Rover SD1, Back Into It

No, the Rover hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s still chillin’ here. Unfortunately I had to wait for the replacement water pump to arrive from Rimmers, so it’s been stuck under a cover for a couple of weeks. Sadface.

The pump arrived the other day, along with some other bits (like all the bolts for the waterpump, as they are known to break off on removal), so this weekend I’ll be swapping waterpumps, and filling the system with yet MORE fresh coolant (must be the 3rd or 4th time since I got the car now).

Since the car leaks coolant the moment the engine is fired up it’s been stuck under a cover in my driveway. Uncovering it for the first time in a couple of weeks made me happy, I have a proper attachment to this car now. Feels.

Once uncovered, it was time to fire it up and move it into the garage. Seems my cold start tuning in Speeduino isn’t too bad. It had a little backfire into the intake (which I still don’t know the cause of) but started and idled good.

Hello old friend

It seems like almost every post has that same photo, lol, but I assure you this is current.

I didn’t have the time to get ripping into the cooling system today, but I still wanted to hose down all the bolts in WD40 to try to make them come out easier tomorrow.

But there was also something else I needed to attend to. The other week I finally received my new washer bottle strap from the SD1 Club in the UK. This was the second try as the useless postal service lost the first one, but anyway, this meant I could finally tidy up the bracket and get rid of this ugly DIY solution a previous owner made.

This is the current strap. Some weird rubber ziptie thing. You can see one of the two round snaps the standard (and replacement) strap attaches to.

And the reason I need to tidy up the bracket?

Some previous (asshole) owner made a complete hash up of painting it in the past, and the paint is literally flaking off and exposing the rust that is UNDER the paint. No prep at all before it was painted. This really pisses me off.

Taking it off the car is easy enough. I chose to remove the mount from the strut tower as that was also in bad shape, so one nut on the strut top, and two bolts down low and the whole lot comes off.

Thankfully the inner guard is solid, just needs a clean

Removed bracket

Some chunks of paint

They didn’t even mask or remove the bolts

Or strip off any old paint

Oh well. I’ll do it right and have it looking good again. It’s the little things that make the biggest difference. The bracket is currently sitting in a box in the garage covered in rust converter, and tomorrow I’ll prep and paint it in my usual high temp satin black.

I have a few other little things to do on the car whilst it’s in the garage this weekend, one of them is look into what chemicals I have that will dissolve/remove the glue that has been slapped on the underside of the bonnet to try (and fail) holding the bonnet insulation up. I need something that will remove this unidentifiable yellow glue, without damaging the paint. Once I work that out, the insulation is going in the bin.

Stay tuned.