We shall have to look and see. I'm not entirely certain we could actually get the front assembly down the side of the house and unfortunately it wouldn't be safe left out the front, even covered up, since it's the convention locally that any metal of any sort left on a driveway (not even at the road end) has been left out for scrap collectors. As it is, the wiring doesn't look that difficult to get to ahead of the bulkhead, it's only when you get inside the car that it seems tricky since it's hidden behind the headlining.
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Words and pictures time. This was one of those jobs that you expect to be quick and easy and isn't. Certainly trying to edit the video and photos down for updates demonstrated how much time actually had to go into it. The job in question is the starter motor. Since getting the car, the starter motor works some of the time on first start up and fairly reliably after a few tries, in between those two states it has usually needed a few taps with a stick to get it to engage properly. Mechanically the starter operates very well, it's just getting an electrical connection that's been the issue. Given the state of other electrical connections and wiring in the car, we had expected it to be something along the variety of cleaning contacts and so it was. First job, push the car out of the garage and get it up on a stand.
Then get yourself under the car and try and figure out how you're going to undo the three bolts holding the starter on without removing the exhaust. I'd been advised removal of the exhaust was necessary and while it would certainly have made life easier, it turned out not to be needed. The big problem underneath the car is that when I had the socket and ratchet on the through bolt and nut, I couldn't swing either far enough before I hit the chassis or the exhaust. I didn't have the time to do this on the day I attempted it so packed up, put the car away, and waited until Pat was free of work when I was free of work to have another go.
The next free time we had the car was wheeled out again, put on a stand again, and Pat had a good look to see if inspiration would strike a fresh pair of eyes. It did! He found he could get in with the ratchet from above and get a bit more swing if I held the spanner from below. After longer than either of us wanted, we had this one bolt out. The other two were much easier. As it happens, I managed to put this bolt back in from underneath the car on my own with a socket and spanner, using the spanner to turn the nut a tiny amount in the space available, while holding the bolt with the ratchet. It took a while, but it was also less grief than pulling off the exhaust. Our next obstacle was the bolt holding the main lead which we couldn't get any tools on. Normally this bolt is really easy to get to by just going under the front bumper and undoing it, there's not even a need to jack the car up because of the impressive ground clearance and access. Here's the view from the front with the starter removed.
That's right, we had to remove the starter to undo the bolt. The reason for this was that the two wires that bolt on to the starter had been put on in such a way that the thinner wire with the crimped eyelet was acting like a locking washer and there wasn't any access to bend it out of the way. It looks like when it was last done up, it had bent and locked onto the bolt head as it was done up.
Ah, but I'm a little out of order here. How did we get the starter motor out without taking the exhaust off? Well, it was a lot easier to simply disconnect the brake rod. The brake rod is held to a bracket via a clevis pin and cotter/split pin. Remove the two pins and the brake rod simply swings aside allowing you to finegle the starter motor out of the restrictive gap it lives in between the exhaust and the sump. Here you can see the offending crimp, the wire it was crimped to had gone very brittle and broke off when we first attempted to undo the bolt.
It had taken us so long just to get this starter out that it was all we did that day on the car because of course we had to allow time to pack up all the tools and push the car back into the garage.
We have a minor complaint with Imperial measurements too, one which we'll likely make again in the future. Both Pat and I grew up being educated on Imperial and Metric so we're good with feet and inches, centimetres and millimetres, the usual. But when it comes to fractions for sizes it is the most frustrating foreign language to us. I want to go a size up from a 3/8ths? No idea. A size down from a 1/4"? Not a clue. It will come with practice I'm sure, but right now it's just so much nonsense. Anyway, we had the starter off and let it sit in the house for a bit while we waited to have some time free to deal with it.
As it happens, I was the first person to have any meaningful time spare and it being a mostly one person job, I got the role of starter inspector. We could have removed the inspection covers while the starter was fitted to the car but we wouldn't have got as good a look, nor been as able to clean it, as when it's on a desk. First job, unscrew the bolt that clamps the band around the body of the starter so we can get to see what state the commutator and brushes are in. Normally you don't need to remove the band completely, just slide it out of the way, but since repainting was on the cards we opted to remove it fully.
Inside we saw that the commutator and brushes were quite dirty. Just moving the starter around to inspect it ended up with a lot of debris falling out of the case. Our theory that the internals were corroded and dirty seemed to be a sound one thus far.
