Hello From Australia

[Guest ozhood]

Hi, My name is Richard and I'm from from Adelaide in South Australia.

 

I have recently acquired a Robin Hood 2B from John Robertson in Canberra. One of only a couple in Australia it seems. It is a fun little car to drive although the journey home was not without incident.

 

Adelaide is about 1300km from Canberra (roughly the same distance as London to Madrid). As I had never seen the car in the flesh and know nothing at all about Robin Hoods it made perfect sense to simply drive over to Canberra with a mate in my car and drive the Robin Hood home. leave Friday, come home Sunday. Easy.... Err, maybe not.

 

Long time kit car owners can stop laughing now!!

 

The journey was plagued with oil leaks, electrical problems, clutch problems, more oil leaks, rain, starting issues, and another oil leak just for fun. It had a curious fault where, due to a gremlin in the alarm/immobiliser, the front and rear indicators would flash whenever you went over a bump. Those of you who have driven on Australian roads will know that means essentially All The Time!. After about 600km we discovered that if we turned the headlights on, the fault went away.

 

Despite all these entertaining distractions we were making good progress although we were a half a day behind schedule.

 

Sadly almost within sight of home (about 50 km to go) the pin connecting the right hand lower wishbone to the vertical pillar chose to shear off. This occurred at about 120km/h with an 18 wheel rig coming the other way.

 

The tiny 4" (or so it seems) Mountney steering wheel gave excellent feedback as it tried to tear itself from my grip but I managed to bring the vehicle safely to a halt to discover that yet again I had no clutch. I'm proud to say that my underwear required no specialist laundry services.

 

We hired a car trailer (With my wife's earlier advice ringing in my ears "Why don't you just tow it home on a trailer?") and after much mucking about we finally got it home safe and sound.

 

The next adventure will be to fix it's various problems and get it back on the road and past the Australian equivalent of your SVA. In Australia, each state has it's own motor registration department. Moving a vehicle between states here requires going through the entire process again. Gotta love bureaucrats don't ya!

 

Most of the problems should be easily solvable with access to a proper workshop now, but the front pillar issue may cause me problems. I'm aware that the RH is based around a Sierra donor vehicle, unfortunately, the Sierra was never released here. Indeed, I'm not sure if the pin in question is from a Sierra or if it is a Robin Hood part. Any advice? Is this a common fault? I've yet to examine the suspension in detail yet. I'll leave that till next week when I'm on leave until the end of January and I should have plenty of time to tinker.

 

A couple of photos for you.

 

1. With support vehicle, just leaving Canberra.

 

 

 

2. A sorry end to our journey

 

 

 

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

Regards,

 

Richard

[Bob Tucker]

G'day Richard!

Welcome to the (mostly!) wonderful world of kitcars.

 

First of all identify the model you have.

HERE

 

There have been issues with the front wishbones/front suspension on two models, first the 2B sliding pillar model, and later the 2B wishbone model. Both can be relatively simply fixed (in the UK) dunno about Oz tho'...

 

Add some pictures of the problem area & you'll be spoiled for choice for answers....some may even be the right ones!!

 

Cheers, Bob

[Guest ozhood]

Thanks Bob,

 

It appears I have a 2B Sliding Pillar. I'll take a few photos tomorrow after I have cleaned things up a bit. Hopefully there is a simple solution to the problem.

 

 

Regards,

 

Richard

[miikae]

Welcome and well done Richard , you did the pickup in real hoodie style , initial smiles generated will only spur you on to get it sorted & back on the road again .

 

Mike

[Bob Tucker]

That would be my guess too from the description.

 

The chrome shaft comes from inside the front mcpherson strut on the Sierra.

It has a small threaded rod at the end of it. Its too small really to be used this way. Most people with the SP suspension remove the chrome shaft CAREFULLY using spring compressors and making careful note of the way it goes together. Then get the bottom of th eshaft drilled and tapped to take a much bigger bolt. Then reassemble it using thread lock.

