Something which made itself known at the end of last week on the Trabant was an absolutely horrendous rattle from somewhere up front. This was plainly a "something external touching something it shouldn't" rather than anything that was actually a sign of impending failure. So annoying rather than worrying.
Sure enough a bit of poking round found the culprit.
The metal adjuster collar on the throttle cable had come into contact with the heater box. Being a pretty lightly built tin box with nothing but a flap in this did a great job of amplifying this into an extremely annoying din.
This has now been rerouted to keep it well clear - though I did scratch my head a bit as to how to keep it there as there wasn't really anything obvious to tether it to. Eventually I figured out I could trap it under the sound deadening jacket and that keeps it exactly where it needs to be.
If it does it again I'll mount an eyelet on side of the heater box to properly anchor the cable to. If time permits I may well do that anyway as it's a much more elegant solution.
She has also had a bit of a facelift.
It's purely a matter of personal taste, but I just think these bumpers suit the car and the utilitarian, no nonsense approach to things. The fact that these have pretty much exactly the same level of patina to them as the car is just a bonus.
One of the things I'd been missing before was the air dam which sits below the front bumper which basically helps shield the carb and alternator from road spray and debris as they sit down really low as you can see below.
These areas are rather better protected now.
I had always thought that panel was plastic until it arrived, nope it's actually metal.
The rear one took about ten minutes to swap.
Front one on the other hand was rather more of a fight. I'm not sure whether it dates back to when the car obviously had a bit of a knock on the nose or when the bumper was changed, but every single one of the retaining bolts had been snapped. Both ends of the bumper instead of using the original bolt holes, were attached using a couple of Z shaped brackets bolted into the sheet metal on little bridge between the bottom of the wheel arch and front panel.
That would indeed explain why it wobbled so much.
As there is enough room to do so, I decided that just re-drilling the mounting holes a touch further back was the best approach. I've only done one so far as my drill bits are apparently incredibly blunt and it took me about half an hour of fighting to get two drilled. It's a thousand times more secure than at any time in the last year or so anyway.
I'll grab a couple of appropriately sized cobalt bits this week and get the additional fixings in place - it's a hundred times more solid now than it was. The bottom of the right hand wing definitely will want some attention with a welder at some point as it's distinctly crusty.
One surprising bit of good fortune however came when I went to fit the number plate. I'd drilled a couple of holes in that basically using Mark I Eyeball as a measuring device when the sticky pads holding it on to the bumper started to fail.
Two unexpected things happened here. First was that the machine screws I used were exactly the right type for the metal threaded inserts on the bumper - second was that I had by total chance put the holes in such a place that they *exactly* lined up with the holes in the new bumper.
Complete and total luck...but just like when playing pool, keep a straight face and make everyone believe you meant that shot to play out that way and no, it of course wasn't a total fluke...
Hopefully I can find a new home for these that have come off.
Shouldn't be a problem though - just like on Minis where everyone wants chrome, there seem to be a lot of people who want to put the older style kit on their Trabants so I doubt it will be hard to find a good home for those bumpers.
Of course the universe being what it is, I'm never allowed to actually reduce the number of things on the to do list am I? While crawling around under the front of the car I noticed something else needing attention.
Crack and a couple of pinholes in the centre exhaust section just back from the joint to the heat exchanger. Now this isn't the end of the world...but it would have really been nice to find this BEFORE having a couple of hundred Euros worth of boxes shipped over from Germany, as including a system in there (I'd probably have taken the opportunity to upgrade to the 45mm version to get the most out of the upgraded engine) wouldn't have made much odds to the shipping bill there...on its own, the shipping near enough doubles the price.
I'll need to have a closer look and see what shape the rest of the system is in before I decide what to do there. Obviously if there's any questions over the condition of the heat exchanger that will definitely be changed given the safety implications of it failing. I suspect if we end up looking at replacing more than that one bit of pipe I'd *probably* look at getting a 45mm heat exchanger (there is a version which includes a larger and much more classically designed two stroke expansion chamber but also maintains the heating function) and having the rest of the system made up in stainless locally. At this point I've spent so bloody much on shiny bits the car is obviously sticking around so I may just as well make it as good as I can and this is the sort of thing I'll probably thank myself for long term.
And having used and worked on their 1980s 386 desktop PC extensively they were anything but what a small corruption of their name might suggest - they were excellent, built like tanks, practically indestructible and gave a good account of themselves performance-wise.
