Bete Noir

Are you using Golf coilovers on the front? I considered them but was concerned about the amount of metal that needs to be removed from the hub carrier for them to fit. I went with mk1 Ford Focus front coilovers in the end because they are smaller diameter towards the bottom so they fit into the hub carrier much more readily.

Notwithstanding the fact that different markets have different prices, that does look like good value. Fun prices appear to have been going up for a while in the UK, and in the last few months I have noticed that Felicia and mk2 Caddy pick-up prices are also on the rise, probably due to the very high prices for mk1 Caddys. Not that my Caddy will ever be worth what I have spent on it!

Real progress Once back together, it was treated to a liberal coating of stonechip

Any thoughts of a wooden floor ended abruptly when I spotted this on eBay. I made the seller an offer, which was accepted sufficiently quickly to indicate it was too generous, and drove the Caddy up to Cambridge to collect it the following weekend. The seller had acquired this for his own Caddy project, but had decided he was unlikely ever to get around to it. The fuel tank came out, and the serious surgery got underway. Unsurprisingly, cutting away the previous dodgy repairs revealed some nasties which warranted remedial action. The replacement bed floor itself needed plenty of work before it was ready to be welded into place.

The rear bed of my Caddy must have rusted-out at some point, and in the absence of a proper replacement a previous owner had cut out the centre section, welded some additional bracing underneath, then riveted a sheet of steel over the top. It was pretty gash, but it served its purpose. The steel sheet covered the whole of the load area, which became problematic when I had to get access to the fuel pump. When I took the steel sheet out, I made a point of folding it up and putting it in the scrap, to remove any temptation to refit it. With the load bed liner in place, it did not look too bad. Underneath it was ugly. The bracing under the rear, in addition to its aesthetic failings, prevented the underfloor holder for the spare wheel from being used. All things considered, it had to go. I had been talking with Nick at S&P Autos about what form the repair should take, assuming that a return to standard was unlikely to be practicable, I had begun to think that a wooden floor section similar to the load bed in Morris Minor vans and pick-ups might be the way to go.

It is only fair to give the OP first refusal 🙂

Is this what you are after? It still has the door looms connected, but obviously I can unplug those. As far as I can see the only bit of the loom which has been messed-about with is that one of the side indicator repeaters has a superseal connector instead of the OEM one. I have more (and bigger) photos I can send you for you to scrutinise in detail. I have no idea where you are located, so even if it is the correct part then it may be academic if transport is prohibitive.

It will be nice to see another 1.8T Felicia project. There are a few old threads on here with loads of useful info for the transplant.

I tried a pair of those LO springs on the back of my Caddy. They came off again almost straight away because they were too soft. If you ever carry anything in the back, I would avoid these springs if I were you.

Have you got any exterior shots showing the whole car in all its glory? If so please share.

