Full circle into a Marina again. My 73 Morris Marina Coupe

Full circle into a Marina again. My 73 Morris Marina Coupe

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B'stard Child

26,353 posts

233 months

Tuesday 23rd February 2021
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In for the journey - you are quite mad but great work so far saving this

Paul S4

1,159 posts

197 months

Tuesday 23rd February 2021
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So is the plan to get it 'MOT'd with minimum of fettling....or a complete refurb/etc ?

TBH the coupe does look quite good, a bit like the Audi 100 coupe IIRC ( the very early ones) but the Marina saloon just did not quite 'work' IMO.

I seem to remember that the TC was quite popular in the UK in orange/black vinyl roof and some different wheels ? And probably more dials that your car !

Richtea1970

593 posts

47 months

Tuesday 23rd February 2021
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I love this.

The Marina was my first car after passing my test in 1988. It was old and unfashionable even then but my dad got it cheap as it belonged to an old lady up the road who had given up driving.
It was immaculate and had only done about 5000 miles but as all my mates were flying around in Escorts and Fiestas, I hated it! Seeing that dashboard really takes me back, especially the fuel gauge as I never wanted to put more than 2 or 3 quid in the tank as I was forever hopeful id sell it.
Had it for about 6 months before I finally convinced my dad I didn't want it and I bought an Escort. I also then got a girlfriend!

Fantastic work OP, excellent write up and pics, I'm following bow

Biker's Nemesis

37,317 posts

195 months

Tuesday 23rd February 2021
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Love this.

KelvinatorNZ

Original Poster:

565 posts

57 months

Wednesday 24th February 2021
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Paul S4 said:
So is the plan to get it 'MOT'd with minimum of fettling....or a complete refurb/etc ?
Thats the basic plan, do enough work to get the car on the road and through a WOF/MOT and from there start to tidy it up gradually. The goal is to have it on the road for next years British Car Day show in Feb, so have just shy of a year to get it done. The rust work will take the most time as it wont get through a WOF whilst there are big holes in the sills and things. If I can make it look less arse by removing as much primer as possible and bring it back to one colour, it'll be easier to pass off as not a complete shed.

shalmaneser

5,713 posts

182 months

Wednesday 24th February 2021
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Always a joy reading kelvinators threads, enjoying seeing where this one goes. You are nuts, though.

KelvinatorNZ

Original Poster:

565 posts

57 months

Monday 1st March 2021
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Just for my own records,

Clutch master is poked, but is a spitfire part. Slave needs a new seal but otherwise looks OK, is a Girlock item.



Aussies were smart and used a circlip to retain the slave, so once the circlip is removed the whole lot comes out toward the front of the car.

Ive been slowly sanding the primer off the paint. The paint is average under the primer (its been sanded back before primer) but should clean up OK until I can afford to paint the car.


Found a big slab of bog in the front RH guard though. Rusty under it so need to pull it all off and see why it was there.

bolidemichael

10,980 posts

188 months

Thursday 4th March 2021
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Another interesting thread!

KelvinatorNZ

Original Poster:

565 posts

57 months

Tuesday 23rd March 2021
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Progress on the Marina has been slow, but things are still happening in the background when funds and motivation allow.

One such thing to happen was the purchase of a three-dial cluster during a recent trip to Horopito Motors (Smash Palace). They had a few clusters there in various states of physical distress, so I picked the best one they had. Unfortunately, it's from a Super so has a clock and not a tacho as I want, but since the housing is the same between them, all I need to do to fit a tacho is find the tacho unit and swap it out. The main thing is that all the mounting points are intact, and there are no cracks in the housing.


I couldn't help a quick test fit to see how it looks. Much more upmarket than the two dial cluster.


Now, being so dark in the rooms of Horopito, I didn't notice some damage to the cluster which needs fixing. The flexible PCB on the back has been torn and damaged the copper trace in the bottom corner


And someone had previously repaired another damaged section of copper trace by wrapping it around some bare strands of wire


It's not the end of the world though. I do have a good soldering station and I'm not bad at soldering. You just need to be damn careful not to melt the PCB and cause more damage.

