15 SIMPLE UPGRADES TO IMPROVE YOUR CLASSIC
Enhance your car and unleash its potential with our handy one-stop improvement shop
Unless you’re into the self-flagellation of unerring originality, it’s good to upgrade your classic to elevate its driveability, improve safety and ensure its reliability. Non-ironic furry dice and marque-specific cushions smothering the parcel shelf are fairly innocuous but some upgrades can turn out to be time-consuming, expensive downgrades. Like attaching a whale-tail to your Viva HA’S boot with the adhesive of over-optimism. Or replacing your Oxford’s coolant hoses with silicone in Playmobil hues. It’s easy to become entangled with the seedy underbelly of accessory-porn after being beguiled by glossy catalogues… before you know where you are, you’ve got a four-point harness in yellow, gauges in blue, and a bank balance in red.
The basic requirement of any upgrade is to make your classic car more reliable and driveable, thus increasing the trust between human and machine, making the whole experience a joy, not a chore.
Here are our suggestions for some worthwhile upgrades that will properly improve your classic while leaving purists relatively aneurysm-free.
1 INSTALL AN ELECTRONIC IGNITION SYSTEM
Improvement rating 4/5 Cost from £30 Difficulty 2/5 There’s absolutely nothing wrong with contact breaker points, condensers and coils: they’ve been crackling away like good’uns for over a century. However, in service, the points are really only the precision switch they were intended to be for about ten minutes, after which they start to fall out of tune so imperceptibly that you won’t notice until a mobility scooter overtakes you and the polar ice-caps melt. Cue some solid-state electrickery that can ignore the drunken meanderings of the distributor’s shaft and has no moving parts to wear out, making every spark a winner regardless of engine speed.
The system can be as discreet or in-yer-face as you fancy: modules are no longer the size of Colossus so you can simply bin the scatty points and condenser, use an original spec coil and retain all the Bakelite charm of yesteryear but with improved reliability; or you can retire pretty much everything resident in the distributor in favour of spaceage chips and more computing power than put man into Currys. Without the points constraining current flow, a beefy system can handle a low-resistance coil, lighting up the combustion chambers like fireworks night.
2 Invest in decent quality tyres
Improvement rating 5/5 Cost From £250 Difficulty 1/5 Tyres are expensive and can bring out the Del Boy in people: given the choice between a big name brand and one resembling the last tile selection in a game of Scrabble, it’s tempting to go for the latter. Stop. Don’t be a plonker. The only interface between you and the road’s surface are the tyres and they can make or break the whole experience. Use your club or forums to find which tyres work best on your classic: radials may be a great upgrade from crossplies; certain brands may perform better than others; good quality crossplies might preserve appearance and key characteristics. The bottom line is this: cheapest is not always best, so shun the shoe-polished elephant-hide that’s long past its sell-by date and radials intended for the commercial sector that have sidewalls as unyielding as the Hoover dam. Always replace all five boots, making sure the balance marks are aligned with the valves to ward off eye-rolling and tutting from those with a sensitive disposition; don’t skimp on new tubes and tapes, if required; and do get all five wheels balanced.
‘You can use Watt’s Law to work out the total load’
3 UPGRADE YOUR CARBURETTOR
Improvement rating 4/5 Cost From £100 Difficulty 3/5 The metering device bolted to your inlet manifold was collectively binned when it conspired with contact-breaker points to dissolve large parts of California. Decades on, the veritable jewel delicately adjusted for your car’s delectation has now probably turned into a hateful bucket of leakiness. When selecting a replacement, consider upgrading from a disobedient auto-choke to one receiving strict instruction via cable, or how about bypassing all the aggro in one go by choosing a single-point fuel injection upgrade. It’s very a la mode, it won’t go out of tune, it’ll save money in fuel bills and you can woo the opposite sex with new chat-up lines involving fuel-injection. Yeah, baby.
While you’re giving the fuel system a birthday, treat the inside of the tank to an exfoliating scrub, followed by some spa treatment and a sealer to resist the hysteria of ethanol fuels. While you’re about it, change your fuel lines in favour of something that will resist premature ageing.
4 Make more amps
Improvement rating 3/5 Cost from £75 Difficulty 3/5 Many an upgrade involves splicing accessories into the wiring loom, from wireless sets to dashboardmounted fans, but if the dynamo was working at its limit beforehand, it won’t have a chance of keeping up with demand when you plug in your camping kettle and inverter. You can use Watt’s Law to work out the total load on the dynamo, then calculate if it can do that while charging the battery. The answer could well be to fit an alternator, either off the shelf or one that’s built into the body of a dynamo to retain the original’s appearance, or to fit a higher-output alternator. Converting to negative earth is easy and allows you to accessorize to your heart’s desire.