The Minor horn is likely to draw significantly more current than the puny little part it is replacing, so rather than doing a straight swap I decided to switch the Minor horn via a relay. The obvious location for this new relay is alongside the radiator cooling fan relay, which is on the bulkhead, beneath the scuttle, on the nearside between the battery and the inner wing. Anyone who has read this thread all the way through will know that wiring is my thing, and as such I was unlikely to take the simplest route to implement the relay circuit. I have uncovered a few nasties during previous forays into the Caddy's wiring, so I thought I would probably find something else worth sorting if I had a look at the loom including the wiring to the horn, and so it proved. I disconnected the wiring from the offside headlamp unit and indicator, as well as the horn, so I could pull that section of loom to the top of the inner wing where it would be easier to get at. This was then relieved of its wrapping tape back as far as the junction with the indicator repeater wiring. This showed me that there was a grey cable which had nowhere to go at the front corner, plus a similarly unused earth wire, and that something else had been spliced-in between the sidelight and main beam wires at some point. The unused grey wire is likely to be for foglights, which I do not have and cannot fit due to the FMIC, so this was removed, as was the stub of cable remaining from the spliced connections. This left me with some (probably fine, but unsightly) solder joints in the main beam and sidelight wires. More on these later. The horn had been mounted on the inner wheel arch adjacent to the top mount, although the wires were wrapped within the loom all the way to the front corner, so once they were unwrapped they were plenty long enough to go across the bulkhead to the new relay coil, with no extensions required. There was easy access to a fused 12v supply for the feed side of the relay contacts, so I just had to run a new cable from the other contact terminal to the new horn, and make use of the previously unused earth connection exactly where I needed it in the loom. Things were falling nicely into place. It generally feels like that in the moments before you encounter a problem. With the connections all made, and before I put any effort into making things look right, I re-fitted the battery and plugged-in the Minor horn. When I then pressed the horn button; nothing. A quick investigation, partly using a test lead I made from the wires previously spliced-in to the headlamp cabling, confirmed my new circuit was working fine, but the horn about which I had previously made the "not much to go wrong" statement had in fact found a way to go wrong. I took the horn casing apart again, and this time I dismantled the little sandwich of connectors and insulators which I had previously left alone. It took me a couple of goes to work out what should be connected and what should be insulated, but then I cleaned all the contact surfaces with some emery paper and reassembled it. Once re-connected to the pick-up, the horn now operated as it should on the push of the button. Lesson learnt, I will try to avoid tempting fate with bold statements in future. Back to the spliced solder joints in the main beam and sidelight wires. I could have tidied these joints up, or re-insulated them with tape on the basis that they have not given any trouble up to now, but I have a few bits of Felicia/Caddy looms kicking about, so I found another offside headlamp loom, and extracted the terminals with lengths of white and green/red cable I needed to do a proper job. Once the replacement terminals were fitted into the headlamp connector, I cut the original and replacement wires and made soldered connections in the part of the loom which will be supported, and wrapped in tape. This obviously looks better, and also decreases the likelihood of these joints failing due to mechanical stress. While the loom was unwrapped, I replaced conspicuous red insulated crimp terminals on the side indicator repeater with soldered joints, and relocated the inner wing grommet where it was supposed to be, then I re-wrapped the loom. One of the jobs on my to do list for the Caddy is to shift the coolant header tank. This is currently on the offside inner wing in the front corner, as can be seen in the photo above, which means it is roughly at the same level as the cylinder head. I want to put it in the offside rear corner of the engine bay, which will allow me to make it the highest point in the cooling system, as it should be. When I do that, I will locate the Minor horn in the space at the front corner which the header tank currently occupies. The modified horn wires I have put in are for its eventual location, so I made up an extension loom reaching back to the rear corner to accommodate the temporary location for the horn fixed to the top mount / strut brace mounting bolt. The new wiring achieves my aim of being pretty inconspicuous in the engine bay.

The next job started on a whim, and does nothing to improved the looks, performance, or reliability of the Caddy. In truth it could be said to be a pointless waste of time and effort, except it makes me smile, which is the whole point of this project really. My history with Morris Minors has led to something which is becoming a tradition with my builds, which is that I try to incorporate a part from a Minor into every project. On my Ibiza I use a Minor light switch for map switching, and on the Caddy I had the idea to fit a Minor horn. The horn fitted to 1950s Minors was a huge steampunk thing, with a deep, klaxon-like sound, just what the Caddy needs. I still have a few Minor parts in my lock-up, so the next time I went over there I retrieved this. I last owned a Minor almost 20 years ago, and this horn and another had been sat in the lock-up ever since. It looked like it too. More in hope than expectation I stripped the ends of the wires and connected 12v, but my expectations were proved correct, and no sound ensued. That would have been just too easy. Before taking the horn apart, I gave the casing a good clean. Inside, there really is not much to go wrong. A bit of attention from some sandpaper on the contacts, followed by a drop of oil on the armature shaft, was all it took to restore function. Whilst the casing was apart it was given a couple of coats of satin black Hammerite. The screw holding the casing together was quite rusty, as it was entitled to be having not been undone for perhaps 60 years. It was presumably a Whitworth or BA thread, and I did not have a direct replacement. Instead I drilled and re-tapped the mounting bracket with an M5 thread so that I could use a nice stainless countersunk screw. The wiring was tidied-up with some convoluted sleeve, and a new connector, before I reassembled the casing.

The Caddy's previous owner had applied his particular style to the interior as much as the exterior. This had resulted in a lot of the interior plastics being sprayed pillar box red. This was one of the pictures he used when it was advertised for sale. In my ownership, all of the red parts had been replaced with standard grey, except for the door cards and door pockets. My son had been on my case to rectify this, and I could not argue that he was wrong, but there have been (many) other jobs of higher priority. However, with the Caddy due to be in the Trucks, Vans & Wagons paddock at the Retro Rides Weekender, I wanted it to look its best, so the last bit of red had to go. The irony is of course that it is a really straightforward job. After not managing to get round to it for years, it probably took less than 30 minutes a side to put it right. Several of the clips on the driver's side were missing or broken, but I had a few spares so not only does the door card now look miles better, but it is solidly attached too. The only frustration was that when I did the job I had not managed to find an offside grab handle in dark grey, so I had to temporarily fit a light grey one. A few days later I retrieved a dark grey handle from my lock-up and swapped it.