Interestingly, here is what I mean about being able to swap the tacho in. On the left in this photo is the clock module. it's attached to the other two dials by two screws, meaning it can be removed separately.


I needed to strip the whole thing down as I wanted to remove the PCB to fix it, and also swap in my two dial cluster in place of this one as the speedo is for a 6 cylinder car and has a different ratio (not to mention the mileage is wrong, and the scale goes up to a crazy 200kph and doesn't have the MPH sub-scale). This allows me to keep my mileage correct.

The first job is to remove the voltage stabiliser, along with its spade terminals. The stabiliser gently pries off the board, and the terminals are held in with a screw each and you can press them out from the front of the housing with your fingers


Remove all the bulb holders, and the other various screws (including the four big brass ones) and start removing the little white push pins. I found it easiest to gently slide a flat blade screwdriver under the PCB (between the PCB and white housing) and under the head of the pin and then wiggle it. Take care not to poke or tear the PCB. Something like a butter knife might work well for this.


With all the pins removed the PCB should just lift off the housing. Next, I removed the four screws holding the housing to the fascia


and then five screws remove the fascia from the main frame of the surround


Everything got a thorough clean as it was all filthy. The fascia woodgrain appears to be some sort of very thin veneer, maybe even a sticker. It had torn slightly in one corner and it's clearly faded. Still very useable though. To clean the fascia I removed all the silver rings. These are held on with a twist lock. Just take care when pushing the tabs through the holes not to catch the veneer and tear it.




Now it was time to move onto the main dials. You can see the two main dials are just the standard unit from the two dial cluster and cannot be separated.


Two screws remove the clock


It was so filthy I couldn't leave it. I tried cleaning just the outside of the glass but found the inside was dirty too, so removed the glass. It is held on with three spring tabs. You can either remove the tabs as they are a press-fit onto the white housing, or just pull back the two on the left with one hand and then lift the glass out with the other. Take care not to touch the black surface inside the gauge as they will fingerprint badly. Don't damage the paper seal behind the glass either. The adjuster for the time has a tiny little slot screw at the end of it, and when you undo that the knob will come free (note for reassembly, the knob is keyed with a flat on one side)



After a thorough clean


I was about to store the donor dials away when I decided to swap the paper gaskets between those and my good dials as they had better seals and the warped seals could be seen when the dials were installed in the fascia. This spiralled into swapping a few other things.

After removing the dirty glass from the donor unit I noticed something. The donor says ALT and OIL on the warning lights, something mine doesn't have!


I love unmarked warning lights as much as the next person, but I was feeling fancy, so had to find out if I could swap the lenses over.


As it turns out, it's easy to do. The lenses are attached to that black ring, which is only held on with the spring clips.


Swapped, with cleaned glass and donor seal


Obviously I couldn't leave the speedo looking like that, so I removed and cleaned the glass and swapped a better gasket onto it


Now I could attach the clock to my refurbished two dial cluster


I cleaned and refitted the rings. They're slightly tarnished but still useable.


Now I had to fix the PCB. The best fix I could do was to bypass the damaged traces with a wire, soldered to the nearest big copper pad. First I cleaned the area I was going to solder on the PCB with a fibreglass brush to get any tarnishing or coating off the copper, and then tinned the PCB and end of the wire (yes, I stripped the wire way too far back. It'll be OK. The others are shorter).


And then soldered the wire to the tinned copper pad. I tried to have the wire as close to the edge and as flat as possible so that it wouldn't interfere with the screw that goes through the PCB.


That wire is quite long and I wanted to make sure it'd clear the housing. Since its installed back on the housing now I'll secure the wire with tape. You can just see the other repair below it. I snipped the previous "repair" and soldered directly to the pad and to the top of the plug contact.


I reassembled it, and tested.


It was all going so well until I tried to install an LED into the high beam indicator (as it's SUPER dim with a bulb in it) and when removing the LED to turn it around and change the polarity to see if it would work, the metal housing of the LED shorted on the back of the PCB and blew one of the traces to bits. Cue much swearing, and soldering a new link in to bridge the burnt-out trace. I had to insulate under this one as its really close to the other traces and I didn't want them to short out against the new wire.