The setup isnt bad, but its not the best. Look out for that stud contacting & damaging the inside of the wheel rims as the spring settles down. Many people in the UK (including me) have changed this setup to proper Caterham/Westfield/Locost type moving wishbones.

But the only kit you can buy is from GBS (who sell the Hood) & it involves a fair bit of work.

Or you can go the DIY route if you have the design, & fabrication skills & equipment.

 

HTH Bob

[Redspec]

Hi Richard

 

Sounds to me like you require no more than a home visit from a couple of the 2B experts on the site, all it would require is the offer of hob nobs and a couple of plane tickets and oh yes the offer of accomodation for a couple of weeks.

 

Steve

[Guest Bazwaz]

Welcome to the club Richard. Just the tickets would do. I could do with a holiday. I could fetch my tent and provide my own biscuits. (can you import Hobnobs?) My late Father in law was brought up in Adalaide before returning to England when he was 15. I'm still in touch with an old friend of his who still lives there.

Baz

[DAVE CASTLE]

Duncun Dgav is in Adalaide an expat hoodie

Dave

[Guest Captain Daz]

Hi Richard

 

I've got a 2B sliding pillar and I think I have a couple of spare chrome shafts if you're stuck.

 

I had the ones on mine modified. The bottom thread is only 9mm so I had an engineering firm cut them off and fit high tensile 12mm threads. Then I drilled out the hole in the lower wishbone and fitted a 12mm nyloc nut. I felt this was much safer.

 

I could send you the shafts if you want but you'd have to get them modified.

 

Let me know if you need them.

 

Cheers

 

Daren

[Guest ozhood]

Thanks all, for your advice.

 

I am investigating having the sheared off bolt drilled out and replaced with something a little larger - 12mm, as suggested by Daren, seems an excellent size to aim for. Thanks for the offer of the shafts, I'll see how I go re-engineering the existing ones first.

 

Whilst taking the whole pillar/hub assembly off I also discovered a ball bearing race under the top wishbone above the coil spring.

 

On mine it is of course shattered. Is this a common failure? It seems an odd place for a bearing of that style with the all the vertical stresses that must be present at that point. Are there any alternative suggestions? possibly a nolathane bush? there is also no sign of a bush on the lower wishbone just a metal to metal connection. Is this also normal?

 

Any thoughts would be much appreciated. I'm keen to get the car back to life as soon as possible. Summers just starting here.. great driving weather soon.

 

For those who offered to come over and help, many thanks. When my mum and dad came over here in '56 the fare was only 10 quid, for the whole family... Has it gone up since then?

 

Sorry, Hob Nobs not available in Oz but we do have many fine alternative biscuits. The fact that I favour the extra width of a Robin Hood would suggest I have sampled a few too many.

 

Looking forward to hearing peoples thoughts.

 

Cheers,

 

Richard

[Guest Captain Daz]

Richard

 

The upper ball race is also from the old mcpherson strut but it's not load bearing. I might have a spare if you're stuck.

 

The shaft is rigidly fixed between the upper and lower wishbones. The race is to allow the damper to rotate with the steering. It allows that funny lollypop shaped bracket to turn.

 

When I had the shaft modified they just drilled in to the end (putting it in a lathe of course) then tapped the hole and threaded in the HT 12mm rod. They went in about 40-50mm I think and left about the same protruding.

 

Robin Hood also sent out a mod to the lower end. It's kind of a 'top hat' that locates the bottom end of the shaft. Has yours got one? If not it might be worthwhile trying to get a pair.

 

Hope that helps.

 

Daren

[Guest salty_monk]

This is what mine looked like after about 3k miles & a couple of trackdays.....

 

If you have the ability it would be better to switch them out for wishbones. The Robin Hood set from the factory look good but you need to have brackets welded onto the chassis.

 

 

 

Dan

[maca]

Hi Richard

If it helps have posted a couple of pictures here for you to see the mod's I did to mine so as to make the shaft more secure at the bottom mounting.

Regards Martin