Airco working and register stats

The garage had forgotten to fill up the airco and it's done now. Yes, it's blowing cold air again. So happy with it. And again a small drive up and down in the street. It drives so well and sounds so nice. 

But the coupe is so nice as well. And only 83.000 km on the odometer. The SW has a 210.000 km on the odometer. I rarely see Kappa SW in the wild on the road. I wonder how many there still are in the Netherlands?

I just checked via www.kenteken.tv and its 40 in total. But only 3 x 2.4 SW
And quite a few coupe's: 124 

Out of curiosity I checked and found the other 2x 2.4 SW's in the Netherlands. 

The first one is offered for sale at: https://www.jacco.nl

https://svl.autodealers.nl/Lancia/Kappa-SW/2.4-20V-LS-5241403/16148/1/16/details.aspx

It's an imported one with 153.000 km and costs € 9.450,-  Number plate T-865-KD

And the other one is offered for sale at https://www.martinwillems.nl via

https://voorraad.autodatawheelerdelta.nl/lancia/kappa/sw-24-20v-ls-project/occ3475355-f529c

It's an original Dutch car with unknown mileage and no MOT since 2017. It has a black leather interior. Offered as a project car for € 1.950,- 

So by the looks of it I'm the only Dutch private person driving an original 2.4 SW version :-)

MOT repairs

 As mentioned previously, I was off a few days and spent 1 day to work on the Kappa SW. 

Now the stabilization bars were done I could look into the brakes. All brakes had to be freed up.

I started at the backside but effectively these were spinning freely. Which is not a surprised as these were renewed when it bought the car 5 years ago:

https://erwinkappa.blogspot.com/2020/10/mot-maintenance-bill.html

Still I took it off and cleaned the whole lot with a steel brush on the drill machine and lubricated the slider bars of  the calipers

So the backside was pretty easy. The front however was indeed more problematic. The brake cylinder was slightly corroded and dirty thus playing up a little.So this got cleaned up and lubricated.

Luckily I had once bought this brake kit, so I easily could push them back. And repeated this a few times. Also the front brakes got cleaned up with a steel brush and lubricated the caliper pins. 

The car had on all wheels new brake pads. So now the car brakes are working properly again.

Afterwards I have been driving up and down the street and tested the brakes to ensure there were no surprises.

Another reported issue was potential rust / bubbles on one of the braking pipes (rear left). I could not easily spot this though, but could see one pipe having a little bubble on the coating

So with sandpaper I removed the coating till it was blank. The bubble was definately not a result of rust, so all was good though. I sprayed the whole lot with rust protection primer:

I also replaced both light bulbs of the licensplate holder as a remark was made that one was very dim. And indeed it was. Easy fix.

So I returned the car to the garage for a new MOT. I told them about the stabilization bar replacement, the easiest job turned out to be a hassle and required a grinder in the end. Then I was informed, these bars were not even a MOT fail. Sigh! Although they had a bit of friction, hence it was mentioned. Oh well, it should drive a little better now. 

And the good news is, by now the MOT is a PASS !!

So I can start driving it again. Which is my plan indeed. I will make it my new daily driver and park my Kappa Coupe for a while. The intention is to tackle all other remaining bits and pieces slowly one by one.

MOT follow up

I had the Kappa SW MOT done but it did not pass. There were a few minor remarks which I need to sort out:

- All brake callipers need to be freed up. Clearly a result of not driving it over the past 2 or 3 years. So I likely need to remove them all and clean up.
- One brakehose-piping having a small spot of corrossion - rear left side.
- Both stabilizor links backside poor.

So I figured to tackle the simplest job first and ordered a pair of new stabilizor links. Including shipping costs this costed only € 25,-

Although everythings looks a bit rusty it's only surface rust. In fact it all felt very firm, so not sure why it's considered a fail. 

And of course it turned out to be a dramatic job as the bolts wouldn't come off easily, despite using a air hammer and various other brute force methods. So I ended up using the grinder to get it removed. The other side was of course similar. 

But hey, presto:

I also quickly inspected the brakes and the discs and the pads looks very good. So only the calipers needs to get a good cleaning. Coming week it's going to be rainy and I'm off two days so I think I know what I will be doing. 

Looking underneath perhpas the tie-rods could have done as well, somehow they were good enough for the MOT. I still can consider that later on.

