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

8 minute(s) of a 242 minute read

no kidding! i guess when most cars of its era had one or two vents controlled with a push/pull cable i can see how this probably all seemed like fairly fancy space age stuff

from what i hear the hvac is second on the list of infamous shadow systems after the brakes/suspension so im hoping getting all this to workable condition wont be too bad. so far its not as scary as i was expecting it to be..

while i was thinking of it, i just cruised through the flyingpspares catalog to see whats available... theyre typically a bit more expensive than albers, and dont list everything on their site, but it looks like the blower motor mounts are still available

and its a good thing the blower motors still work, they want 100GBP for a used motor, and 880GBP for a new one!

flyingspares also lists reconditioned heater actuators for 95-175GBP so that makes me think that its possible to take them apart. but ill bug albers about that when i get in touch with them
theyre also on ebay for 100-150 a piece so it shouldnt be too hard to find spares.

12-30-2014

thanks

youre right the factory stuff is a lot thicker. i think they just did a bunch more layers of lacquer on the original woodwork.
but the pictures make it look more textured than it comes off in person. the vertical faces of all the door toppers, and the dash - i dont know the right term but the parts where they lay on the decorative grain - dont really have any texture so it looks "deep" there.

3-17-2015

long overdue update, lots of pictures


freshly remounted blower motors that dont drag in the housings anymore. hooray






new fusible links. ive never made fuses before






a pack of RR approved diodes
spares for the fuse box, there was some concern that some of these were blown causing the run-on of the toe board flap actuator, but testing showed all the ones in the car were fine.




"while we're in there" a quick regrease of the wiper motor. the original stuff was pretty crusty. the wipers worked but were a bit slow. judging by the grease im not surprised!










after a really good walk through over the phone thanks to one of the RROC guys, i think i finally understand the hvac system now.
and he confirmed why these can run on (the toe board actuator on the other side of the car was jammed up due to the flap falling off its hinges) and why theyre noisy (the little brass bushings that the gears and main shaft ride on get noisy).
and he explained how to tear them down and refurb them (a few drops of 3-in-1 oil, and a couple dabs of white lithium grease)... so i thought id give it a go on all the ones that were easy to get to - which turned out to be all of them but the two buried inside the dash.

onto the carnage pictures!






















by the time i got to the last couple i had the routine down to around 20 minutes from tear down to testing/resetting the park position.








and weve come full circle - both of these toe board flaps finally work now. they both park and shut like theyre supposed to.




and theres no dying squirrel noises from under the hood and dash when you move the hvac control knobs anymore. all around, pretty pleased with how it came out.

it did
rereading now i realize i wasnt super clear in my description there but the two toe board actuators are on the same circuit. originally i didnt realize that there were even two actuators as the system diagrams for the early cars arent real clear on that. at any rate, when one of the two of them jams - as was the case on the other side - it causes the opposite one to never get the shut off signal. these fall off their hinges as they get older, which both had done.
it probably only needed resetting of the flaps themselves to be usable, but the actuators that had sat unused were the loudest, so a teardown probably didnt hurt. but the root of the problem was that the other side didnt move since it was jammed up by the fallen flap.
and it turns out that it going in only one direction is normal, but it needs to successfully park which it cant do when its getting shorted power from the other side since they need to move in sequence.

i also learned that these actuators are all interchangable both from position to position and from one model year to another - from the early days of the shadow through the late 80s/early 90s. good to know for any future parts needs! but i think most issues could be solved with a careful teardown if its not missing any pieces, since its really a pretty simple device once you get into it.