Project Bentley

Tbid said:
I've driven a number of Bentley Turbos and I never ever managed to get the cruise control to work on any of them, I'm know how to work it as I managed it on a Continental R but never a Turbo.

The seats were also quite temperamental on some of the cars but perfect on others, the heaters were lovely!
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I suspect (and hope) that it's just down to the electrical connections to the box. Unfortunately, the test tool is a fairly obscene price and I don't know a garage with one that's a) near us and b) wouldn't charge the money involved in a small war to use it!

Pate said:
The car sounds like a disaster if I'm quite honest.

Seems like you've sunk hundreds of hours into an old, inefficient ugly car that seems determined to just keep breaking.


Just my 0.02 naturally. :p
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Hey, we're all entitled to our opinion! I would just point out though that these cars are very reliable if you maintain them. This one suffered from a bit of neglect, so we're just getting over the fixing of those problems. The only bits of rot in the body are now gone, the underside of the car is spotless, running gear all running perfectly....

Even at it's lowest ebb (when that split vacuum hose in the engine bay caused the idle speed to drop low enough that the fuel pump shut off) it never failed to complete a journey. Took some creative thinking on how to keep the revs up when coming to a junction, and caused a few panicky moments when it did shut off and the power assistance on the steering and brakes disappeared, but it always made it.

As for 'old, inefficient, ugly' - not exactly prehistoric (23 years old), not all that inefficient (I did 18mpg on a run with the engine not set up right, the A/C on full tilt, and not exactly sparing the whip), and while you'd hardly call it classically beautiful - it's no Jaguar E-Type :) - it does have a certain gracefulness about it IMO.

But as I said - you're entitled to your opinion. I don't agree with it one iota, but you're entitled to it :)
 
The paint has been cut and polished now, along with a few runs sorted and a few chips repaired. The new front tyres are on. The interior is mostly clean now - little more to do on the drivers seat, but it's a lot better than it was. Just one major expense left - filling the 109 litre fuel tank....
 
You should have mail Locky. Sent a message to your Trust e-mail.

Anyone out and about in Stretton earlier today will have seen a mirage. A 17ft3, chestnut red, Bentley-shaped mirage doing a halfway decent imitation of a fully working car driving around :D She drove exceptionally well. Everyone who saw her had something nice to say. Just got a few little jobs now and we're done.

One of those jobs involves sorting the whitewalls on the rear tyres out that we'd attempted to paint over black before and failed at. We did make the attempt at lunchtime, with a completely safe manoeuvre - jack the car up on one side, fire her up, put her in drive so the wheel in the air rotates, and apply wet-and-dry paper to the sidewall to bring the whitewall back up, rinse and repeat for the other side. As it turned out, the Goodyears on the back had been whitewall painted after the fact, so wet-and-dry didn't really do much beyond taking off what was left of the old whitewall. Appropriate paint has now been ordered for restoring them!

Idle speed when warm is a tick low, and the fuel-air mix could probably be leaned out a notch. And there's still (!) some niggling faults with the paint. Nothing major, or even obvious. But we know about them, so they need sorting. But the 'to do' list is a lot shorter now than it has been....
 
Congratulations on getting this far and glad to hear the list is getting shorter, it must be immensely satisfying when you actually get to go out and enjoy the fruits of your (seemingly neverending at times) labour. :)
 
Cheers semi-pro. Felt pretty good driving her after all this time - most I've driven her in 8 or so months before today was up and down Gary's drive testing the brakes and trying to get the back end to rise up on the hydraulics!

That reminds me, my sig link needs the text updating.
 
Went for another short run today to go pick up a camera that works from a friend!






As you might have spotted - the gold finishing stripe has been put on both flanks now, and we've fitted some badges for the front end :) One (the AA badge) was a Christmas present Gary got, the other two from the Bay of E. We reckon they look quite good.

The steering is getting better and better, need to add a bit of fluid to the PAS but it's never had any in all the time Gary's owned it. Rear suspension and the brakes are working perfectly now, so we appear to have gotten all the hydraulics to actually function as they're supposed to. That job list gets shorter all the time. Bold statement, I know, but I think we'll actually finish her this year :o:p:D
 
Jokester - that was a joke, ya know? I wasn't seriously trying to sell the Jag via the forum :)

Another job ticked off - air conditioning has now been charged, and actually blows cold air out of the vents which is a novel concept for a British-made car....
 
Firestar_3x said:
only change i would make is fitting a facelift mesh front grill
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I don't get the thing with the mesh. Who wants to make their Bentley Mulsanne look like the cheaper Bentley Eight? You can't make the car look like a much later Turbo RT without changing the bumpers, valances, and a whole host of other bits so you're basically only making it look like the 'cheap' car of the Bentley/R-R range.

And then you've got to pretty up the front fans because you can see much more of them, which means taking them off the car and pulling them to bits in order to work on them. Add to all that the fact that you're spending ~£800 on the privilege, if you want to use parts that are actually made with some attention to quality rather than looking like they've just fallen out of a Ripspeed catalogue....noooooooo thank-you! :D
 
True, the new Mulsanne has a mesh grill doesn't it? Model aside for one moment it just looks a whole lot newer and fresher with mesh, but then again it all depends what you want.

Don't know much about parts prices but i do know that a secondhand grill is a whole lot cheaper than £800, think Mr Brewer got his for £200?
 
Firestar_3x said:
Don't know much about parts prices but i do know that a secondhand grill is a whole lot cheaper than £800, think Mr Brewer got his for £200?
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Yeah. And that car looked like **** once the Wheeler Dealers show was done with it ;) It's now in Australia, hopefully having since had the hole in the rear wheel arch sorted that WD just filled over....

Companies like Flying Spares will sell you a new aftermarket chicken wire one for around £500 (and they actually advertise it as 'Bentley Eight style'!). A proper Bentley matrix grille centre for the radiator shell on these cars is a lot more than that.
 
Here we have a worried Bentley owner:



And why is he worried? Well, I just pulled this out of his car:




In R-R/Bentley parlance, this is called the Switchbox. It is a particularly expensive piece of kit, because it contains the ignition barrel. Unfortunately, I need it apart because it's the source of that damned twittering sound.

Wish me luck.

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Okay, think I've spotted the problem area. Gone to work with a nail file!

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We-e-e-ell....it's not twittering at the moment. Will have to see for certain next time we take her out for a spin.
 
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Took the car for a quick run around the block. The twittering hasn't completely stopped, but it's much improved. We're on the right track. I get this horrible feeling that I'm going to have to try and run the car with the switchbox hanging out of the dash so I can look down into the guts of it and see what's going on....:eek:
 
So, that twittering. It's been with the car ever since Gary bought it back in November of 2008. It always sounded exactly like a relay that had gone bad, but we figured it couldn't be as we replaced all of them. As in, every single relay in the car (and there's more than a few of them!). And every time we'd had a relay exposed the sound wasn't occurring.

Fast forward to today, and past the many attempts over the years to identify and fix it. I've pulled Lord knows how many bits off the car, cleaned them up and refitted them and the twittering stopped only to reappear sometimes hours, sometimes days, sometimes weeks later. Ever since we got the car back home this time the sound has been worse. So this morning I had the dashboard apart. Again. I eliminated the ignition and headlamp box. I eliminated the (non-functioning) cruise control ECU. So I looked at the set of relays underneath the steering column again, more in hope and exasperation than expectation. And what do I find? The one unlabelled relay of the bunch is twittering and rattling so hard that it's practically jumping out of the socket that it's fitted to.

:rolleyes::mad:

So, what do you do when you find a relay that isn't labelled? One that could be running anything? Well, only one thing you can do really - you remove it and see if anything stops working. But as near as we can tell nothing has stopped working. One of the technical manuals for the car suggests that it could be the controlling relay for the heated mirrors. But the drawing that shows that is for an earlier car ('87 model year rather than '88-89). An early '89 car (as in, late 20,000 series VIN but pre-30,000 series) shouldn't have a relay there. The upshot is that we just won't know if anything has been knocked out until it becomes blindingly obvious that something that used to work no longer does. Unless that something breaks down of it's own accord. Then we're pretty much screwed for finding out what it did.

Aargh.
 
Here's where I was this morning - cruise control ECU country.






We bought a new ECU for the car and fitted that yesterday. As it turns out, the VDO-made box is fitted to a few cars so avoiding Bentley Tax™ was possible. Then I found a broken wire that had been taped out of the way (:rolleyes:). So this morning I spent a few minutes filing down a spade connector in Gary's workshop, stripped the wire back and crimped it on, then stuffed it into the connector. One quick trip up the road, and the cruise control kicked into life.

Winning.

Also, in that second picture you can see the relay I removed (the far right connector that has nothing in now). Still don't know what it did.
 
Right, made a better job of the wiring now. The original box that the car came with is definitely knackered (refitted it to test, not working, pulled over to swap back to the new box, fully functional).
 
Not got a proper photo yet, but Gary and I finally got around to mounting up the alarm/immobiliser light on the dashboard (it had been hanging loose in the fusebox under the dash for ages. Had to drill a hole in this panel:



Pretty scary, 'cause if we'd cocked that up it's a fairly expensive bit to replace....
 
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