1983 Maestro 1.6L ELD

[Jeff Turbo]

Always good when things light up as they are supposed to

[Doctordiesel77]

Always good when things light up as they are supposed to

Very true, I've got the green bulbs, will leave putting them in until I have more time though, iirc they aren't that easy to get to...

[Doctordiesel77]

The gasket between the inlet and exhaust manifolds was leaking, so I decided to get it fixed and reinstate the electronic controls on the carb at the same time. The various nuts and bolts were a bit rusty, the induction heater came in very handy, much safer than a blowlamp! The bolts from below the manifolds came out surprisingly easily, considering the fact that they are screwed into the alloy inlet manifold, but the third one stripped the threads in the exhaust manifold...a job for the helicoil kit. I used an sds drill on hammer setting to rattle the exhaust manifold off the long studs, the vibration is a lot less damaging than levering or hamerring...

[Doctordiesel77]

Took a while to clean everything up & the heatshield that goes under the carb was missing, luckily I had a spare, I used this as a pattern to make 2 steel copies & fitted these either side of the original one, this should prevent the original from falling to bits & would probably do the job on their own if need be. The two fixing holes needed to be helicoiled, after extracting the one screw that was left in. I guess the last person that was in there got one screw out & broke the heatshield trying to get the second one out, then decided that they knew better than Austin Rover & missed the, in my opinion, very important heat shield off! The bolts for the hot air intake box also ended up being drilled out & helicoiled, while it was easy to get at I painted the manifold with high temp grey paint & wrapped it, to keep even more of the heat in, obviously the bit where the hot air box lives was left bare.

[Doctordiesel77]

I rebuilt a spare carb that came from a 1.6 Vanden Plas, interestingly it was fitted with a 1.3 needle, so a good job I got the full kit. The stepper motor plug on the car was a disaster area, so I spliced the one from the spare carb in. I either failed to identify the colour code correctly, or there had been a crossed wire on either the car or the spare, the Lucas fast check came in very handy for sorting this out!

[Jeff Turbo]

You've been busy on it John. Rusty bolts etc are always hit and miss but with the gadgets available and what you have it's a bit easier. Liking the Fast Check unit, that's a bonus

[Doctordiesel77]

The hot air box had, I guess, rusted away, so I made another, using the spare from my MG 1600 as a pattern, a bit rough, but does the job. If I have to make another, I'll shape the hole for the pipe before bending it and will leave spare metal on the ends, trimming it later would be neater/easier. I used a new ECU, assuming that the old one might be the reason for its conversion to manual choke & cleaned up the connections on the ambient air temp sensor. From cold it ran perfectly, but carb took a bit of setting up with the colourtune. A test drive revealed that it cut out at junctions & according to the Zemco MPG meter used more fuel on the overrun than under power...very odd.. I decided to check the thermostat and engine temperature sender, the gauge worked, but only went past 1/4 if left idling for a very long time. Having drained the cooling system it seemed like a good time to switch to waterless coolant. The water that came out seemed pretty clean, but when I flushed it with a hose pipe a vast quantity of sludge came out. After fitting a new sensor and thermostat the gauge rose much more quickly, but it was impossible to get the radiator fan to cut in, the sludge must have been pretty bad. Now the gauge said it was hotter, but it was actually cooler & carb was much easier to adjust, a quick test drive showed that it was a lot better, still went well, but did 200mpg on the overrun, rather than 20mpg! The temperature sender must have been faulty for a long time & was probably the reason it had a manual choke when I got it. When I find my box of new ambient temperature sensors I'll replace it as well, just in case 41 years have taken their toll on it!

[Doctordiesel77]