Not a problem 😄

As soon as I got the Caddy home I put it away safely in the garage to keep it clean for the Retro Rides Weekender.

Yes "again", like I did on Friday. There was no sarcasm in my previous post, it was entirely literal, and I am not in the least bit offended by your off-topic diversion. Thank you for your comment in appreciation of my efforts on this project.

I will try again to drag this back on topic, if J.R. and skomaz will allow it 😀 All the while I have owned this Caddy, the B-pillars have been an increasing eyesore. The rust had been evident under the paint, and more recently it had broken the surface. With it being located so prominently, I was reminded of its looming presence every time I reached for the door handle. Finally getting it sorted had risen to the top of my to do list, and Nick at S&P Autos had a slot to do it. Before it went in, it had got to this state: On the nearside, it was worse because I had also scraped the rear wheelarch. Nick was kind enough to take a load of photos throughout the work. There are still a few bits of the bodywork which need attention, but slowly I am working my way round.

Before I took the Caddy off the road, it had been suffering from increasingly erratic reliability. It had begun mis-firing and cutting-out, and had me convinced it was a fuel issue. As I mentioned in my previous post, I had installed a fuel cut-out circuit, but for reasons of expediency I had connected this to the high current side of the fuel pump relay. This was a mistake, and the relay I had used to implement the cut-out had not been up to the job, so it had failed a while back. This relay had been replaced, and it appeared to have sorted the issue, but the same symptoms had re-emerged afterwards. I re-configured the cut-out circuit to switch the low current (coil) side, and hoped this might solve the problem. When I drove the Caddy off to JKM for its MOT, a journey of about 20 miles, I got about halfway before it started playing-up. On a couple of occasions I thought it was stopping on me, and my son, who was following me, said it produced some sizeable blue flames through the exhaust, but it kept going to get to Portsmouth. The MOT test was passed, which was obviously welcome news, but I left the Caddy with JKM waiting for them to have an available slot to test run it on the dyno. While I was waiting, I decided it made sense to replace the fuel pump with an uprated one, whether or not it was found to be the cause of the problem. The pump that was fitted had been swapped-over from the Felicia when the 1.8T transplant was done, and for all I know was a standard Felicia 1.3 or 1.6 part. Jim at JKM decided, probably wisely, to try to replicate the fault on the dyno before the pump was replaced. Sure enough when it was run up the fuel pressure was all over the place. A Deatschwerks 265lph in-tank pump was duly fitted into the Caddy. The spark plugs were also replaced as they were overdue. The subsequent dyno run showed the Caddy now making 200bhp (well 199.6, strictly speaking), up from the previous 180bhp. Happy days. One frustrating aspect related to the increased power is the fuel that the Caddy was running on at the time. I seek out Shell V-Power whenever I can for all of my cars. If I cannot get V-Power then I will go for BP Ultimate 97 octane. The Caddy had not been anywhere for months before I drove it to Portsmouth for its MOT, and the fuel gauge has not always been 100% dependable, so when it first started playing-up going to JKM I thought there was a chance it may be running low on fuel. I did not dare risk striking-out for the BP station five miles or so further down the road, so I stopped at the closest service station, and put £30 of normal unleaded in. The first time the Caddy has ever had anything but super unleaded in it, and that was when it goes on the dyno! There was a slight mis-fire showing-up at high revs on the dyno, so new coil packs were recommended. Luckily enough, I had some replacements in the shed, so no additional expense was incurred in putting that right. The difference between 180bhp and 200bhp really does not seem like it should be noticeable on the road, but the Caddy feels distinctly quicker than it did previously. I still need to get the suspension geometry done, as it is currently as I set it 'by eye' during the suspension rebuild, but I have been busily reacquainting myself with how much fun it is on the road.

