1973 Rover 2000 p6

[george94]

HI all!

I've been lurking on the forum for a while now so i think its about time i start my own thread.
I bought my Rover back in the autumn of 2015 from a chap in Dudley, Birmingham.
i owned it a full 40 minuets before its first breakdown on the M5 on my way back down to Somerset, overheating massively due to a seized thermostat (covering my girlfriends car who was following behind in rusty water).
All in all it was a good solid car but it had suffered mainly from not being used. i believe it was restored in 2002ish but before then it had spent at least 10 years in storage.
The first photo i took of the famously unreliable machine...


First thing to go wrong after the overheating on the way home was a good month in to ownership. the rear trailing arm that connects to the di-dion elbow gave way driving along some lumpy moor roads at 1am. This as it turns out is quite a common fault on p6's these days, years of rust and fatigue take their toll. Thankfully i was on a straight road with no traffic, doing 60mph i thought id had a blowout and the whole back end started sliding around, not a pleasant experience!

I repaired it using 3mm stainless steel, so hopefully it'll last much longer! I also checked and strengthened up the other side to make sure that it wouldn't happen again!
More to come..

[120y]

Lovely motor

[shielsy68]

i made 2 door skin repair panels 12 in high and new inner frames for my friend . his is a v8 , throaty thing it is

[george94]

"Things going wrong part 2"

I decided the car needed a service so i went about removing all the spark plugs, i got to number 1 plug and i sheared in two with almost no effort at all. This being my only car at the time gave me a bit of a problem. I started off by trying my luck with one of those easy out tools which i now know was a complete waste of time, because as you try to turn them to remove the damaged part they also expand the thread in the hole making them impossible to remove.

Needles to say the one i had snapped in two..

Eventually it became apparent that the head would have to come off, i'd never worked on an overhead cam engine before but as it turned out it wasn't as hard as it first appeared. Just had to take care that the top chain tensioner didn't dissapear down in to the sump!



With the head off i was then able to drill out the remainder of the spark plug.






With a new head gasket and spark plug i threw it all back together ready to drive up the NEC classic motor show the next day!




I took it for a Polish car wash on the way home, they all wanted photos taken next to it! 

And on my way back down from the NEC someone got a photo of me chugging down the M5!

[peter96]

I must admit I do like a P6. Hope its running better now.

[george94]

It did run better for all of about 6 hours peter96 but the clutch then gave out on the way home from the NEC and bits of the pressure plate started shooting through the bell housing!! Thankfully though it was still drivable and i managed to limp it home.

All the bits whizzing around had made a bit of a mess but thankfully nothing was badly damaged. I managed to find a NOS pressure plate and clutch on ebay so that went on along with a new release bearing.

Then of course it had to be taken for the obligatory test drive  

The car ran really well then for the next couple of months though slowly i was beginning to notice a loss in power to the point that changing down to second for hills was becoming normal! Chatting to the people at the P6 club stand at the Bath and West classic show pointed me in the direction of a burnt out valve on number four cylinder.
Sure enough!..

I was planning to put hardened valve seats in the head but i still wanted to squeeze a bit more POWER out of the Rovers engine so after scouring ebay for a few weeks i came up with this!

A NOS cylinder head for a 2000 TC and i also found a pair of twin HIF6 carbs off of a 2200 TC local to me.

Took a bit of cleaning up with new needles, jets and gaskets.

insert quote here

[discostew]

Great story - and I do like your garage radio!

[peter96]

Those SUs have cleaned up nicely. Amazing what a bit of elbow grease can do.

[grifterkid]

That is a lovely car...

I've had a couple of P6's and I need another one soon!!!

[dubbelduwwel]

Good to see another survivor! Bookmarked!
~~~
A bit of a hijack: Would a P6 dashboard be butcherable to fit a Range Rover Classic? There is a certain similarity and room for more gauges and switches would be less of a mess with a dashboard with more room from the factory in the first place rather than hang on's or horrible circular saw cut outs.

[george94]

Mar 9, 2016 12:41:43 GMT discostew said:

Great story - and I do like your garage radio!

Thanks! it works a whole lot better than any modern radios I've had!

Before putting the engine back together i had to make up a new set of valve shims to ensure i had the correct gap on each valve. 
I had to get them made up at a machine shop out of high carbon steel then have them hardened.. a lot of faff just to adjust a gap!



I sourced an exhaust manifold (ebay again) and bolted that and the carburettors on to the car. I had to shorten the forward exhaust pipe as the SC has a cast manifold and the TC a tubular.

I got it all together and went to turn the engine over and the camshaft lobe shattered on the number 8 valve… It being a NOS head i had forgotten to have a locating dowel made for the cam carrier. so i had to get one made up, i also had to find a replacement cam and cam bucket..

That solved that problem, and when i next tried the engine fired first time!


Then there was the small matter of cutting out some of the rot on the sill,


With all that done the car went like a bat out of hell and ran really nicely for almost the best part of a year with only minor pits and pieces going wrong, mainly overheating because of a hole in the radiator..

[george94]

Mar 9, 2016 20:44:49 GMT dubbelduwwel said:

Good to see another survivor! Bookmarked!
~~~
A bit of a hijack: Would a P6 dashboard be butcherable to fit a Range Rover Classic? There is a certain similarity and room for more gauges and switches would be less of a mess with a dashboard with more room from the factory in the first place rather than hang on's or horrible circular saw cut outs.