Another test shows that thankfully I didn't cock it up completely, and everything works again. Phew.


Well, by "everything" I mean everything but the clock, since that is dead as a doornail. I tried feeding 12V straight into it and it will tick once, the second hand will move, and then it's dead until I remove and replace power, where it will tick once, again. Very disappointed. So now I'm left with a couple of options. Find a tacho module to swap in. Disassemble and break the clock more fix the clock. Or Find an aftermarket tacho that matches the size and style and 3D print a bracket to hold it in place. Not sure what I'll do yet, but I do have a lead on a stock tacho, so we'll see.

Before giving up for the day I thought I would try some 303 Aerospace Protectant on the super dry vinyl dash. It came up surprisingly well. It's still very dry and has a lot of overspray on it, but its black, not grey now. It just drank the 303 up, so will keep applying more and see if it softens it over time.


A bit different from how it looked before.


I've got a wee box of bits waiting to go into the car, but I'm still waiting on a few more parts to arrive from the UK. I need the BMW to sell before I can really get cracking. It's listed for sale now, so hopefully someone falls in love with it soon.

sprouting

477 posts

171 months

Tuesday 23rd March 2021
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Doesn't matter what your bringing back to life, your updates are always entertaining.

Is it just the light of the pics or are the clock hands orange and the speedo and water/ fuel gage hands yellow. Orange dial hands look good to me. (Alpina like)

KelvinatorNZ

Original Poster:

565 posts

57 months

Tuesday 23rd March 2021
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sprouting said:
Doesn't matter what your bringing back to life, your updates are always entertaining.

Is it just the light of the pics or are the clock hands orange and the speedo and water/ fuel gage hands yellow. Orange dial hands look good to me. (Alpina like)
Well spotted. Yes the speedo and temp/fuel needles are faded to almost white. You can see the donor needles are still somewhat orange. I'm not going to mess around with removing needles to try and swap them as I don't want to damage my dials if I get it wrong. I'm happy enough with how they are.

C70R

14,164 posts

91 months

Wednesday 24th March 2021
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sprouting said:
Doesn't matter what your bringing back to life, your updates are always entertaining.
Agreed. These are some of my favourite threads on PH.

I live my car fettling life vicariously through them.

Paul S4

1,159 posts

197 months

Wednesday 24th March 2021
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Always an interesting read !

If it were my project, I would try and find a matching OEM rev counter...it would look more complete IMHO.

I was surprised to see that there is a PCB on your car... I did not know they had them in the early 70's...!

tr7v8

6,959 posts

215 months

Wednesday 24th March 2021
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Paul S4 said:
Always an interesting read !

If it were my project, I would try and find a matching OEM rev counter...it would look more complete IMHO.

I was surprised to see that there is a PCB on your car... I did not know they had them in the early 70's...!
Yes started early 70's unfortunately. I have repaired many, often due to ham fisted people but sometimes poor design where the current exceeds the track capability.

It looks like a TR7 tacho could fit in that binnacle. More available & therefore cheaper than a marina one.

KelvinatorNZ

Original Poster:

565 posts

57 months

Friday 26th March 2021
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anonymous said:
[redacted]
Thats a solid theory, but I do wish it was a bit brighter so I could see when I accidentally leave the high beam on when it isn't dark.

Its also interesting to note that all my wiring diagrams, and owners manual, say the high beam indicator light should be at the bottom of the speedo, not the top of the aux dials. The light a the bottom of the speedo does nothing, and is red. There is mention it might be a brake warning lamp of some sort, probably in the higher spec models.

KelvinatorNZ

Original Poster:

565 posts

57 months

Friday 26th March 2021
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Typically, being sat for 25 odd years, none of the hydraulics work. The clutch pedal is solid, and the brake pedal goes to the floor, and both do nothing to their respective components.

I removed and stripped the clutch master and slave a while back, just to see what was going on. The slave was definitely seized, as using a long prybar on the clutch fork to compress the slave resulted in a sudden BANG and it started to move freely. I still needed to remove it to inspect though, as it was obviously getting hung up on something.

