At the last Lancia Fulvia Update, I’d started removing some exterior trim. The job continued today and true to form, I got over some previous frustrations and discovered some brand new ones!
Last week’s frustration was the headlamp surrounds and a fresh air intake for the heating system. Let’s tackle those first….
I managed to get one headlamp surround off but the bolts holding the other three in were round where they used to be hexaganol, and rusty where they should be smoothly threaded.
One off, three on….
And this week, all of them removed and then the headlamps out, too.
That’s Geoff working on something or other inside the engine bay. Geoff managed to wrangle the headlamp surrounds out thanks to a liberal dose of penetrating fluid and some mighty big pliers from his van. It’s handy having an electrician around, sometimes 🙂
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It’s worth remembering that the end goal for everything that’s happening right now is to get all the little bits and pieces off the body of the car so that I can rub the paint off before sending it away for rust repair and new paint.
A few weeks ago I started removing the windscreen wipers but the little pokey-uppy bits that the wipers attach to won’t go until I get all the mechanicals out from underneath.
Here are the pokey-uppy bits (it’s a technical term).
The mechanical bits underneath are hiding behind the fresh air intake for the heating system, which is the long black box you can see at the back of the engine bay in the photo below.
I’d removed one fixing last week but couldn’t find the others, which I assumed were on the inside of the car. A helpful gent in comments pointed out that there were two more fixings in the engine bay, one either side of the intake box. I hadn’t seen these due to the abundance of rat poo covering them!
One, and then the other.
These came off fairly easily but the box was still stuck in place. There are a pair of hoses coming off the bottom so I un-clamped those (more on those in a minute) and it was then that I noticed one more fixture – a pivot mechanism that opens and closes the vent, attached to the interior by a cable.
It was tricky to get to as access was limited, but a couple of 11mm spanners saw it off.
And with that, the air intake box was free. The strange thing is the two pipes coming off the bottom, which seem to have flattened ends and go nowhere i.e. they’re just there, without being attached to anything else.
Removal of the box gave me a full view of the extent of the rat poo. They certainly had a good old time in there….
Removing that air intake finally allowed me access to the windscreen wiper mechanism, located under the cowl and attached by a couple of nuts on the passenger side of the car and a couple of wires.
Most things have been removed from the car with only a little bit of fuss. These two nuts proved to much more difficult, however. The bolts they attached two are housed in a rubber bushing and they don’t appear to be attached at the other end. That means whenever the slightest bit of rust caused the nut to stick, the whole rubber bushing would twist with the bolt. What kind of system is this? I managed to get the first one off OK, but the second was doing nothing-but-sticking so I’ve given it another bath in Penetrene and we’ll see how things go later in the week.
Indicators came off from the front, with one lens as a casualty.
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And out last job for the day was removing the stainless steel trim from around the front face of the car. This was secured by three small screws, one at each end above the headlamps and one in the middle-lower section.
It came off quite easily but I’m not sure it’s re-useable. Maybe one side is, but the passenger side has quite a few bumps where the car obviously had a bit of a front-ender at some point. The outer headlamp surround is suffering in the same way.
The end result?
The front end of my Lancia Fulvia is looking rather bare now. We’re on our way, for sure!
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Thanks for visiting.