Next was to remove the end covers. The smaller cover allows access to the main spindle so you can rotate and clean the commutator without removing the starter from the car, it is held in with two small screws. The larger cover also houses half of the contact switch which is engaged by the starter knob inside the car by pulling the cable that's attached to the arm. The larger cover is held on by two additional screws. These both came off very easily.
Once this was open another problem was apparent. There was a contact being made between the disc and plates of the contactor switch but it looked to just be in one small spot for the most part which didn't seem ideal.
When you pull the starter knob in the car, it pushes the disc into contact with the plates on the starter motor, thus completing the circuit and allowing the starter to spin up and engage.
As you can see, while the lever does move freely, all the bits that should be clean really aren't. After some time with contact cleaner, an old toothbrush, and cotton buds, I finally got the brushes moving freely in their sockets and got as much dirt as I possibly could off the surface of the commutator. The commutator surface has got some scores in it but I doubt it will cause significant issues with the operation of the starter. All of the copper components inside the starter are quite substantial and crude compared to modern equipment so I daresay the tolerances aren't particularly fine and will work perfectly well even when in quite poor condition.
With all of the copper components cleaned as best as I could, I put the loose parts of the starter in the ultrasonic cleaner to remove the grime and some of the rust. It was quite effective.
I didn't put the main body of the starter motor in the ultrasonic cleaner in part because that seemed like a bad idea and in part because it wouldn't physically fit. Instead, I scrubbed all of the rust I could off the body of the starter with a wire brush. After that, it was time to paint. I opted to hand paint everything with enamel rather than opting for faster aerosols. I felt this would be more in keeping with the car and would save me the hassle of a lot of fiddly masking. To make the painting of the parts easier, I used a cardboard box with holes in for the screws and starter motor, if you make the screw holes a little smaller than the screws, you can then wind the screws into the cardboard to hold them in place.
A coat of Kurust, two coats of red oxide primer, and a two coats of black enamel later and everything was looking smart if not new. As with the water pump, this will give us both a quick visual reminder of what we've worked on as well as allowing the parts to be less than perfect and mellow out into the general look of the car. Cared for but not restored. Once the paint was hard enough, I reassembled everything and waited for the next opportunity to get on with fitting it to the car.
Before the starter was refitted, one item that needed to be addressed was the clamping bolt for the bowden cable. Previously it had been this brass... thing. I'm not sure what tool it was made to fit but it certainly wasn't any tool I own, someone had gone to a lot of effort to make sure that no spanner, socket, or screwdriver could work with it. Quite remarkable really. We had a rummage in the odd fixings tub and found a screw with the correct thread pitch and a good flat end to the thread that will work much better. A hex headed bolt would have been better still, but we didn't have anything that matched the thread unfortunately so a cross head bolt will have to suffice.
My plan was then to refit the starter and use the ACF-50 I'd ordered but hadn't yet arrived once the starter was back on the car. Typically, the ACF-50 then arrived, so I quickly removed the caps and gave the contacts a suitable coating. I didn't use any ACF-50 on the brushes and commutator, I had a memory (hopefully accurate) that commutators should be kept free of any sort of anything.
Then it was finally ready to go back on the car.
Which it did, with not too much difficulty happily.
I did manage to get all three bolts back in without removing the exhaust and from underneath the car on my own. It would have been easier with Pat swinging a ratchet from above, but with patience I got the awkward nut and bolt tightened. To prevent the thinner wire's eyelet from behaving like a locking washer again, I fitted it before the thicker lead which meant everything seemed to line up and stay flat a bit better. The last thing was to reconnect the brake rod, which now moves much better than it did, and put a new split pin through the clevis pin to hold it in place.
Now, you'll notice the distinct lack of one particular item. We haven't tested the starter. I had one of those moments where I looked at all the parts and couldn't for the life of me remember how to use them, realising only after the car had been put away how easy it would have been to hook up power and test the starter motor. So we're considering the fitting of the refurbished starter motor a calculated risk. There's no reason to believe it won't work now, it was sort of working when it came off the car after all and we've improved it internally so it should now work better, in theory. The next time we have the opportunity to do so we will test the starter motor, for now we'll just pretend it's okay. A surprisingly mentally taxing job in the end, probably because it was the first time doing this job on this particular car. We're looking forward to tackling either the radiator or the wiring next most probably, as time permits.