Project Marina, Post WOF

With a successful WOF under my belt, I could finally drive the Marina out on the roads and see what it is actually like.

Before driving it the couple of KM to the last WOF inspection, the most I had driven it was around the block a couple of times. I had never really strayed far from home.

Now though, I could take it out for drives “for the fun of it”. I could even get some photos that weren’t taken in my garage or driveway!

The interior in particular looks a lot better out in natural light than in my garage

The feeling of finally being able to get out and actually drive the car properly was awesome. For 51 years old, it drives really well. Going down the road, it just feels like “a car” (that you have to dodge all the potholes in lest you bottom out the suspension). It can be driven just like any other car; get in, turn the key, it fires up and off you go. The difference is that you are driving it, it’s not an appliance. About as far from the Leaf as you can get.

Touch wood, but it doesn’t smoke, it’s not overheating, the gearbox shifts well, and although a bit soft, the suspension seems to be doing what I ask of it. I’m very impressed.

Those first couple of drives did show up a few niggles. One of them, which concerned me a little as it was the first time I’d heard it, was a clattering from the gearbox. It only happens sometimes, and only when warm, which is why I hadn’t heard it before I guess and usually only on over-run or when taking off from a stop. Surprisingly the shifts are good and the syncros are doing the things they should, unlike my first Marina which would punish you if you didn’t go from first, across the gate left to right and then go into second gear, to give the syncro time to catch up.

There is a squeal from either the clutch release or spigot bearing though, so a new clutch will be on the cards in the future.

Something that has been bugging me for a bit, was that my tacho was intermittent at best and dead at worst. It happened randomly a while ago and sometimes works until the cars been running a few minutes and then just drops to zero. I checked the wiring from the coil to no avail, so knew it had to be something in the cluster. Having spent a not insignificant amount on the Spiyda tacho conversion, I was hoping it wasn’t an issue with that.

With the column shrouds off already for other work, removing the cluster was a matter of taking out two screws (since I haven’t got around to sorting the top two yet), reaching in through the “speaker” grille in the dash and undoing the speedo cable, and then pulling it forward enough to disconnect the harness.

Once on the bench, I had my suspicions about what the cause was

This little guy. I didn’t do this, and it’s on the power feed to the tacho. Lifting the end nearest the screw showed it was barely attached to the copper trace, if at all.

I carefully peeled it off, snipped it back to the solder and soldered in a new jump wire, this time joining straight to the bare copper where the ring terminal contacts the trace

To give it some support and stop any risk of shorts I covered it in some hot glue

Refitted to the car, lo and behold on the next drive I had a rock-solid tacho for the whole drive. Excellent. I love a simple fix.

A not so simple fix, was the next thing that was bugging me. The ignition key.

Ever since I’ve had the car the ignition key has been a bit of a pain, but it did work, you just had to jiggle it a bit and sometimes it’d only work if you pulled the key out and turned it over. I could live with that though.

What I needed, was spare keys, just in case I locked my only set in the boot, which has no release except with a key and cant easily be accessed from inside the car.

The door key was easy enough, the locksmith decoded it and cut me a nice new one. It turns out his decoding of it perfectly matched a photo I took of the back of the outside door handle ages ago, showing the back of the lock barrel where the number is stamped into it.

The ignition key though, was a different story. The first thing the locksmith said to me was “this is on the wrong blank” just by looking at it, followed by “its been hand cut with a file”. Oh goody.

Long story short, the original key had been hand cut by/for the previous owner and had an asymmetrical cut. It took me a little to work out why, and was only when I remembered something the guy at the workshop that failed the Marina said when he went to open the boot with the ignition key and I told him to use the door key, “it opened it before”…

Sure enough, when flipped up one way, the ignition key will open the boot

But it won’t open the boot if the key is inserted the other way, and it won’t open the doors. Some wizardry had been done. Why he specifically needed this cut, I don’t know, but it’s kinda cool.

The locksmith didn’t want a bar of it, he said he could replicate it but it may or may not work, and in the end it would probably still have the same issue the key currently has, where it’s hard to use in the ignition. The reason for this is because it’s not a symmetrical cut, with the same cut on each side of the key, so of course the wafers in the barrel will be different on each side.

My plan was to copy one side of the key to both sides of a blank, by hand, and make it a symmetrical key. I bought a blank from the locksmith and dug out my needle files.

Before I could do that though, I wanted to strip my spare barrel so I could use that to test the key, so I didn’t upset the current barrel (and make the car immobile).

The problem was that I didn’t have a key for this barrel, and you need to use a key to remove the core. That left me with one option, see if I could pick it.

First I had to drill out the retaining pin. This goes into a hole in the barrel, locking it in place. I actually filed this down first to see if I could expose the pin and pull it out, it didn’t go well, so I ended up drilling it.

Next you would insert the key, turn it to ACC position and due to the mechanism in it, it would eject the barrel from the housing.

With out a key, or lock pick set, I had to get creative. Using a bunch of stuff from my rollcab that really shouldn’t be abused like this, I picked the core wafer by wafer and out it popped. I went between using this spanner and the screwdriver on my multitool as a turning tool, and the remains of some cheap long-nose tweezers to pick the wafers

Now the fun part. I removed the column shrouds

Took some photos of the wiring so I knew where to plug it in later

And using the handy previously slotted shear bolts holding the ignition on, removed it.