New radiator + airco evaporator/condensor

I'm glad my previous blog update did contain the background regarding this topic. That saves me a lot of typing. Long story short I had ordered a newly build ALU radiator including evaporator since these are no longer obtainable. I had it ordered via autosklep.pl (Marcin Gruchała) who is specialized in Lancia parts from Poland. It took a while before it was created and due to being busy with other stuff it took me equally a long time before it was installed. Here is the item unpacked:

And here I have mounted the fan unit:

And put back into the engine bay:

It all fitted perfectly, so hooking up all the cables and hoses again. Went to the gaspump to get additional cooling liquid and presto. All working fine again and no leaking. 

Now I need to make an appointment with the garage to get the arico refilled and checked. 

I also took the opportunity to make a small spin up and down the street after heating up. The engine is so smooth and it drives great. Took this photo afterwards and it does look really nice but in reality the car has much optical issue's and other minor items to be sorted. 

New fuel pump!

 And another year gone by without doing much due to so much other things going on. 

My daily driver a Kappa Coupe was suffering from a failing airco. Meaning the past two years I had to refill it at the start of the season when it became warmer. So it was leaking, despite a pressure test the leak could not be identified. But changes are 90% it's the airco evaporator. Unfortunately these are no longer available and I sourced a similar one which required only a small modification to fit. I figured to hand this job out to the garage. They mentioned the radiator was also slightly leaking so that needed replacement too. Again, these are no longer available either. But some years ago I had spotted one a bought as a spare. So I happily provided them this one. Turned out it was the correct one, it was one for a V6 24 valve. At the time I only recalled it was advertised as a 2.4 version, which matched my engine. So it was advertised incorrectly. Sigh!  Thus I ended up using the one from the Kappa SW. The evaporator that came out of this one was toast so that still requires a new or a good used one. 

Obviously the car has not been used or running since. But my daily driver was running cool again. Until the MOT popped up. And it failed due to rust on the car sills, mostly the drivers side. I had looked it up and the other side of the sill was done in 2016. So it was envitable this one was going to happen at some stage. But the timing was bad. It's so hard to find resources who has time to have this fixed. So I decided to get my spare Kappa Coupe on the road. It has been sitting idle for the past 2 years and still had to be road registered as it was imported from Swiss. It's a car that had not be used since 2007 and was not running when I bought it. There were no keys either. So that's something I had fixed back then already. It also required a new fuel pump to get it running. Again something I had fxied. I simply reused the fuel pump from my current daily driver. So to fix my daily driver I had to source a new fuel pump. Again another item that's no longer available. But there was a nice work around by my garage. He had a fuel pump kit that could be used instead and it worked great. I thought to swap the new one to my spare Kappa Coupe but that never happened. So basicly the spare Kappa Coupec was driveable but still required some more work, basicly a good service overhaul after all these years. But now was the time since I required a new daily driver. Clearly the Kappa SW could not be used either due to the missing radiator and evaporator. So I made an appointment with the garage to get a service overhaul and the car MOT ready for the road registration. Then the unexpected happend. The car would not start up. After a few attempts I figured it might be the old fuel pump I used. So I simple had it swapped from my Kappa SW. And presto it worked. So the spare Kappa Coupe was brought to the garage and afterwards was road registered. All good. I had a working daily driver again. Of course I also had arranged anoter new fuel pump alternative solution. So today I finally had some time to have this fixed and put it in the Kappa SW.

Find below the details of the alternative fuel pump, apparently its the same one as used in a Fiat Croma and Lancia Thema:

To dismantle the fuel pump is quite easy:

The pump and the new parts:

When removing the old pump it became apparent what happened. The mounting rubber was toast, broken, soft and it pieces. So thats likely why the pump failed:

For comparison the new and the old rubber pumpholder unit:

It's easy to make the new unit. It does come with a seperate filter but I'm reusing the old one. Just unscrew the bottom and put the rubber holder in it

Put everything back together. I also mounted the new rubber hose which comes with the package, the old one is still good though. The old single plastic connector can not be reused and you need to tear this open so the wires and the two seperate connectors are free. You then can simply hook these up on the new pump. The kit comes with two new connectors but you wont be needing these if you do it like this. The green wire needs to go on the large pole (plus) and the black wire on the other one (duh!). And presto. 

Put it back in again and the battery had just enough power to start up the engine again. So it's working!

Effectively this means my old Kappa Coupe and the Kappa SW has got both new fuel pumps and my new Kappa Coupe is running again on a old fuel pump .... oh well. 

And for the sake of it as I'm sure it will come in handy at some point I will now include the alternative pump solution for the Lancia Thema 8.32

The original pump is a Bosch  OEM: 0580254018 / 5985559

But is no longer available, or when you are lucky to find one it will be very expensive.
The alternative solution is to use Bosch 058 0254 044 and cut off the bottom as per below photo's: