Thread: 1955 S1 86" addition to the stable

Originally Posted by Mustlust

I have an orange lenses on my light..... can anybody shead light (sic) on why the lens is a different colour to JayBoRover's red lens???

Fading I suspect.

New porkies and probably lenses, are available from the S1 Club UK I think,

Cheers Charlie

Why there are orange pork pie lights? I don’t know either but they exist maybe not LR. I converted 2 brand new orange lenses to red by spraying them with lens spray it was far more successful then I expected you can’t pick the difference.
As far as I know the base kits are available from S1 club but not the rest.
Dennis

Originally Posted by newhue

There is also a good set of D lights from a different seller if porkies are too hard.

Let the bank doors open and the CC start getting hot. The down side to your new addiction.

I saw those D lights and thought I might have a nibble at them for the 80". Then I saw the seller stated "no postage - pickup only" in two places on the listing but also said "post anywhere" in his text description. I got nervous that things would get messy, being on the other side of this giant island and all. Turns out I maybe would have won them with what I'd have bid to.

My CC is fairly locked up this year ... you have any idea what it costs to enter the Dakar Rally?

My CC is fairly locked up this year ... you have any idea what it costs to enter the Dakar Rally?[/QUOTE]

Probably a lot more than an 80" Series 1. Looks like fun in the mud though for the bikes. Next year the Range-Rover Evoque's are taking part, be exciting to see them up against the Mini's. Wish you the best of luck with it all & hope you get some good sponsorship.

Cheers Nigel

Yep - I'm looking forward to seeing the Dakar Evoques. I got to see the Mini's at the Desert Challenge in Abu Dhabi last year. Not much "Mini" about them - in more ways than one. Definitely bigger than my S2a!
... and yep, some serious sponsorship would certainly help! Looking down the barrel of around $100k - and that's after I've already spent just over $50k on my Dakar bike! All that would certainly buy a few tidy S1's huh!

Since Defender Mike has stirred things up in his search for a Series 1, I have felt a little more motivated to have a look at "Flash", the '55 I accidentally won on eBay a while ago. So this weekend I towed Flash out of the garage for a little look-see.
So I started with removing the doors, bonnet, seats, tools and the stuff in the rear. A blank canvas:


So my game plan was to remove the badly rusting steel hardtop skin that a previous owner had fitted.



So out with the electric drill and drilled out several million rivets (I never, ever, ever exaggerate). The odd belt with a chisel and hammer and it started to come away.


Took a bit of work to get the majority of the panelling off:


The "ribs" are welded to the hoops. I have actually finished cutting them off but I hacksawed them each side of the hoops so I can more easily attack the joints with the grinder without impacting on the original hoops too much. So the tidying it up will be a job for another day. The rear sections of panelling are welded to the hoops both vertically and along the tops and to the tub capping along the bottoms! Grrrr! That'll be a big job for another day!


So with the hardtop basically removed the other part of the game plan was to see what might be required to get the old thing running. So I removed the spark plugs and cleaned them up, turned the engine over for a few rev's with the hand crank and poured some water in the radiator. The radiator fairly quickly emptied itself through a hole somewhere around the water pump and also from a split in the bottom radiator hose. I then hooked up the battery from DeeDee (my S2a) with some jumper leads to Flash and found the headlights came on. Surprise! Turned them off with the dash switch and they turned off. Brilliant! (Pardon the pun).


I took the filler and neck out of the fuel tank to find the tank in beautiful condition internally with no gunk, rust or fuel. Not confident that the fuel pump would work so figured if I got that far I would be doing well so planned on gravity feeding a bit of fuel directly to the carb. First wanted to see some spark to verify the coil, ignition and distributor.


Couldn't find any spark. I removed the coil and cleaned all the contact and checked the coil continuity. It was fine so put it all back together. The actual plug leads are't looking very happy so I think I might have to spring for some new ones of those. The plug caps just fell apart in my hands so I wasn't confident that even if I got power that far that it would actually get to the spark plug anyway! Still no spark so thought it might be time to check the ignition switch itself, as it didn't give me any "solid" feeling in it's key turn. opened up the dash panel and found this!



More than a fair share of the wires are eaten through and broken. Busy mice!!




So I have some work in front of me to sort the wiring out. In the mean time I'll try to figure out what I need to do to bypass the ignition and power only to where it's needed for a test start. Jeez I was lucky to not have a fire in the dash with all that dry straw, seat cushion material and broken wiring with insulation eaten away!

I was pretty happy with the condition of Flash. A few things to do but I don't think it'll take too much to get it running. The the real work will start to sort things out properly, but it'll be nice to have it mobile so I can move it around without having to tow or push it. Hopefully by this summer it'll be useful for working around the block, collecting firewood and clearing the firebreak. Fun, fun, fun!

Got to love those busy rodents, klonks chassis was full of plastic, grass and baling string.

Certainly lucky it didnt put a new meaning to his name.

Its kind of dissapointing to find stuff has been welded to the cappings and hoops. I have the same problem on klonk, priced up getting stuff regalved $1.50 per Kg of steel weight, includes the acid bath to remove rust and paint, not too bad.

Ive also seen complete wiring harnesses available in England for around 140 pounds.

Cheers Steve

Originally Posted by JayBoRover

So I have some work in front of me to sort the wiring out. In the mean time I'll try to figure out what I need to do to bypass the ignition and power only to where it's needed for a test start.

Top report John! I had some Rover mice in mine as well - obviously they know a bit of quality when they find it

If you get a length of light automotive wire and put a crocodile clip on each end, you can then connect it from the battery live to the coil negative (I think). If you get the coil terminal wrong it doesn't matter too much, as you will still get spark although slightly weaker. If yours is an old coil it will be marked CB (contact breaker) and from memory SW (switch) so connect to the SW side. Disconnect the coil from your ignition switch first! I bought packets of crocodile clips from K-Mart I think.

Once you have done that the coil is being energised, so don't go away and do something else, or else the coil will overheat and kark it.

Have you tried the starter motor yet? On mine I had to prise open the starter solenoid and soak the internals in a glass of lemon juice to clean them and then reassemble with vaseline on the contacts,

Cheers Charlie