More small jobs on the DHC

Or the list of 10CR preparations slowly gets shorter. In my previous post I mentioned that there was a something wrong with the new brakes. During a very short test drive (12 kilometres over quiet rural roads) last week, the brakes behaved quite randomly. Under braking the pedal would either go almost to the floor, behave as if everything was absolutely fine, or it would be a bit spongy. And sometimes the car would pull to the left under braking. There was one clear similarity in the brakes behaviour: it was completely random. As I had bled the brakes on my own, my first thought was that there still was some air in the system. So I decided to have another go at it, time to get my assorted bleeding tools out again!

But this time I asked for some assistance. With one person putting pressure on or pumping the pedal, surely helps with getting trapped air out of the system. And as I had expected, when we came to the right hand front calliper there was some air coming out. After which the pedal’s feel did improve significantly. Result! Though I have to admit that this car still lacks the precise brake pedal feel of ‘t Kreng. But that is down to the fact that the DHC is still fitted with the standard drum brakes on the back axle, where ‘t Kreng is fitted with discs.

The syringe pictured above is normally used to empty the clutch master cylinder and re fill the clutch reservoir. This time it was used to top up the brake reservoir too. As it only needed a small amount of fluid to get it on the prescribed level using the syringe was much easier than using a full bottle!

With the bleeding completed (hopefully as I haven’t driven the car yet) I switched my attention to the back axle in general and the hand brake lever arm’s dust covers in particular.

With the rear of the car supported on axle stands it was time to get the tools out to disconnect the hand brake cable and remove the old dust covers.

Did I write dust covers? Well it is probably better to call that the remains of the dust covers, as the picture below clearly shows. They were in a pretty sorry state! Rather annoying really, bearing in mind they were only fitted last year!

But before fitting the new dust covers I first inspected and cleaned the rear brake’s system, including the handbrake cable’s forked ends and axle pivot point. Nothing wrong with the shoes and their mechanism, though the sometimes hard use of the car over the past few years, has finally managed to attack the paint on the brake shoes!

Remained the final task of fitting the new dust covers, which with the correct tools was pretty straight forward. I wonder how long these covers will last …

One final task remained. After the car’s MOT last year  I found that the fuel hose going into the fuel pump was porous, and leaking fuel as a result. As the hose between tank and solid pipe was the same age as the one that perished last year, Therefore an inspection of this hose wasn’t superfluous. I needn’t have worried, the hose still was in good condition. Did I mention that a Defender is really suited to act as a tool and parts support 😜

So the to-do-list for the 10 CR now looks like this;

·         General check and service;

·         Fit and connect GPS bracket (=dash out job);

·         Fit PAS in combination with a quick rack (order in progress);

·         Check rubber fuel lines at the back;

·         Replace brake master and servo;

·         Replace front discs and callipers;