Taxi to East Germany
Sam ditches a cab and juggles Wartburg cranks
My first Winter Warmers plan was a miserable failure. I bought a grim LTI Fairway taxi for £550 from a chap in Bristol. I’d fancied another FX4 for years – but, back at my workshop, I concluded that I didn’t fancy this FX4. The horror show of chapped rubber, rusty metal, sagging fabric, looseness, leakage, seizure, degradation and despair that confronted me caused the logical part of my brain to step in and order that the operation be aborted. Addressing the taxi’s mechanical and structural maladies to a halfdecent standard would, I calculated, cost in excess of £1200 in parts alone. This would’ve been fine if I’d liked it – but I didn’t, really. I found the Fairway devoid of the endearing utilitarian aesthetics and pleasant mechanical simplicity of the older FX4S I’ve owned and loved. I swiftly resold it on Autoshite.com at a tidy £250 loss. I decided to turn my attention to a car that I wanted to work on – namely my Wartburg 353. I’d swapped it with a German friend for three Yugos, an ARO and an UAZ and spent a total of £430 on its recommissioning – so it could still, tenuously, slip in under the £750 Winter Warmers budget.
It did, however, have a significant problem: a seized crankshaft.
When preparing the Wartburg for its first MOT in the summer, I’d noted that its three-cylinder two-stroke engine remained distinctly smoky. It’d covered 80,000km in the hands of a single elderly owner. I surmised that he’d never taken it above 2000rpm and the crankcase was choked with a confection of two-stroke oil and carbon. I figured it needed a good thrashing, so I ran it up to temperature and took it on a spirited tour of the lanes around my workshop. The result was a gentle but decisive engine seizure.
Getting a bit cranky
Removing and disassembling the still-warm engine revealed that thrashing it had had the opposite of the desired effect. Rather than burning off, the oily carbon ooze in the crankcase had solidified into charcoal, jamming the rollingelement big end and main bearings solid. Shavings of escaped bearing cage confirmed that they were beyond rescue.
Wartburg crankshafts are pressed together complete with bearings and con-rods, which makes rebuilding them a specialist undertaking. Instead, I bought a pre-rebuilt item for £340 from
Bulgaria, via German ebay. It arrived hanging out of its box, but it was a high-quality East German-rebuilt item with excitingly smooth DKF bearings. I treated the rest of the engine’s entrails to a decoke, lightly honed the bores and put it back together with new gaskets and little end needle-roller bearings. I deemed the clutch to have plenty of life left in it and the discovery that new piston rings were £90 a set encouraged me to look favourably on the originals.
Back in the car, the engine chimed and clattered into life with jubilant twostroke enthusiasm. When I walked around the front of the car to bask in my success, however, I noticed that the crank pulley was wobbling drunkenly around. Investigation led to the aggravating conclusion that the frontmost crankpin was bent. I angrily re-removed the engine and the crankshaft. Straightening the crank seemed scientifically possible, but the risk
of getting it wrong and having to strip the engine a third time caused me to save this experiment for the future. I simply bought another crank, this time for £370 from Germany. It was inferior to the first, with a motley array of Russian and Ukrainian bearings. Nevertheless, when installed it spun without eccentricity.
DVLA bureaucracy
Having firmly exceeded the £750 target, I opted to blow £380 on a luscious set of 590-13 Camac crossplies from Vintage Tyres, the design of which was pleasingly similar to the Pneumants the Wartburg would have worn in East Germany.
A few hours of fiddling won an advisory-free MOT certificate. The car came with no paperwork, but the Wartburg Trabant IFA Club UK was kind enough to issue a dating certificate. I’d forgotten to complete a NOVA declaration after trailering it home from Germany, so I did so now, falsifying the import date to avoid a fine. To this pile of documents I added a V55/5, a scan of my driving licence, my insurance certificate and a cheque for £137.50. I sent it to the DVLA and received a crisp V5C a week before the Winter Warmers kick-off. Let the test-thrashing commence…