The Aussies are a bit smarter than the Brits with the slave cylinder. The UK cars you need to remove the clutch line, remove the clutch pin, and then try to slide the cylinder towards the rear of the car, and get it out from between its housing and the clutch fork. Sometimes this is easy, other times it requires a special tool to push the clutch fork back to create space. The Aus cars have a circlip to secure the slave, so once that and the clutch line is removed, the slave slides towards the front of the car, where there is ample space to remove it. In fact, one of the UK manuals I have claims the slave can ONLY be removed if the gearbox is removed from the car!

UK cars


And Aus cars


With the slave removed and on the bench, I removed the pushrod pin and boot. You can see the rusty sludge that the piston has moved.


After I cleaned the sludge out of the holes in the circlip and removed it, the guts of the cylinder came out with some prodding.


Everything actually looked reasonably good, with minimal signs of rust in the bore. There was some at the very front, which a quick touch up with fine sandpaper fixed no issue. I'll be reusing this slave, but have a new seal kit for it. I could have gotten away with reusing the existing seal, it looked fine, but don't want to do the job twice for the sake of a few quid. That kit arrived the other day, so will rebuild that soon.

The master on the other hand is a write off.

I removed it from the car, removed the pushrod, and thats as far as I can go


No amount of "gently tapping" will force that piston out. I ended up putting about 70PSI behind it, and only got this far


I can only presume the piston and/or the bore is rusty and just binding. It turns out this is a Spitfire master cylinder, so have ordered a complete replacement and will fit that when it arrives.

Moving along, I started work on the brakes. This work was proceeded by buying some basic parts and finding some in the boot. I purchased all new hoses for the front and rear. The fronts are from a Series 3 Land Rover (2x BR0764) and the rear is from a Triumph Spitfire (1x GBH166). I found a new old stock master cylinder rebuild kit in the boot, purchased new in Tokoroa in 2001.



I had previously tried to bleed the system but got zero fluid from any of the bleed nipples, even when trying to draw the fluid through under vacuum. There was fluid in the reservoir when I got the car, but it was a bit low, so I thought I would top it off before trying to draw it through. Pouring in dot4 resulted in the weirdest "mixing" I've seen. The fluid kinda floated around and when it slowly mixed it kinda sparkled and didn't look right. I sucked the fluid out, and sure enough, I'm 90% sure the master cylinder was filled with engine oil. It smelt like clean engine oil. Even sucking it all out left some sludge in the bottom of the reservoir.


This was a bit easier to strip down. A few hard bashes on the vice and the piston popped out, covering my hand in whatever sludge was in the bore, chunks and all.


I was trying to think of why you would fill the reservoir with oil and the only reason I could come up with was to stop the bore rusting. Well, it didn't. With the piston removed, there was some minor rust on the sides of the bore, but bad rust and pitting at the very end, where the seal on the end needs to block the reservoir. I cleaned it up as much as I could. The rust on the sides of the bore wiped off with some fine sandpaper.


The piston had some light corrosion on it, but looked OK otherwise.


This is the end seal, you can see all the crud built up around it


The seals weren't too bad, but having the new kit already I swapped them all over and reassembled. A quick test on the bench showed that it seemed to be working as it should, so I reinstalled it into the car.



Now it was time to work on the hoses and calipers. I started on the front. The hoses came off reasonably easily. With the hose disconnected from the hard line I attached my vacuum bleeder to suck through fluid and flush the line. I like using the green fluid as it's really obvious when the new fluid is coming through.



Out of curiosity, once I removed the hose I connected the vac pump up to one end, left the other end open and tried to pull air through it. Nothing. Blocked solid, and even with the most suction that pump can draw, not a single drop of air could get through.


I was warned about these style hoses, the old style with that textured outer layer, when I redid the hoses on the TVR. The rear hose on the TVR was of this style, and apparently they are known for internally degrading and blocking up over time. The other side was the same, completely blocked.

The new Land Rover pattern hoses look nice enough


I temporarily reconnected the old hose to the hard line, just to block the end of it in the mean time so I can draw a vacuum from the reservoir.