5 Upgrade the lights
Improvement rating 4/5 Cost from £20 Difficulty 1/5 If your classic is of a certain age, it’s likely its headlamps cut through the gloom like a two-year-old’s birthdaycake. To hike up the lumens, make sure all the lights’ reflectors reflect, the lenses are clean, then fit some new bulbs. There are bulbs on the market that use gas chemistry to punch above their weight but if you’re opting for more plentiful real-life watts, make sure you add up the combined output and divide it by battery voltage to arrive at the current draw to ensure you don’t unwittingly light up the countryside with your very own fireball when the loom ignites. Uprating the wiring and adding suitable relays is also a good idea. LEDS in a range of bulb fittings are cheap, low-energy, long-life options that will improve visibility and safety.
6 Fit an electrically -operated cooling fan
Improvement rating 4/5 Cost from £35 Difficulty 3/5 The internal combustion engine feels particularly jolly in a relatively narrow operating-temperature window, vaporising fuel in readiness for thorough ignition, fending off the formation of noxious acidic soup in its sump. The thermostat is the engine’s hypothalamus, diligently ensuring the coolant in the block warms up quickly but it’s constantly working at odds with the standard engine-driven fan that saps valuable horsepower, giving its all whether it’s a Baltic winter or Bali summer. Not only do you not need the fan when warming up, you don’t need it when driving as there’s plenty of airflow, so the engine’s fan is wholly redundant for the majority of trips. When you do need a fan, while ticking over in traffic and after stopping, the fan is either rotating at its slowest speed or not at all.
We would suggest replacing the factory mechanical fan with a thermostatically-operated electrically-driven one, preferably in-front of the radiator where it’s most efficient and can’t be easily seen. You should reap the benefits of better economy, less noise and greater reliability.
7 Dial into some dials
Improvement rating 3/5 Cost from £25 Difficulty 2/5 Here you need to think less about the back pages of Seventies go-faster mags and think more about instruments that could actually avert mechanical cataclysm, discreetly peering out from under the fascia. Warning lights are great at telling you the horse has just bolted but you need a gauge to alert you before the damage is done. We recommend an oil pressure gauge and a coolant temperature gauge at the very least, both of which are relatively easy to plumb in. Leave the in-car barometer for someone else.
‘Dual-circuit brakes are a tremendous improvement’
8 FIT A FREERFLOWING EXHAUST
Improvement rating 3/5 Cost from £250 Difficulty 2/5 Of the car components you’d want at a dinner party, the exhaust is to be found firmly at the bottom of the Z list. Not only are they unexciting, they’ve positioned themselves in a bloody awkward place on the car and seem to have the sole aim in life to rattle, blow or rot away. If you’re going to grasp the nettle and shimmy underneath, therefore, you might as well do some homework and see if anyone’s applied some science to your system, increasing flow while retaining character.
Once you’ve done that, it’s certainly worth taking a ballpein to the piggy bank for something that won’t commit suicide while swimming about in road-salt solution. OK, so it’s not sexy, but a stainless steel exhaust and accoutrements is a worthy upgrade. Various exhaust coatings are available – ceramic for example – and while pricey will help prolong the life of the system even further.
9 Upgrade all filters
Improvement rating 3/5 Cost from £1 Difficulty 1/5 Cut it whichever way you want but filters save lives: lives of engines. They promote reliability by preventing bits of grot from finding their way into carburettor jets and ensure longevity by being the bouncers to unwanted interlopers in lubricating oil and induction air. Fitting a fuel filter is cheap and easy to do but tackling the oil filter could become more of an engineering project and is more contentious: a bypass oil filter quaintly filters only a tincture of lubricant and may not have been changed since Churchill was a lad. Any jagged bits of filth can circulate many times before being arrested, doing untold damage on every lap of the engine. A full-flow filter set-up may not be a looker but if you want to drive and preserve your car, it’s a must. Likewise, some paper or felt elements can be as sought-after as Lalique, so converting to a spin-on filter will encourage regular replacement. It’s not pretty or exciting but your engine will be forever grateful.
10 Big up brakes
Improvement rating 5/5 Cost from £30 Difficulty 3/5 Of all vehicle systems, the one most likely to land you in A&E is the one in charge of retardation. In heavy service, drum brakes can fade, for which read fail, so upgrading to discs on the front is a good move if there’s a kit or another model in the range that has them, plus you’ll need a servo to go with that. There are plenty of brake pads available in uprated compounds these days, which can provide a handy increase in stopping power even with an otherwise standard disc brake setup. Even without the disc conversion, a servo will reduce the pedal pressure required, so is a worthy upgrade but it won’t make the brakes more efficient. A single- to split-/dual-circuit brake upgrade will vastly improve safety should one circuit become incontinent but is generally only viable if another model in the range has a master cylinder that’s interchangeable. However, you can minimise the risk of needing a second circuit if you upgrade all of your brake pipes to Cunifer.