I got a spare engine & gearbox on ebay, which came from an early 1983 Vanden Plas. Being more or less the same age as ELD the parts were all the same, I've already used the carb & thought that the 5 speed gearbox would be a nice upgrade. The early 1.6L came with a 4 speed as standard, but the 5 speed was available as an option. The 4 speed box had a few whines and rattles, no doubt due to a life spent in London traffic. Having looked in the book to see what a gearbox rebuild entailed, I decided to leave the 5 speed alone, unless there was an obvious fault. Unfortunately there was...loads of endfloat on one drive flange. The local VW guru said that the only time he'd seen the inside of an 020 box was when he looked through the hole that the diff had made when it flew to bits, so had no clues about a rebuild. The gearbox had to be dismantled to see what was going on with the drie flange. Getting the casings apart and diff out was fairly simple, the AR and Haynes were singing from the same song sheet. The end float was caused by wear on the diff thrust washer, which is a strip of nylon wrapped around the inside of the casing. The circlips were missing from the pinion pin too, but it hadn't escaped, as the cones on the crownwheel were in its way. Having heard horror stories about the diffs from a VW fan I decided to put a limited slip diff in. They are not horribly expensive, but are easy to find, the Maestro boxes have 109mm crownwheel. The crownwheel is riveted on, so they were to drill out, the AR bolt kits to replace the rivets are nla, but vw kits are easy to find, not cheap, but available. Bearings for VW box are also readily available, apart from the 25mm id mainshaft bearing used on the pre june 1983 ones. Setting the preload up using the method in the book involves fitting bearings then taking them back out to fit shims, I decided to try measuring everything first, then calculating the shims. This was a partial success, but one was to redo as it was right at the end of the turning torque tolerance. Getting the taper roller outer race out of a blind housing involved some modifications to a blind bearing puller to get it in behind the bearing.

[Doctordiesel77]

Some of the bearing inner races were very resistant to being removed, one I ground a slot in with a die grinder so that it would crack & remove easily, another I heated with an induction heater, it just fell off. The internal pullers managed the needle bearings without modification.

[Doctordiesel77]

I had a good selection of shims, but still had to stick one on the surface grinder to get the right preload. Torque screwdriver was very handy for checking that everything was as it should be, I did have to make adaptors up from some scrap parts though.

[Doctordiesel77]

Once the bearings are set up, putting it back together is just as the books say, a hydraulic hose fitting with 27mm af hex is handy for crewing selector bung back in and 17mm diameter super strong/super cheap magnets from ebay are a perfect fit in drain and level plugs, a better place for the magnet than the place vw put theirs, I left the original one in, so any steel swarf should be captured by one of them. Out with the old, in with the new! Not having the correct 5 speed guide plate for the gear lever I adjusted the gear linkage by loosening clamp, putting gearbox in reverse, gear lever in reverse, then turning the selector rod to keep the reverse stop tight on the guide plate shoulder. I did this as I was pretty sure that using the correct method would make 5th impossible or difficult to engage. So far it seems to work well, despite my cheating....

[Doctordiesel77]

Did a bit of overdue maintenance, the crankcase breather should be replaced every couple of years or 24,000 miles, I don't think that that has happened in the past. The old one was corroded in & took a bit of getting out without getting bits of plastic swarf in the sump! The new one has silicone grease on the threads, so might not be such a fight to get out next time. The torqueometer was already by the car, so I put the wheelnuts back on in the way that garages and tyre places should, but rarely do. The external door handle decided to stop working when I was doing the gearbox. On investigation it seemed that the link rod was the wrong way round. This is not easy to get off, so I was pretty annoyed with myself when I realised that it had been correctly fitted, but the much easier to remove nylon clip/bearing in the handle lever itself was the part that was the wrong way around...Always pays to look harder & make sure you are on the right track! While the door card was off I slopped a load of thin grease all over the moving parts of the window and door mechanism, if I went a bit ott with it the excess will end up rustproofing the door bottom! Only problem left is that, even with the correct drive gear fitted, the speedo now over reads by 10% and odometer over reads by 5%. The zemco fuel computer that I fitted is still accurate, as it gets speed signal from magnets on the drive shaft, but I may have to investigate further..

[Doctordiesel77]

The first motorway trip with the 5 speed box was to Hebden Bridge vintage weekend, so involved some A roads, a bit of town driving and a good bit of motorway. Seemed quite happy at an indicated 70mph, which is about 65 according to my carefully calibrated fuel computer. I never went over this & varied between 60 and 70 (indicated), the fuel computer came up with an average fuel consumption of 44.5mpg, which I am quite happy with. If I had used the odometer to work it out I'd have come up with 46mpg, either way the 5 speed conversion seems to have been worth the bother.

[Jeff Turbo]

Excellent and makes it all worthwhile

[Doctordiesel77]

Yes, the times when things go according to plan make up for those other times when they don't!