The other side had some questionable looking fluid in the lines, but flushed OK.


With the hoses off I began removing the calipers. I'm glad I previously vacuumed most of the cobwebs off. Ugh.


These were well stuck on, but some hammering and levering saw them jump off the rotor. I'm hoping the rotors will clean up OK, will need to check their thickness.


Everything looked and felt like it had been on there far too long. Even removing the pad retaining pins was a pain, but lots of hammering and lots of CRC got them out.


The previous owner got their monies worth from the pads.


One of the piston boots was missing its retaining clip, and was just floating around.



I had to get creative to try and force the pistons out. One is moving freely, but one is jammed solid. Even 128psi couldnt shift it. I'll need to try and shock it with my actual air compressor, not slowly build pressure with the tyre inflator.



The other caliper isn't much better, neither piston felt like moving on that one.


The one piston I did get out was a disappointment though, the chrome coating is flaking off in places and there is scoring and corrosion on it, so all the pistons will need to be replaced. I already have a seal kit, but will wait on new pistons now. Might even paint the calipers in the meantime to make them flashy (even if you can see them with the wheels on).

The last job for the day was to remove the rear hose. There is only one, as the fluid goes to the RH side wheel cylinder and then crosses over to the LH side one. Another old textured hose.


New hose partly connected. I'm pleased at hose easily these old hoses came off. A ratcheting spanner certainly helps for the lock nut though.


And new hose installed.


Another quick test with the vac pump, and sure enough, another completely blocked hose



Pays to check your hoses and replace them if they are the old style.

With the new hose in place, the only other thing to do was flush the lines with new fluid. There was quite a bit of fluid in the cylinders and lines. Didn't look too bad, and no rust, so hopefully that means the rear wheel cylinders are still OK. I can get the kits to rebuild them locally, so will see if they work first and go from there.


And keep pulling it through until it goes green


Unfortunately I tried pumping the pedal with the system all buttoned up, and the master cylinder is blowing fluid back into the reservoir, indicating the end seal isn't sealing. I have reached out to a couple of companies that should be able to sleeve the cylinder and will see what they say.

In the mean time, off to make a list of more parts I need to buy.

jamesson

2,761 posts

208 months

Friday 26th March 2021
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This is great work. I wish I had a fraction of your talent. Looking forward to further updates in due course.

stevensdrs

3,143 posts

187 months

Friday 26th March 2021
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Many years ago I had a Marina Coupe 1.3L. I wanted it to look like a TC model so I got the necessary trim bits and badges from the breakers. To convert the dashboard to have the 3 dials I simply purchased the bigger housing from the parts dept along with the tacho. All I had to do was use my original 2 clock unit and add on the tacho unit. No need to change the PCB as all you need for the tacho is a couple of bridge wires across to the original unit and if I remember correctly a feed wire to the coil for the ignition pulses. It was less than an hour to get it all working perfectly.
Good luck with the restoration, you are braver than me.

KelvinatorNZ

Original Poster:

565 posts

57 months

Saturday 27th March 2021
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jamesson said:
This is great work. I wish I had a fraction of your talent. Looking forward to further updates in due course.
I believe most people with an interest in working on cars should be able to do most of what I do, it's just a matter of being methodical, and it always helps to read the workshop manual cover to cover a few times. I'm not a mechanic, have no training, and didn't grow up around cars.

bolidemichael

10,980 posts

188 months

Saturday 27th March 2021
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KelvinatorNZ said:
jamesson said:
This is great work. I wish I had a fraction of your talent. Looking forward to further updates in due course.
I believe most people with an interest in working on cars should be able to do most of what I do, it's just a matter of being methodical, and it always helps to read the workshop manual cover to cover a few times. I'm not a mechanic, have no training, and didn't grow up around cars.
Wait, what?!

I'm sorry, but the breadth of your knowledge and know how - cracking the issue of the TVR's K-Jet (iirc) system and diagnosing the cack-handedness of previous bodges. That was all brilliant stuff and so detailed. You're bluffing us just because we're in Blighty and can't throw tomatoes at you. Right?