BODGE ALERT!
The throttle cable is intact. I was misled on a quick shuftie by a frayed bit of cable end hanging off at the top. Someone has fitted a second eyelet to space the cable end. The issue was an old bodge: some fuel pipe that had been used as a cable guide had jammed under the pedal linkage.
Hands up 🙋♂️ Bodger/Owner#5 reporting for duty. I’m sure I did it in haste to get the car back on the road after rebuilding it and to avoid further fraying of the cable on the very sharp edges of the bulkhead. It seems to have served its purpose well. It now falls to you to implement a suitable upgrade for the next 10+ years!
Your car already kind of has its own Forum thread from 2010 here…
http://www.lancia.myzen.co.uk/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=15886d77c23009ba93a06f6f65710a19&topic=3392.0And here’s a photo gallery from when I was selling it back to the UK around 2015…
https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0JGDdyTvGzoFiKI bought the car in 2005 but timed out on having it ready for the Lancia centenary in Turin in 2006. As it turns out, I doubt it would have been a good idea to attempt the journey to Italy on the basis of only a cosmetic make-over. However after more extensive rebuilding the car ran flawlessly to Trieste for the Flavia 50th in 2010 which was a testament to it and a very satisfying reward for all my work. It also cost me virtually nothing beyond the respray and running costs.
Early in my ownership in Oireland, the car was resprayed in a modern Lancia bordeaux colour with only cosmetic repairs and no structural work required on my account. I will never know but I suspect the paint shop lifted the car on the sills against my specific advice and crumpled one of them ahead of the front b-pillar. Something was mentioned of a repair being necessary there as it was full of filler. I later fibreglassed a small hole in the passenger footwell myself and that rust hole you fixed in the rear arch rings a bell too. A fellow HF owner had black lower side-striping like the originals made up and I fitted some to the car after the respray. I didn’t want white ones.
At the time of the respray I replaced the doors with better HF ones that came with the car and replaced the bonnet with a standard coupe one. Hence the errant bonnet badge which I retained as it was enamel and in quite nice condition. I went to no end of trouble to align the bonnet so that the chrome trims looked smart. However the doors were a bit of a pain as I only got to first fit them after they had been painted (unmemorably outdoors in the rain) and they never quite sat right but could have been a lot worse. It took over a day per side to rebuild all the innards including the cable window winding assembly but very satisfying when done with new rain channels.
In this and separate events during my ownership, the car was fully dismantled - except for the dash - and reassembled but no engine work was done. Before the respray, I had the rear axle out as the springs sagged badly and one side was broken. Spare springs also came with the car and I added a leaf to these and was happy with the result which made it sit pleasingly high and also improved its passenger and load-carrying ability. It may have been the adjustment of the panhard rod but I felt the car was always a bit off line at the back end (one purist drew attention to the non-original line of the lower rear wing below the bumper line) and that the tyre to wheel-arch measurements were uneven. I attributed all this to the smack it got around the rear wing area before owner #4. I did my best to align, realign and level it out and learned a lot in the process.
Later I broke the quill shaft in the gearbox so the front subframe came out and everything up front got fully dismantled, cleaned, painted and rebuilt. I had bought a replacement 2000HF spec box on eBay which came in handy. I regretted not replacing more steering and suspension parts with new such as ball joints and bushes but if things looked ok they went back in. Your replacement of the idler box bushes should transform the steering and handling.
I replaced the fuel and brake lines and rebuilt the callipers and master cylinder myself but the brakes were always pants. Again I may or may not have replaced the pressure adjuster to the rear. Knowing what I know now, I’d recommend a professional reconditioning of the callipers and master and replacement of the adjuster. I found fluid in the servo bellows before the master cylinder rebuild.
I have some pictures of all this dismantling and rebuilding which I can post in the same place as the iCloud gallery above if you can see it.
Otherwise and, being somewhat hand built at PininFarina, the car was a delight to dismantle and reassemble with never-ending surprises in the detail of the construction methods.
At one stage I needed to tow a Y10 to a Lancia event so that an overseas visitor could use one of my cars. I bought a bespoke 2000 coupe tow bar from Watling Engineers in St Albans who had one on the shelf for about £120 iirc. Plus postage. Later I went to them looking for a Fulvia Berlina tow bar and I think they wanted £multiples of this to make one up from their jigs. I could be back to them yet as the product quality was great. When I went to fit the towbar to the HF in a very big hurry on the night before the event, I was awfully happy to find that the fitting holes were already pre-drilled in the chassis and it was just a 30 minute bolt-up job! On enquiring from owner #4 he said he had removed a towbar from the car when he got it so I’m guessing it was also a Watling. Thus the HF ended up towing the same trailer/dolly on which it had first arrived in Ireland in 2005. And that wasn’t the end of its towing career either…
Overall I got great use out of the car and sold it partly because I didn’t have the appetite for doing it all over again and partly because, by 2015, HFs we’re making more than ten times what I had paid for it in 2005. And I needed the money. I drove it to the UK on it’s swansong voyage to deliver it to dealer owner #6 who resprayed it as it is now and re-installed/reupholstered the original seats before moving it on to a LMC member. I think I got a lift home in a friend’s Thema 8-32 but the most unusual thing about that was that I didn’t bring home another Lancia myself!
Alan#2
