Project Bentley

[JRS]

Resounding lack of interest there, then. Maybe this'll get a response - disassembly time!

Started the strip-down to get the car painted. Turned up the usual mix of 'interesting' (read: boneheaded) design choices. Take the stainless steel trim that runs along the door at the bottom of the glass. Bentley decided that it would be a particularly corking idea to make this piece so that it could be moved upwards a few mm in order to change the rubber underneath it and between the trim and the glass itself. Noble thought, poorly executed. It might just be me, but I'm pretty sure that if I wanted people to be able to move that trim, I wouldn't use pop rivets and nylon collars. Because it just doesn't bloody work.

*breathe*

Aaaaaaaanyway, I've spent a few days here and there pulling the interior trim, door glass, bits of exterior trim and so on with Gary. The radiator shell is off the car again, the windscreen wipers are off, the cowl vents are off (amazing how expensive the gauze is for those, by the way....) and soon we'll have the rest of the trim removed.

Pictures

Radiator shell AWOL:



Cowl vents and wipers off:

http://img807.imageshack.us/i/dsc01463f.jpg/


Drivers door minus glass, trim:



Another door done:



Door mirror out of the way:



Me, trying to dig ancient rubber out of the trim:



Still going:



And going:



Going to be fun re-tensioning that lot:



Tomorrow, weather permitting, we'll pull the remainder of the trim off along with getting the headlights and front indicators out. The headlamps are being replaced with newer, better and spanglier ones which should improve both the look of the car and the night vision which is a bit poor.

 

[JRS]

Lordy. Easy to see why people accumulate massive bills for these when they're unable to do the work themselves. Massively time consuming, at best!

Tell me about it!

All these little jobs must be helping to bring the car up immensely, though

Keep up with the posts, though, I for one enjoy reading the latest trials and tribulations in Bentley land

Cheers mate, will certainly keep everyone updated through the summer rebuild.

I like whitewalls on those old Bentleys but only if they are clean, once they start looking grubby they look a bit ropey.

Yeah, they were looking pretty **** to be honest. Not finished yet, and we may still put the whitewalls back on.

What colour you painting it? Who's prepping it and how much it costing to paint?

Staying the same colour, just with fresh paint and lacquer. Damned thing looks like a patchwork quilt now, there's a few different shades on there. One of the local body 'n' fender shops is doing the work, did us a deal (given that we're doing the strip-down and re-fit, there's a few hours work saved for him!) so it's costing less than 2 grand.

 

[JRS]

In terms of the whitewalls, do you have a picture of more than just the wheels i.e. a picture that gives a better idea of them in the context of the whole car? I can't speak for others but I find it difficult to get an appreciation of how good/bad it looks just seeing the wheels and tyre alone.

I'll see if I can find a shot in the library of pics we have.

 

[JRS]

Popping back round one night this week (weather permitting) to finish pulling stuff off the car. Gary's going to lead-load some of the grottier bits himself, saving us a bit more cash and meaning that there's a rather better chance that the job will be done to his satisfaction! Once we've done all we can, then we'll give the shop a weeks notice to clear the decks.

Going to be interesting when it comes to getting the car into town. Driving with no rear bumper, no window glass except the quarterlights, no headlamps, no front indicators, no radiator shell and grille....

 

[JRS]

Right, more trim off. The stainless steel bits from the B-pillars and the roof gutters are all off. Usual mix of bodges and nonsense found - missing sealant between body and trim so the body has corroded (way to go, prats!), missing screws, the screws that were there were cross-threaded, or corroded, or both, mismatching screws on the B-pillar trim.

Headlamps and front indicators are also off the car now. Piece of advice for whoever worked on the car before - when you fit the two large bolts that hold the headlamp surrounds on, it's generally a good idea to fit the longer one in the top hole. That way you can actually get a socket on it without having to **** about. It also means that the bottom one doesn't foul on a pipe for the god-damned air conditioning. Morons....

Would have some photos for you all, but Gary's camera has upped and died, and mine uses this marvellous device called 'film' rather than a memory card.

 

[JRS]

More good work, your a better man than me.

Don't know about that. I'm probably just a good deal more insane than you

One bit seems to have us defeated right now, and that's the trim on the A-pillars. I can get the interior trim bit off, but I can't see how the exterior trim attaches. Which is a bit of a problem, since it means that if I can't figure it out in an entire morning and with the aid of the RROCA's technical library then the paintshop's chances range from slim to bugger-all....I must be missing something obvious.

 

[JRS]

Just tell them to mask it properly, if its that hard to get off it will be worse to get back on.

I guess. I just don't like leaving that job unfinished, you know? It has to come off at some point to renew the rubber seal behind it anyway. I'll figure it out.

I just wish i wasnt so useless in a practical way, because something like this would be perfect now im retired and bored.

I know where there is a Rolls Royce Camargue sitting in a barn id love to have at a go at.

The way I figure it is that you learn by doing. These can be the greatest cars to learn on - once you've fixed one of these, you can do anything! But you have to go in knowng that there will be days when you come away from the car after several hours and know, deep down, that you've managed to sort out **** all. Hours of toil, skinned knuckles, filthy and sweaty and nothing to show for it. Those are the days that can drive a man to drink, panic attacks, or both. I'm hoping that valium will keep Gary on an even keel until we can finish the car!

