A few days ago the Caddy was given one last clean up ready to move on to its new owner.
Still doesn't scrub up bad for a 21 year old van.
Off she goes.
Has been a cracking little car...van...? I still never quite decided whether to call this a car or a van. Always felt more car like to drive, so I've always tended towards car. I really hope she continues to give similarly Stirling service to the new owner.
This is a big weight off my mind though as it means that all my cars actually can be kept on my own property again rather than having to abandon one around the corner or have one lodged at a friend's house. That takes a bit of the urgency out of moving the P4 on at least.
A few days back a large box of box of bits arrived for the P6. The vast bulk of these by volume was a full coolant hose set. Additionally there was a full set of gaskets for the light clusters, a full set of stainless steel screws for the same as a bunch of mine have well mangled heads, new thermostat and housing gasket, a set of wiper blades, and an oil pump housing gasket.
Decided to tackle the light gaskets first as it seemed a nice simple job.
The reason the front light clusters were proving to be significantly less than weather proof wasn't hard to see, the gaskets had long since turned to plastic.
The tail lights were also letting in a bunch of water as evidenced by this condensation.
These turned out to be completely missing their gaskets which definitely wouldn't be helping. Hopefully adding these will help things out a bit.
A similarly quick job was swapping out the ancient wiper blades for some new ones.
I know these modern repro stainless blades aren't great, but I wanted to have a second set of them on hand so I could have a go at rebuilding the original ones I had with new rubber blades in case I wreck them. The stamping of the ones I took off is definitely far superior to the replacements. They do clear the screen acceptably though for now at least, and this isn't a car I'm likely to be using a huge amount in poor conditions anyway. That's what I have a modern daily for.
I've been looking into the options regarding the radiator. Off-the-shelf replacements don't appear to be available. No huge surprise to be honest.
There are a couple of suppliers offering exchange units for around the £300 mark by the time you've factored in two way postage etc. Alternatively there's a well reviewed company over in Kempston who can recore this one with an uprated core for around the same money. Which is probably the option I'm leaning towards. Being less than half an hour from home rather than having to entrust things to the postal system is a big plus, and being able to support local businesses always appeals to me. They can also carry out a repair to that end tank no problem, whereas those offering exchange parts I imagine may object to that damage. So that's likely to be the route I take there.
This brings us up to today, when I'd been feeling a bit rough but still wanted to try to get something ticked off the list. Changing the suspected sticky thermostat seemed like a good target. As it was quite crunchy and had a split at one end only being stopped from growing by the hose clip I took the opportunity to swap the top hose while I was there.
The old thermostat wasn't the most gunged up I've ever seen but it was definitely a bit on the grubby side. That poor gasket though, I wonder how many times that has been used.
I did note that the bleed hole in the original one was positioned at the bottom - whereas it really should be at the top like so.
Idea being that any trapped air is then able to find its way past the 'stat through that hole without leaving the power head on the thermostat air bound which could cause it to fail to open.
Worth noting that after I took that photo I did dig off several layers of silicone and instant gasket off the sealing surface before bolting the housing back in place.
Not thrilled about the quality of the moulding of the new top hose, the radius of the curve leading to the thermostat housing is too wide so it wants to kink there a bit. Not badly so and once the system has a bit of pressure in it definitely won't be prone to collapsing, but it's a bit disappointing nevertheless. Sorry I didn't apparently get a photo of that. Admittedly, several of the current hoses on the car aren't the best fit either - the heater hose you can see below the thermostat in the above photo is basically wedged in place. Will see if the replacements are any better. I may be able to improve the fit of the new hose by just trimming the end a bit as that will naturally straighten out the bit that's trying to kink a little. I'll take another look at that when I'm feeling a bit more human.
I didn't have the opportunity to take the car for a road test today but the temperature at idle stabilised around here. Which doesn't look unreasonable to me for a car that's stationary.
Hopefully it sits somewhere reasonable when we're actually moving as well, though that will need to wait till the weekend to find out.
Interestingly at one point while I was keeping an eye on this during warmup the fuel gauge visibly twitched two or three times. I'm (probably vainly) crossing my fingers that we might have a dead spot on the potentiometer and that as the level drops a bit we might see it spring back to life. I know the gauge itself works and we've got a good ground connection between the tank and body, so the sender is our issue. Wishful thinking I know, but I'm going to cling to it for now given how much of a pain getting to the sender will be.
Have noticed I do have a slight weep from the top radiator hose connection so imagine there's some gunk trapped in there. Radiator will be coming out probably this week anyway so I'll likely just be leaving that be until then as it's a tiny weep.