The signs that someone had been here before were obvious… Such as the random screw holding the switch into the housing

and the modification to the retaining pin

It turns out the modification is a little ball that was pressed into a hole that had been drilled down next to the pin

Removing that allowed me to use a pick under the pin to lift it up

Inserting the key into the barrel, and turning it ejected it

The bare barrel

A bunch of wafers were missing from either side, to match the cut of the key. No wonder it was a pain to use

The square metal rod on the end is what turns the electrical switch in the end of the barrel. The white plastic section has a groove that runs around it, and this is what engages and disengages the steering lock (and also what ejects the barrel from the housing).

I used a small punch and screwdriver to drift out the roll pin holding the plastic part on

With that removed, the core will come straight out of the barrel

Make sure you have a key in the core when you remove it or the wafers and springs will go everywhere. The core does not require a key in it to be removed.

The effects of the iffy key can be seen in the barrel, where the wafers have worn into the housing from not being disengaged properly

This is what the uncut blank looks like in the core, showing the wafers that would stop the barrel turning. It does highlight how few wafers were actually being used too. Apparently this “wrong” blank is designed for 10 cuts (5 on each side). The proper blank is for 8 cuts. This key had maybe 4 total based on the wafers left.

I stripped the spare core completely

After cleaning all the wafers and springs up, I went through and using the original key, on the side I wanted to copy, matched the spare core to that key

It’s worth remembering that the key works on the opposite side of the core, pulling the wafers down. In the above photo, the cut on the bottom of the key will be acting on the wafers fitted from the top of the core, pulling them down against the springs.

I didn’t fit any wafers to the other side, just so I could perfect the one side of the key first

I carefully clamped the two keys together, and using vivid (permanent marker) on the blank, traced the cut from the key to the blank

Using a series of small files, I carefully filed down the cuts until it was close to the traced marks, testing along the way.

I got one side of it really good, almost a perfect match. I started on the other side, got it pretty close and then this happened

I messed up. What I hadn’t accounted for was that the other key, having the shorter cut on one side, couldn’t be symmetrical using that cut, or the key goes too far into the core

By reducing this area here to line the cuts up, allows the key to go further into the core than it should, misaligning the the end wafers.

You can see the reason for it here, on the original key. With that one, the key goes further into the barrel on one side than the other. Its madness.

Back to the drawing board I went. In a stroke of luck, whilst googling what sort of key the Marina should have, I came across a number for a blank which rang a bell. Hold on, don’t I have one of those keys?

It’s pretty worn, but yes, that’s the blank a Marina should have. I don’t know where it came from, if it even came with the Marina or another car, but its quite fortuitous.

You can see the cut is quite different and the tip of the key is longer and stepped

I already knew this key didn’t match either of the barrels I had, as I had tested it, but this gave me the chance to rekey a barrel to match this key now. The locksmith was also more than happy to duplicate this key as it wasn’t some weirdo custom thing.

I built the core up in my spare barrel for testing, and once good, I gutted the original core and swapped it all over

The reason I couldn’t use this barrel in my car is that someone has removed the outer ring which has all the markings on it, so it looks pretty haggard

One tip for reinserting the barrel into the housing, is to make sure the plastic at the end of the housing matches the pin on the end of the barrel. Its not actually a perfect square, but a slight rectangle and it will only go in one way. You can spend a lot of time being frustrated by it not going in, if this piece is the wrong way around…

I gave the barrel, core, and housing all a good clean and then lightly lubricated it with graphite before reassembling and refitting to the car

The steering lock is still a little sticky to activate, it always has been, but the key now works each and every time without having to jiggle it or turn it over. Its made the car 100% easier to operate now.

I really wanted to keep the weirdo asymmetrical key in the car as it’s a cool bit of history, but that just made the job far too difficult, when just redoing the whole lot to a different cut made so much more sense. I’ll keep the original keys in storage with the rest of the bits, including the wafers I kept in order, just in case.

Now, I have two complete sets of keys (plus another spare that will open the boot) and an ignition barrel that works properly. Success.

Finally, the last niggle the car has developed since I’ve been able to drive it properly is an issue at higher RPM where it seems to cut out.

I had a rather interesting moment shooting a gap in traffic where I started off rapidly with a chirp of a tyre, and just as I got out in front of the oncoming car, the engine cut flat out but came back to life when I basically crash started it and kept going like nothing happened.

Testing it again later, the same thing could be replicated by giving it beans in a straight line. It didn’t seem to be load dependant as you can go WOT at low RPM and other than some light pinging (hopefully to be fixed by running higher octane now) it pulls fine, but once the revs climb above about 3500rpm it started to misfire and then cut out.

It could be fuelling, as I’ve been topping the fuel tank up with jerry cans and I don’t know how much is actually in there, and although the fuel gauge is coming back to life, I don’t know how accurate it is. Theres no obvious rust in the fuel filter, and the pump should easily be able to keep up with the demands of this engine. I’ve topped up with another 20L of 98 octane to be sure it isn’t just low fuel, and the gauge reads about 3/4 of a tank now. It’s a 54L tank, so that makes sense.

My suspicion is the ignition system, as the tacho drops to zero when the engine cuts out. Other than cleaning the points, checking the gaps when I got the car, changing the plugs, leads, cap and rotor, I have done nothing else. My plan here is to replace the coil, relocate it from the engine to the engine bay (like later Marinas, presumably to reduce vibration), convert to electronic ignition, and I’m also going to give the carb a quick going over as I’ve only barely cleaned and adjusted it to get it running.

Hopefully that fixes it. if not, more troubleshooting will follow, including maybe checking inside the fuel tank for condition.

In the mean time, its more than happy tootling around town, as long as I don’t try to drive too aggressively.