Also as an aside show your mate this http://www.hardtofindradiodashkits.com/

Im waiting for him to reply to my email about shipping costs, but im going to order one whatever then have it veneered to so it looks better.

That there is a break through for X308 Jags.

Wow....how long has the market been waiting for that? Nice find

 

[JRS]

That will be a nice car when finished. But how much will it be to run that thing on petrol alone

12 to the gallon

Best we've seen so far is about 18mpg. Pretty sure it's down in single figures around town though

 

[JRS]

Taking a much closer look, it seems like the A-pillar trim is actually attached to the windscreen surround. Now, we could remove the windscreen surround....but as the exasperated Chinese zoo keeper said to the last male panda in the enclosure while pointing to a female panda:

****. That.

It'll just have to be masked. There are many parts of that car that I'll cheerfully launch into removing, but I'm not going down that route.

 

[JRS]

Oh, and while I was here....

With the headlamps out, we've wire-brushed and hammerite-ed the bowls that they sit into. Spotted some pretty grotty metal back there while we were at it, so that needs stabilising and sorting. Ah, the joys of old cars

 

[JRS]

I wouldnt remove that windscreen surround just let them mask it all.

That'll have to do now. It's a shame, because I really wouldn't mind renewing the seal behind the outer edge at some point. And the trim needs a few dents taking out of it as well. Typical Bentley, had to over-complicate it.

 

[JRS]

Oh, bother....




21 year old cars, eh?

 

[JRS]

The car is going to the body 'n' fender shop next week, probably Tuesday. We've done all we can with dismantling the old girl, we've probably taken more off than some people do with complete restorations.

Some further issues have sprung up.

1) The drivers seat controls have stopped working. I'm pretty sure I know what's happened here. All the controls for the seat go through a memory box underneath the seat cushion. There's a battery inside (Varta 3/V150H) that keeps the unit powered to hold the memory. Flatten that battery, and it doesn't just knock out the memory - it knocks out the whole bloody seat. And we've had the power off on the car for ages....I'll sort that one when it gets back from being painted.
2) Firing the engine today, I noticed an intermittant miss on a cylinder on the drivers side bank. Hoping that's just because it's sat for a while. Filing that one under "not thinking about too hard"
3) Gary's decided to put the whitewalls back on. Mainly because they keep poking back through where they were painted over! Plus we've decided they actually do set the car off quite nicely when they're in good nick.

Going to be interesting when we come to pick the car up. When it was painted under a previous owner, when they came to paint the body near the rear window you can see they painted up to the edge of the surrounding rubber and made a bad job of it. The car stays at the shop on this job until they get that bit right!

 

[JRS]

No pics of the naked body?

I'll grab you some tomorrow, raining here at the moment!

 

[JRS]

Some pictures of the car in her current state of undress. Click to make them bigger, if Imageshack will play ball.

Cowl vents removed:





Headlights and radiator shell MIA:



Grottiness abounds:













Tell you what, the doors aren't half rattly in this state:





The daily-driver Vectra, with the one clue to the +150mph top speed also shown:

 

[JRS]

The backing we've got on the door cards is doing a pretty effective job when the doors are assembled, but yeah - Dynamat is something that I wouldn't mind fitting at all.

 

[JRS]

Funny, the things you notice when looking at exploded diagrams of Bentleys....

We were looking for the part number to replace the gauze-like piece under the passenger-side cowl vent. Turns out that there's supposed to be a foam filter underneath each vent. When we pulled the car apart, we found no evidence of a foam filter in there. Guess we best buy a couple of those when we next put in a call to Monty....

This probably explains why there's so much junk underneath those vents!

 

[JRS]

Bentley minus quite a bit of paint equals....






Body guy reckons it's going to take a bit longer than he first thought. Lots of real estate to get paint onto! He's taken the rear lights out (we would have, but we needed them there for Gary to drive it to the place....), pulled the strip of trim from the bonnet, and as you can see started stripping the paint off the panels. Not a great deal of rust found, but some minor welding to do.

Will keep y'all posted.

 

[JRS]

Wiper arms painted up and sorted out, new badge for the radiator shell ordered....little things, but they'll be noticed when the car goes back together!

 

[JRS]

You have had an amazing result not finding much rust, those are normally rotten unless they have had some repair work done already.

I think the initial restoration was done right. It's the chasing of the crap that was left by the second 'restoration', i.e. cacked-up blow-over and bodged-up everything else, that we're trying to undo now.

Structurally, there's nothing wrong. Mechanically, the engine is fine. It's these niggly, crappy little faults we've got to get sorted. Little bits of cosmetic rot in the body, paint issues, that's being done by the body 'n' fender shop. Brightwork, seals, the bumper end-caps (notorious on this era of R-R/Bentley for being mis-shapen and looking like ****), random trim....that's Gary and I sorting one step at a time. Mechanically though, she's actually sorted. Our tame mechanic and Gary, with yours truly chipping in (I'm not a god-like mechanic, but I can get stuck in if something is ****** up)** have got her to the point where we can safely say that she's not going to embarrass the driver by acting up. Electrically, she's a bit of a recalcitrant minx, like all old cars. But since the only thing that absolutely refuses to work is one of the cigar lighter sockets in the back, I'll forgive her that little foible!

***edit***

** - oh yes, and one of his friends as well who helped us change the spark plugs. Much of the smooth running of that engine can be attributed to him. Great guy