Rover 75 ‘Cyclops’
James gets the Rover’s brakes sorted and fits some parts that he’s been after since… forever
Afew things were in the balance the last time I reported on the Rover. I was anxious to see if flushing the cooling system through had made any difference, and the rear brakes appeared to have seized, which meant that I couldn’t take the car out for a run. Come Easter weekend, I backed it out of the garage in order to get at something else, and shunting about a bit in our courtyard produced a surprising result – the rear brakes freed themselves off. Seems like they had only been binding in reverse. So, somewhat gingerly, I took it out for a brief local run on some quiet roads to see what was what. It behaved as good as gold, with no braking problems, and no overheating, either. Just lots more potholes to avoid than when I last used those roads. However, the temperature did begin to rise when I parked the car after its run. No change there, then!
The next date in the calendar was Drive-It Day, but I thought I’d better do the job properly this time. So, I booked the Cyclops into my local specialist for a ‘Safety Check’ ( basically an MoT without the certificate). Even the tester was surprised by how sound it all was underneath, but he did attend to a couple of problems for me. One was the rear brakes. The left-hand side had clearly been binding intermittently, so he freed everything off for me. The other was a fuel leak, and that highlighted the value of getting somebody else to cast an eye over your car. I’d smelled petrol on occasion, but had never traced the leak. Tester Glenn found it, and apparently there were two – one either side of the fuel pump. With new pipes, I’m expecting my fuel consumption to improve now.
Much relieved (like the brakes), I set off with a mate on Drive-It Day. We visited the British Leyland event at Cowley (can it really be 50 years?) and the opening of the Rootes Archives at Banbury – a fabulous day out.
Well, I reckoned that was a good start to the season. Things could only get better – and they did. I’ve finally located some parts that I’ve been hunting for over ten years (since I got the car, in fact).
It became a legal requirement, back in 1954, to have a pair of red reflectors on the rear of your car, but the Cyclops didn’t have any because it was built before that. Rover did a service mod of special brackets so that you could fit reflectors to early P4 models, but these were only available through its dealers and many owners decided to fit proprietary reflectors themselves. As such, the proper Rover kit is quite rare.
The DIY reflectors on my car did the job okay, but always annoyed me because they looked too modern. I’d seen a few sets of the real thing on fellow enthusiasts’ cars at rallies and put out the message that I was hunting for some, but with no result.
However, everything comes to he who waits. Rover Sports Register Chairman, Adrian Mitchell, was rummaging in his spares stock for something, and to his surprise discovered a pair of new old-stock mounting brackets – ‘filed in the wrong box’, as he put it. He got in touch, and a deal was done.
The brackets didn’t have their Lucas RER5 reflectors. I bought a pair of reproductions and fitted the new reflector assemblies. One of the brackets doesn’t hang straight because the light above it doesn’t quite fit flush to the body. But I’m not about to quibble!