A TCL First? '67 Rolls Royce project thread...

10 minute(s) of a 242 minute read

im going through and doing some cleanup and checking a few nagging items off the list before winter comes around and the car sits, and ive been troubleshooting the inoperative drivers side dome light.
after chasing some wires around and doing some basic checks, i found myself looking for a "d post connector". ive never heard of a d post or d pillar in anything other than a station wagon, so i thought id do a google search...

this came up on google images



google seems to generally make me think theyre refering to what i would call the c pillar, or the rearmost pillar on a sedan, when they say d post.

further sleuthing is required, but i might take some of those panels apart again to see if i can find this mystery connector (which most likely has some corrosion)

ill have some pictures of these random maintenance bits soon

11-16-2013

couple random shots, oil filter housing and a torn down door switch

5-14-2014

nothing new really since the last update. i did some more digging around on the door switch issue and we need to finish that up

life, and the MG project, sort of got in the way...

since the last update i ended up moving a few hours away from the car and starting a new job, so it was a busy winter/spring.
however, there are plans being made at the moment to bring the car to my new place for the summer, since the co-owner also lives nearby... we're thinking of doing this fairly soon, and finishing up the door switch stuff (just to make it easier to use on a more regular basis) and giving it a good cleaning. in any case itll be relocating for the warm weather soon, definitely expect pictures and updates when that happens.
that also means itll be getting used on a much more regular basis while weve got it here, so there should be lots more photos to come this summer

7-15-2014

wow i had no idea itd been since mid may the last time i updated this until i went looking for it tonight where did the summer go?!

at any rate we had some time to dive a bit into the electrical system, and following some directions from a few RROC members based on the inoperative driver's side door lamps, it was suggested that we check out the relay board up front near the heater box as thats apparently a common source of inexplicable electrical issues. and it was also a good time to clean up some of the other rag-tag wiring under the hood, most notably the heater valve solenoid wiring under the brake reservoir that looked like it had been chewed on


a few pictures...





we also took some time to extend the wiring out to the driver's side door switches, i had noticed before when taking those out to rebuild them that there was barely enough slack to pull them out and properly clamp the wires into the switch.




and the job of getting to the relay box. this wasnt made to be easily serviceable it seems, and they made it barely weatherproof, so it does a good job of collecting any condensation or water that happens to get down to the firewall shelf

first undoing the heater pipe and the blower motor



then the blower motor housing comes off. at which point we vacuumed out about a pound of mouse turds and old insulate scraps from behind the heater pipe and blower housing... smelled kind of like a barn yard if you put your face too close to it



quite a few minutes later - after wrestling with the relay box connectors and trying not to break any wires in the process





not in as terrible of shape as what i was lead to believe some of them get to be from sitting around...



you can see the little paper sheet under the relays that has guide holes so you know which pins are used for which relay position. we put numbers on there just in case...



top side of the board, looking kind of scuzzy but after some cleaning with mild scotchbright and a pick, all of the connections tested out fine and there werent any breaks or failures on the printed circuits themselves. so thats good news.



three different kinds of relays in total, all tested out ok



we had to take one apart (easy to pop the cover off after bending back the small crimps) to verify why it had a "dead" lead. turns out it was marked the same as the others in that group but for whatever reason that leg just went through a dummy hole on the actual board connections, and internally in the relay it wasnt hooked to anything. very strange. but it was for the headlights (if i remember right) and those work fine.




anyway everything tested out fine with no faults found, but at least this jobs done. put everything together with a good dose of dielectric grease after a good cleaning so it shouldnt have corrosion buildup again
i have a feeling our issues with the drivers lamps is elsewhere in the harness, likely someplace in the interior but at least all of the various pieces appear to test out fine individually, the light just isnt getting power! hah
but if thats the worst of our issues, so be it...

i forgot to throw the RROC window stickers on it, but thatll happen next time

until then...

that would have been a pretty massive rework of the whole board, or more likely eliminating it altogether.
if you can see on the bottom side of the board the little clusters of male spades - those all feed into the old school "high density" connectors, that then split out to the various relays via the thick printed traces.
somehow all of those high density connectors would have needed to be broken out to some sort of distribution board or series of daisy chained wires in order to feed modern relays. doable certainly, but probably more trouble that it might be worth as everything here seemed to be working.

what im not sure of, and its likely totally different, is what the later shadow2 or 80s cars did or where their relay board sat. its likely that the electronics were completely different, as for a shadow this car is fairly simple just by being an early production car, but at least for the mechanical bits there have been a few places where we've been able to borrow parts from later shadows in order to do somewhat stealthy worthwhile updates.

7-29-2014

the RR had a big weekend this weekend. went a really long road trip, in a trailer im fairly certain that truck got better mpg pulling it and the trailer than it would have gotten on its own.









we'll have shots of it on the hoosiers soon


and a quick one of it out in the wild...

sounds like the cooling system handled the 90+ deg weather in traffic without any hiccups


id like to get some more interesting shots of it now that its out of the shop. and we got some great news from a magazine last week in relation to this car more info on that one once i find out more details.

7-30-2014

thanks for the kind words guys.
should be some cool updates coming up


almost forgot the new stickers