Project Bentley

JRS · 7 Jun 2014 at 15:14

Right, been for a drive myself now.

It is unbelievably good.

The 'box and torque converter are now so tight that if you merely glance at the throttle it just spins a wheel (Goodyear Hydragrips on the rear, a misnomer if you ask me). In normal town driving it is utterly silent, you can have a whispered conversation. Give it some beans, and all hell breaks loose. It's going to be hard to resist doing that, now that the speed matches the noise output!

It's a bold statement, but I think you'd have to go a long way and spend a fairly tidy sum of money to find a similar model Royce or Bentley as good as this. Though of course, a fairly tidy sum of money has been spent on this one all told....

JRS · 8 Jun 2014 at 09:41

I'll get some shortly, just about to head over to Gary's place.

JRS · 8 Jun 2014 at 12:13

Hey look, oil pressure! Drops when warm, but only at idle - once you put some revs on it comes up nicely.

Took it to a nearby car park to photograph:

Please excuse the general filthiness of the car, not been cleaned since before it went into surgery.

JRS · 8 Jun 2014 at 15:44

sigma said:
What kinda sums are we talking?

Cruising, you'll get close to 20mpg especially if you add a bit of pressure to the tyres. Hit traffic, and you'll get low teens. Those tyres are about £220 each if you pay full whack (Avon 'Turbosteel 70' 235/70/R15 103V with whitewalls are the original equipment, we have those on the front with Goodyear Hydragrip equivalents on the rear). You'd need to carry a couple of half litre bottles of Castrol HSMO in the boot - there's a special cubby hole provided for it - for driving serious distance because the rear suspension hydraulics leaked even when these cars were new, never mind after 25 years and several replaced spheres!

JRS · 8 Jun 2014 at 23:46

I hadn't realised Jez was working on it

Though he's more than welcome to! I've got a real ball-ache of a job to do straight away as well, with re-mounting the interior panel on the drivers door

***edit***

It's actually a job that I've been meaning to do for ages, last time I was in the door was a while back when the window motor decided to stop working. The door card never did go back on right, because the clips had been on and off so many times that they no longer had enough tension in them. We have new clips, I've just not had the patience to go strip the door down again. It doesn't help that sometime before Gary bought the car there was obviously a problem with the contents of that door - a ruddy great section of the door panel itself was chopped out. You can see it in one of the earlier threads on here, when I was getting the central locking working in the pouring rain

rolleyes: hey ho). I wouldn't mind, but I've been inside these doors and done fairly complicated work - the hole that this rock ape cut didn't make the job any easier. It's just a chunk of missing door.

JRS · 9 Jun 2014 at 18:36

Eh

Gary here, What could possibly go wrong. There is nothing left of the original car (well not much)

JRS · 12 Jun 2014 at 15:58

Gonna go ahead and get the car topped up tonight so we can measure the fuel consumption. Hoping to see better than single figures now!

On Sunday I'll hopefully get the drivers side dipped beam re-earthed to see if it cures it (it's not even remotely bright enough right now). Another job that I'd been meaning to do for months and never quite gotten around to.

JRS · 13 Jul 2014 at 15:52

Went after the headlight this morning. What an inglorious ****-up that was....

I've got the dipped beam circuit working fine by cutting into the live 12V feed to the passenger side outboard light and wiring it over to the drivers side. When you switch to high beam though, we end up back where we were with only 6.7V getting to the drivers outboard light. None of the original loom is even colour-coded correctly OR consistently so tracing it is a complete cluster-****. And even if it was consistent or correctly coloured, it would still have no doubt been made by Lucas and therefore be crap.

I am extremely bored by Crewe's idea of 'good enough' :rolleyes:

I think we're on the right track though. If we'd had enough high-quality wire handy and I'd taken the other two connections across from the passenger side outboard light to the drivers side, I suspect it would be working fine right now. Until the inevitable fire, anyway!

JRS · 17 Jul 2014 at 22:38

Lights now all work, fresh ticket has been gotten. Some advisories, nothing major. The mechanic ended up bridging two connections from passenger side to drivers side (keeping a years-old bodge of mine and the one we did the other day), and jacking into the 12V supply from the loom to inboard drivers side lamp and sending it to the outboard.

Immediate job following a test drive today is to fix my jury-rigged connection to the cruise control ECU, which appears to be ailing somewhat (CC has gone intermittent). That's my Saturday morning sorted!

