently in bits in need of a new line and torch assembly as it's been bodged once too many times (well, it was free) and literally fell apart last time I tried to use it. Still, I went ahead with the prep anyway and finally slapped a couple of coats of wax on and gave all the plastics some attention. Always forget how much of a difference to how tidy a car looks (or not) that just dressing the plastics can make. Don't think she's looking too bad to be honest! I always try to turn up to the MOT with as presentable car as possible. Really need to get some white paint and touch in the lettering on the mudflaps, that's really bugging me now I've noticed it! MOT is at 10 tomorrow morning, so let's see how big a shopping list I come away with. Expecting: [] At least two or three welding repairs needed on the offside sill. [] Brake hoses don't look too clever - even if they pass, they're getting changed ASAP anyway. [] Front discs? They look horrendous, but the brakes work very well (easily locks the front wheels on a dry road with weight in the front) and the car stops perfectly straight, so we'll see. [] Rear suspension bushes? They went through the last test (at a different garage) without mention so we'll see (though so did the offside sill...and I don't see it having got that much worse in a year). It'll be getting booked in to get those changed shortly anyhow though as I know the semi trailing arm bushes are shot which is throwing the camber out and are they cause of my creaky rear suspension. Just have to see I guess!

Afternoon all! Have been meaning to make an account on here forever, but somehow it kept not getting to the top of the to do list. Figured that I've just set about dragging my Estelle back into the land of the living (head gasket) though this was as good a time as any though. So, if you see a violently orange D plate 120LX driving around Milton Keynes in the next few weeks, there's a good chance that's me. ...assuming that Mr. MOT Tester gives me good news this Friday anyway, and that it doesn't blow up on the way to or from the test station anyway! Here's the car in question - in need of a good polish, but not too bad given that she had been sitting since the end of September last year when the head gasket let go. This is actually the third one I've had, first being an E plate 130GL, which despite being in absolutely mint condition was sadly written off by a fuel tanker driver who failed to stop at a crossroads, second was a somewhat troublesome 135RiC that I owned for a couple of years, but I think actually spent about six months of that time on the road, and this is number three. Have also had a major soft spot for Saabs and Ladas since my early years so the Estelle shares the driveway with an 88 E plate Saab 900i (one of the very last of the 8 valve engined cars). If you're into Ladas, Saabs, vintage technology or lighting tech you may well recognise my user name from a few other forums. If so, hello here too...small world isn't it?