Dealing with Decay - a day in the life of...

Ho Hum

So, the trusty Marina now has working wipers and the dash panel lights are working again (I found a replacement second hand switch for a mere $35 - even managed to fit it myself).

Unfortunately I now know it will cost me the best part of $800 to have the steering rack removed and reconditioned (read re-bushed) and to get the brakes fixed. This will put the total expenditure on the car so far at about $2,500 - which is almost 3 x what it is worth - with all the work and new bits done so far. Most of the expense is in the labour required to remove the steering box - something a competent home mechanic could do quite easily - but I am not one of those...

Causing me to think very seriously about the logic of continuing with it - but then, the flip side is that I have a reasonable and reliable car - all for about $2,500 - and I KNOW which bits won't go wrong any more, because I will have replaced:

* tyres
* Windscreen
* Window winders
* dash-light switch
* fuel cap
* rear axle/diff
* steering rack seals
* gearbox mounts
* clutch and brake fluid
* windscreen wipers
* bent wheel

And I have bought it a substantial steering wheel cover

All I need to do now is fix the heater and it will be hard to fault. Well, for a 35-year old Marina, anyway.

If I try to think of it as an MGB with a more practical body, it becomes quite desirable in a pea-green, goat-in-sheep's-clothing kind of way. (Pic of MGB in exotic location to compare with a pic of Marina at our local exotic play park...)

They are, coincidentally, both the result of an Italian body design clothing British componentry...

Beauty is, after all, in the eyes of the beholder.

Then there is the Rover. The heater works and the steering rack is fine. I have spent well over $1,500 on it since buying it - mainly on replacing the windscreen, front and rear window rubbers and having the top-end tuned twice.

Here it is being an every day commuter car. Well, sitting in a car park between commutes - I don't yet know how to photograph myself driving without getting a speeding ticket.

b-u-u-t, it still has the automatic gearbox in need of a $5,000 overhaul and a slightly worrying intermittent misfire. Plus the electrics are quite obstinate from time-to-time. Mind you, my previous experience of elderly Rovers is that they will continue to function quite well despite a myriad of ills, so I feel as long as I keep the fluids topped up, things should be more-or less ok.

Oh - AND it needs a new driver's door and a fairly serious respray to about 7 body panels. Only yesterday the swivelling switch/catch for the driver's-side quarter-light window 'exploded' (it has a spring in it) in protest at being used.

How about this - to check the auto gearbox fluid levels, you have to lift the carpet off the transmission tunnel, remove a very perished rubber bung from the tunnel just under the parcel shelf, and use the short dipstick to check the level whilst the car is idling, in gear (low) with the handbrake on!!

The gearbox fluid is a special one, and a sort of watery blood colour. The dipstick is very shiny, which makes it quite hard to see where the level is.

Filling it up is quite awkward, because of the limited space between the parcel shelf and the transmission tunnel. Is slightly tiresome having to do it at least once a week...

The leak is inconsistent, and sometimes the box practically empties in 2 days. All a teensy bit irritating.

And then there is actually driving it. 45 years ago, relatively few British cars were sold with automatic gearboxes. The dear old Rover has TWO gear levers.

So how does it work? For normal driving, you select 'D'. Nothing odd about that, except the selector goes P-N-D-L-R (where 'L'= Low gear), in stead of the now ubiquitous P-R-N-D-2-1 - in other words, 'R' is in a different place. You can not select second gear manually.

As you pull away, the car starts (by default) in second gear, only briefly selecting first if you completely mash the pedal to the floor, and (also by default) the upchange to 3rd occurs at about 30kph. You can stretch this out by stepping much harder on the pedal, or really get it to hang on by mashing again.

OR... you can use the other gear lever, which is like an indicator stalk next to the main gearlever. Once flicked, the car starts in first, holds it for a while, jumps to second, holds it for much longer and then jumps to 3rd at about 70 kph. Generally if you are going up hill, it holds the gears for longer anyway. This second lever is called (I think) the 'kick-down switch', but I might be wrong about that, because I think the last centimetre of accelerator pedal travel is also called the kick-down switch. Hmmm.

The car is set to upchange at very low revs - because it was always meant to be a sedate and gentlemanly motor car - also the engine, whilst it can rev a bit, is probably best when it doesn't.

Having said that, the overall gearing is extremely low, with the engine revving (I calculate) at 3,000 revs at 62 mph (100 kph), which,by modern standards is quite a high engine speed for the actual road speed. Although it is revving quite fast, it is very smooth and does not feel like it will break - even at an indicated 85mph (about 137kph) it just seems to keep going (4,200 rpm)

Then there's the lights. Apart from the fact that they are quite moody about whether or not they will come on, there are THREE separate switches for the lights. None of your all-in-one column switches here.

• Switch 1 - a dashboard toggle switch that turns on the light system (sidelights only if nothing else is switched on)
• Switch 2 - a single action indicator-type switch (on or off) that turns on the headlights. This is on the right of the column, behind the indicator switch
  
• Switch 3 - a floor-mounted foot-operated dip switch to the left of the brake pedal which turns on main-beam
• Switch 4 (did I say 3 switches? tut) is headlamp flasher, which you get by pulling the indicator stalk backwards (I'd had the car 2 months before I accidentally discovered this blissfully logical device)
• Switch 5 sits under the instrument binnacle and turns on the spotlights.

Switches 2, 3 and 5 only work if switch 1 in 'on'.

So - you think you are ready to drive it? Don't forget - no power steering (1.7 tonne car) and you need to fill up the gearbox first :)