Rexanne - Gold s2 restoration project

[CHC (RIP)]

Missed out on your washer jets so I\'ve just done a deal with pete markin on his.

[CHC (RIP)]

Posted Steve - I\'ve sent you a PM.

[Steve-A]

Thank you Cliff

[mpk490p]

looking good Steve but you are making me look lazy!

[Steve-A]

Haha cheers mate

Hopefully in a few weeks I\'ll be too busy driving it to do any work on it and will slow the pace a bit :3gears-rh:3gears-rh:3gears-rh

[spoddy]

i wanna an fb to fix up lol

she looks great in gold, it\'ll be nice to sit back and put your feet up, with the satisfaction job well done!

lucky duck :Laugh

[CHC (RIP)]

There are plenty around Spoddy - get lookin & bite the bullet mate. Check other thread for cars available.

Yes Steve - keeping fingers crossed that you\'ll be enjoying the fruits of your labour very soon. Does this mean the 2nd car will be up for sale or perhaps another engine transfer on the cards :Hammer

ps - received - ta

[Steve-A]

The Alfa will be up for sale within days of getting the FB on the road. She\'s been a good work horse, but I can\'t afford to insure two cars. As soon as the FB is on the road the Alfa will be un-insured so will just sit on the drive till its bought.

Selling the Alfa should fund a sensible motorbike, so I\'ll have mode of transport with good fuel economy. That said I keep looking at my poor old RGV, and knowing what I\'ve been through with Rexanne it looks like it\'d take about a week for fully restore that. Not many bits to do on a bike!

I have in fact got little done on Rexanne today because I spent all evening working on the RGV giving her some much needed TLC. (and playing with some nigh time photography!)



I\'ll get another Alfa one day, it\'s on my to do list, just want one about 25 years older than than my current one

[CHC (RIP)]

The bike resto sounds a good option there Steve - nothing too much to cause you any major long term issues and less likely to break the bank too.

As for the Alfa .... hmmmmm, I think the question here might be \'how much do you like this particular model?\', does it tweek your buttons sufficiently to want to keep it for the next 25 years in dry or dryish storage so that you can simply roll it out in a quarter century with an instant classic car to adorn with lots of tlc and a bucket load of dosh? If not, just sell it on and splash the cash elsewhere and enjoy life - we\'re only young once afterall!:rollin

[Steve-A]

This Alfas going for sure.

A 60s alfa is on the \'cars I must own in my life\' list, but I\'ve done the 90s Alfa thing now, and ready to move on!

[CHC (RIP)]

Good for you mate! :Thumbs-up

[CHC (RIP)]

Steve - I\'ve sent you a PM & I have the piece ready & waiting, just let me know.
:cheers

[Steve-A]

I\'ve grabbed a few hours here and there this week to get the brake callipers rebuilt. Here\'s what I started with.



One disassembled it was clear just how dirty they were under the seals too.



So time for a clean up, here I\'ve wire brushed the calliper bodies and polished the pistons.



Before painting in brake calliper paint, that shouldn\'t melt with brake fluid....



Unfortunately, it wasn\'t as good as it said on the tin... quite a bit of paint came off where it got covered in brake fluid during the re-assembly process. After a couple of hours fiddling with the new seals they are all back together.



Cliff has very kindly sent me an ignition switch to replace my smashed one. As ever it wasn\'t plug and play though. The spring mechanism between the IGN and START positions on my s2 was contained within the electrical switch. In the switch Cliff sent there\'s no spring, nor any place for one to go, so in my car the key could flop about and keep hitting the starter. I guess if I left it like that it\'d have died the first time it fired the starter solenoid when the engines at 6k!

So I\'ve modified the switch so it can only go as far as IGN and wired my starter button in and mounted it where the un-used electric mirrors switch goes. I\'m quite pleased as it looks fairly OEM.



Finally, in not very exciting news, I\'ve mounted some cheap-ish replacement speakers, as the original ones had died.



The front 10cm speakers dropped right in. The rears were a little bit of a faff as ever because to fit a standard size 17cm speaker I had to do a little cutting and drill some new holes.

I\'ve spoken withGAZ and I\'m expecting my coilovers at the end of the month/early july. So getting to Beaulieu is gonna be tight!

[spoddy]

nice work steve, i was going to say to you when you were setting up your temp starting button, to put one of those push button starter buttons on the dash, as although not original, looks cool.

as long as she starts and keeps going, hopefully you\'ll get her finshed and MOT\'d soon so you can still make it, lucky you boys can go to a garage for an MOT I have to book in weeks in advance at one of our government centres.

[Steve-A]

Once again progress has been a little slow these last few days. It feels like the chances of getting her to Beaulieu on the 10th are slowly slipping away. Ah well, I\'d rather not rush the end of 8 months hard work and make a mess of it. In the big scheme of things if it takes another couple of weeks to get it on the road it\'s not the end of the world.

At the moment there seem to be lots of little jobs that take a long time to fix that need doing. A good example was that my reversing lights weren\'t working, I traced it to a dodgy connection where the gearbox sensor joins the wiring loom, but it took me a good couple of hours by the time i\'d jacked the car up and worked through the other options.

I\'ve now cleaned and painted the brake calliper carriers, so the brakes are ready to be assembled onto the car. While I was at it I cut off the rusted away remains of the dust shields from the front brake brackets and painted them too.





Something I noticed was that theres a small gap between the dust shield and bracket, which had filled with mud and was retaining moisture. The dust shields themselves were rotten through in many places and the rot was starting to swell the bracket themselves in a couple of places. In the big scheme of things once I\'d wire wheeled the rot off, the brackets were fine. Maybe one to watch out for the future though, on cars that are getting a bit rotten. Brake callipers rotting off would be pretty unsafe!

I\'ve had my rear discs skimmed and my front brake disks and set of new pads all round have arrived. I\'m just waiting on my brake lines now then I can assemble the complete brake system.



I spent quite a lot of time over the weekend building this:



I do like being able to weld! It still needs a little refinement but its working, £0 and a few hours of spare time is much nicer than paying £250+ for an arch roller from a shop.

I gave the rear drivers arch a bit of a test roll. The paint is already destroyed so if I got it a bit wrong and it needed some paint/filling it wouldn\'t matter. It gave me about another 2" of suspension travel on these tyres before hitting the arch. It doesn\'t look like it in the photo but the wheel still span freely here, without scrubbing!



Either way I\'m glad to have some fractionally narrower, lower profile tyres winging their way to me. Frustratingly I didn\'t spot that when I ordered my new tyres online that they\'d take a week to deliver. This is gonna hold me up a bit as there\'s little point properly rolling the arches till I\'ve got the proper tyres to check for clearance. Would be soul destroying to do all the filler and paint only to find I\'ve gotta start again as it still scrubs!

The weather looks a bit iffy and not very paint suitable for the next few days, so when I\'ve got a little time I\'m gonna make a start on the A pillar. Then I\'ve got the joy of finding a new windscreen!