JRS · 18 Jul 2014 at 09:52

Built in March 1989, so originally an 'F' reg car. It's a late example of the '20,000' series cars - cars with a VIN ending in 2xxxx.

JRS · 18 Jul 2014 at 15:34

DJ_Bucho said:
snip

I kinda like the badges. I will say though that if I ever get chance, I'll get a clamp for the AA badge and move it off the radiator slats and onto the badge bar. I've never been 100% happy with where it's attached.

Thanks for your kind words about her condition as well, I'll make sure the owner sees them. He appreciates things that feed his ego :cool:

And we both appreciate nice things being said about the work that we've put in!

JRS · 18 Jul 2014 at 17:02

Ryan-3 said:
It must feel good to be able to just saunter off to the pub in a Bentley.

Exactly what I did last night. And I had to saunter, because I stuck £78.01 of petrol in it despite the gauge reading just under the halfway mark

eek

and didn't want to use it all up in one go....

JRS · 19 Jul 2014 at 00:05

Ryan-3 said:
HOLY HELL!

If you fancy something more economical, run a burning oil field.

Meh, it's got a 6¾l V8. It's going to use fuel. It did deliver 18mpg on a run from Burton to Brum Airport a few years ago, with what we now know to be a knackered gearbox. To be fair, urban mileage is pretty much always going to be low. And at the end of the day, the car doesn't do that many miles so the consumption is not nearly as frightening as if this was a daily driver.

I reckon we can drag the 'pottering around' figure up into the low-to-mid teens. With a bit of luck!

JRS · 26 Jul 2014 at 10:51

Re-did my lash up of the cruise control wiring - I say "re-did", I just took the wire all the way out and then shoved it as far into the connector as I could. Hopefully that's got it!

JRS · 11 Sep 2014 at 23:50

Took the old girl out tonight to get fuel and warm everything through since it hadn't been driven really for a few weeks. Ran like a dream. We apparently got a hair over 13mpg on that last tank, which was virtually all urban mileage.

Still haven't fully sorted the cruise control wiring, got an all-new fix to wire in (this weekend if I get time). And we appear to have lost a slightly concerning amount of engine oil, with obvious signs of leakage around the rocker covers and in the valley pan. At least it's leaking rather than burning (no blue smoke).

JRS · 13 Sep 2014 at 20:46

Well, I think the phrase rhymes with "clucking bell"....

/Blackadder

Wiring to the cruise control ECU is fine. We're pretty sure that the fault is at the road speed sensor on the passenger side of the gearbox. Nothing else can really have been disturbed in the gearbox replacement.

I ******* hate Lucas parts :rolleyes:

JRS · 13 Sep 2014 at 21:46

Wherever you go on these cars you run right up against the buffer of Lucas, The Prince Of Darkness™.

It's a good thing that they started making footballer cars, otherwise these ****s would be out of business.....

JRS · 8 Nov 2014 at 20:15

Quick update:

Oil was leaking from the drivers side rocker cover. I say 'leaking'....'flooding' might be rather more appropriate. The valley pan was turning into a swimming pool. All sorted now. Also sorted is the cruise control, which was in fact the road speed sensor connection in the side of the gearbox as suspected.

And all was sweetness, until I found out that the boot wasn't locking again. So now I've got to revisit something that I fixed almost dead-on two years ago.

****ing ****y **** ****.

:rolleyes:

JRS · 9 Nov 2014 at 16:25

Boot trigger sorted again, apparently it all spent the last two years walking itself right out of alignment (thanks Bentley, for giving everything oval-shaped mounting holes.... :rolleyes:

). Still not locking on the fob, but works off the key so I'm putting that down to lack of use. It'll work itself back into service.

JRS · 7 Jul 2015 at 19:19

Long time no update. Best remedy that.

The old girl just breezed through the MOT. Gary got one of our mates to attend to some paint that was bubbling up on two of the wheelarches (front left, rear right) - he found filler, no shock. I'll grab some photos at the weekend, he's made a beautiful job of it. And the air conditioning is working for the first time in forever, having swallowed about three times more refrigerant to re-gas it than anything the AC guy has ever come across!

Cruise control is back to being intermittent, which I can't quite fathom out. And as I noted in the 'what did you do your car today' thread I really have to do something about the bumpers, they're pretty tatty now.