When the freshly re-assembled fusebox was refitted, I tested all the electrics again. After the attention I had lavished on the fusebox I was surprised and disappointed to find that the radiator cooling fan was no longer working. When JKM did the engine transplant they reconfigured the cooling fan wiring, and I did not have a diagram of the revised circuit. In the diesel engined Caddy / Felicia pick-ups, the radiator thermo-switch switches 12v onto the fan relay, but there was no sign of 12v at this switch, nor was there any sign of it at the relay. Eventually I worked-out that the thermo-switch has been re-wired to switch to earth, meaning that the other side of the relay coil should have 12v present, which it did not. The wire that should have been bringing 12v to the relay coil disappeared from the scuttle through the bulkhead and behind the dashboard. After much searching, I succeeded in identifying the relevant wire behind the glovebox, and traced it through to the fusebox. It had not been spliced into an existing connection, but had been added, using a proper crimp terminal, onto an unused pin of one of the standard multi-pin connectors. Clearly this was the professional way to make the connection, although it did make it a lot harder to identify. The next problem was that the terminal now being used to provide 12v to the fan relay coil, as it is normally unused, does not appear on any circuit diagram I have. I tried buzzing through to all of the fuses on a spare fusebox, but I could not find where it should be fed from. Pretty quickly I settled on the plan to partially dismantle a spare fusebox so that I could see where else the relevant copper track is connected. Once I had done that, it told me that the 12v supply to the radiator fan relay is also the live feed to the fuel pump relay. I have a concealed cut-out switch which switches this supply, so the cooling fan was not operating because my cut-out switch had disabled it. Doh! At least now I have a nice circuit diagram for the next time I have to fault-find the cooling fan.

The Caddy had been off the road for a while, but it was getting close to being ready to put through an MOT, so I did a test of all the electrics, and quickly discovered that the headlights were not working, either on dipped or main beam. It seemed massively unlikely that all four fuses would have failed at the same time, so suspicion immediately fell onto the R1 relay. I pulled this out from the fusebox and found the terminals were corroded. Swapping this out for another relay had the headlights working again, and I could have left it at that, but I decided to have a closer look at the fusebox itself. Water had been leaking around the windscreen rubber, and more than once I had found the fusebox filled with water, which I always knew was likely to cause me problems at some point. The R1 relay corrosion was a manifestation of this, and I could probably expect similar issues with other circuits if I did not address the water damage. I was also curious about what the fusebox looked like inside, as I had not had one apart before. It did not take long to find out. All laid out as in the picture above it looks daunting, but each copper 'track' is unique, and fits into a matching slot on the appropriate plastic layer. I kept the copper pieces organised by layer, and reassembled one layer at a time, cleaning all the contact surfaces as I went along. When I had finished, it looked remarkably similar to how it looked when I started, and I had no 'spare' pieces of copper left over. Happy days.

The black wheels have Toyo T1-Rs fitted, so it made sense to put some more Summer oriented rubber on this set. I do not have previous experience of using them, but I found a couple of pairs of Hankook Ventus Evo S1s in 195/50R15 with 5-6mm of tread which I bought to try. Recently my son introduced me to the services of Get-A-Grip Mobile Tyres who came to my home and did eleven tyre swaps including balancing for what it would have cost me to have had half that number done at the local tyre fitters. Now that the red wheels are on the Caddy, the black wheels are waiting patiently in the corner of the workshop for me to paint them gunmetal.

The wheels on the Caddy are Renault 15" steelies, which I painted black to go on my Felicia pick-up, which was itself black. I have never really liked the look of them on the grey Caddy, but re-painting them has not made it to the top of my to do list before now. Part of the reason for the delay is that I had not been able to make up my mind what colour I wanted to paint them. The three options I was considering were the same grey as the bodywork, gunmetal grey, or dark red. I got as far as to rule-out the bodywork grey, but I was unable to decide between the remaining two options. The pragmatic solution, especially since I bought a second set of these wheels very cheap, was to paint a set in each colour. The red I settled-on was Ruby Red Hammerite Ultima Smooth. This is a water-based paint, which I had not used before, but the colour looked perfect so I was keen to give it a go. Before I painted the fronts of the wheels, however, I painted the rear faces with normal Hammerite Smooth, also in red but in a brighter shade. After one coat it was obvious that the coverage of the water-based paint is not as good as the normal Hammerite. If I had been aiming for a marble effect I would have been pretty satisfied, but a solid colour looked a long way off. After the second coat, it was looking a bit better, but still nowhere near good enough. Finally, after the third coat, I had the colour coverage I wanted.

Yes it would have been my son. We have an agreement that when he takes the Caddy anywhere he doesn't have to refer to it as "my dad's". When there is work to be done or money to be spent it is definitely mine and not his, however 😁

This is in the wrong chronological order, but I forgot to include it at the time so I have added it now. In Nov 2018 there was a BriSkoda rolling road day at JKM, which is not far from me so it would have been rude not to take part. Unfortunately I had another commitment, but my son took the Caddy along. It made a little under 180bhp peak flywheel power, which is, as is traditional, a little less than what I was hoping for, but not too shabby for something that emerged from the factory with one third of that. Frankly whatever power it made, I was mostly just relieved it did not go bang on the dyno.

It will be nice to see another Felicia Pick-Up thread active on here