Not sure i can help you with that one having never really seen the interior of a classic range rover.. My P6 being the base model only has the single strip speedo and a clock. I'm thinking it might be upgraded for the TC instruments at some point as they have all the fancy gauges such as oil pressure and an ammeter!

[george94]

Next on the list of things to do was to replace the leaking front and rear oil seals on the engine and do something to tighten up the incredibly sloppy gear linkage.
This seal wasn't even seated properly which didn't help..

The linkage took a bit more work. Originally there would have been two nylon bushes that had long since evaporated, new bushes are available but they were a bit expensive for my taste. Instead i found some aluminium tube of the same bore as the diameter of the gear linkage rod and had it TIG welded in to place.

Then bolted it back on the the gearbox and put it all back in the car again!

Another few weeks went by until one of the engine side plates gave up and began leaking coolant everywhere, so all the manifolds were removed to get a new one fitted.

Lovely NOS side plate.

Stuck in with loads of instant gasket

[darrenh]

the cylinder head has hardened seats already, because its alluminium

looking at the sandy textured combustion chamber in the head, then subsequent nibbled exhaust valve, i'd say there is some serious detonation going on. the valve damage will be a symptom rather than the cause

[optimusprime2]

Nice car .Reminded me of my v8 .Fitted new wings and did a lot of work on it, One place to watch is behind the rubber boot covering in the boot area by battery Its the anchor point for shockabsorber top mount the rust just inside the bot hole.

[george94]

Well i ran the car for another 8 months or so as my daily driver and made it to november of last year, i wasn't happy with the engines performance, it wasn't pulling well, my mpg was around 17, even less than the V8!  Eventually i got round to doing a compression test. It came out with a reading of 120ish psi on all four cylinders, showing that something was defiantly amiss.. Also the rear suspension needed a complete overhaul more for my peace of mind than anything else! so i took it off the road and began its recommisioning..


First things first, i took the head off…. Again..



Because of my loss of compression the car had been running incredibly rich.. None of the exhaust valves were sealing properly, but more worryingly the car had some pretty severe ring wear.





I decided to get stuck in and do a full engine rebuild on the and sort out all of the other little faults on the car before i put it back on the road.

[george94]

First i stripped the engine down to its bare components. The engine had to be bored out and then sleeved back to standard size as oversize pistons for this car are near enough unobtainable! the originals cleaned up nicely though! (Sorry about the bulk upload of photos!)

[george94]

While the engine was away at the machine shop i decided to tackle some of the bodged welding repairs the car had had in its life. 

I started by removing the sill closing panel in the wheel arch which had a nasty patch covering the bottom section.

Hiding a nice pile of rust..

I then used the old panel to make two new ones out of stainless steel.

Hopefully it will mean this area will never rust again! I then clamped it in to position and blasted it with the welder!



Then seam sealed all the welds to try and keep water from getting in to the box sections.

With the welding done on that side of the car i fitted new discs and brake hoses, the old discs i believe are the originals were in a terrible state!


While replacing the discs i found that the top ball joints were completely knackered! its a wonder it passed its MoT!
They took a bit of work to get off with help from a 4ft crowbar!

I then gave the wheel arch a coat of Gravitex stone chip paint, then brushed on a coat of gloss black 2 pack paint.

[george94]

I picked the engine back up from the machine shop, having emptied my wallet of all its contents i began reassembling it!

As you can see the bores have been sleeved back to standard size , I've done this because the supply of oversize pistons for the 2000 engine is almost non existent and i didn't fancy going to 2200. this way i only had to source new rings and could re-use my old pistons.

I used duck egg blue engine enamel paint to keep a bit of originality, and i quite like the colour!

Crankshaft in.. bearing in mind this is the first engine I've ever rebuilt to this extent!

the pistons look so much more healthy in the bores now!

Fitted the engine side plates and ancillary housing.


This should make setting the timing a bit less difficult!

The sump was full of bits of rubber chain guide and tensioner but after a couple of hours scrubbing it came up nicely, ready to stick back on.

[george94]

With the engine reassembled i was able to put it back in to the car! I plumbed in the exhaust and radiator and she fired up on the first turn of the key! All be it quite a long turn!

                                        
           
Now having got the engine work out the way i decided to tackle the rot on the passengers side wheel arch which was slightly more extensive than the drivers one..
All the new bits were again made of stainless to prevent further rot getting a grip in the future.




I also had to replace a good section of the floor pan as it had been badly patched in the past to cover up the rot.

    

    
All the joins were seam sealed, painted with gravitex, then two coated of 2k black gloss.


     
I also remade the strip of metal that holds the rubber wing seal in place with stainless.. I'm very slowly turning the car in to a DeLorean..