A stitch (or three) in time
Ed catches up on overdue Moskvich maintenance
It's quite nice to have an improvement blitz on something from time to time, and it's been the Moskvich 427's turn recently. It started when spots of oil on the tailgate led me to the bellhousing. Here I found a modest amount of newly changed engine oil in glistening, golden blobs on the rearmost sump bolts. Diagnosis: probably the crankshaft rear oil seal. The engine was built from parts in 2014 and has done about 15,000 miles.
I ordered an SFK crank rear seal and gearbox front seal from Simply Bearings, which has more sense of urgency than most ebay engineering parts merchants. And, sure enough, they arrived two days later.
The Moskvich's bellhousing is a separate entity from the gearbox: engines are always shown being hoisted out complete with bellhousing. Given the limited clearance behind the housing, I decided to unbolt the gearbox, which fell into my hands rather suddenly when it came. The bellhousing was a struggle, until I belatedly noted the manual's instruction to tilt the engine back. Good job I'd also neglected its command to remove the exhaust, because the long pipe was an essential lever to achieve this against the stiffness of the engine mounts.
Bellhousing removed, the crank seal was indeed the culprit, though it wasn't desperately bad and felt very soft still. Too soft, as it turned out: the pointy lip had worn down to a flat cylinder. The seal had oil return flutes (correctly angled for anti-clockwise rotation) and these had completely gone over a large contact area.
‘The 1972 gearbox oil seal was still doing a good job’
The seal is mounted in a flat housing that unbolts. At this point, I discovered the slant-four engine's sump oil level is slightly above the right-hand sump joint line when full. A clean jug was summoned and about half a pint collected. Jabbing a flat screwdriver under the seal and twisting brought it out without fuss. The replacement was tapped home with my trusty, heavy nylon hammer.
I also changed the gearbox front oil seal, the gearbox to bellhousing gasket (I have a lifetime's supply) and the gearbox input shaft bearing, which was wobbling around, worn out. I just happened to have a couple of these too.
The gearbox front oil seal was marked 1972 and, although as hard as iron, was still doing a pretty good job. Luckily, the solidified rubber hadn't worn a groove in the shaft.
Improvements intensify
On day two, everything slotted back together nicely, so I thought I'd go on and attempt to seal the joint between the vertically mounted cabin heater and the airbox to which it bolts. This had been letting rainwater through. Years ago I reconstructed the air box-to-bulkhead joint: clearly it's no longer as true as it was originally.
I drained the coolant, removed the heater (two hoses, two wires, four nuts) then took a trip to Phoenix Trim, a few villages away in Uffculme, Devon. They sell a big range of seals and extrusions and have a vast online catalogue. A length of hollow D-section closed-cell foam (self adhesive) formed a supplementary seal that could compress to almost nothing yet also fill in the undulations.
I've also done a bit of remedial painting – two doors in late spring, and the other two in the autumn. The whole car needs a repaint and it would have been more sensible to start with the shell – but the doors were pretty desperate. If we'd had an actual summer during the actual summer, there might have been a real danger of painting everything. Alas not, but at least the most pressing work is done. Painting the doors meant I could finally glue on some new seals. The NOS ones I fitted in 2000 self-destructed within a few years, causing huge amounts of wind noise, but not leaks.
One final job was on the brakes, which had developed a funny characteristic: they would initially bite without much pedal pressure, but sustained braking needed real force. I discovered the one-way valve screwed into the servo had stuck open. I repaired it, but then ordered and fitted an in-line valve as insurance.
I've now owned this car for far longer than the long-term second owner. His 1976 to 1997 tenure seemed like an impossible length of time to my impressionable 26-year-old self – but here we are, going into 2024. I wonder if I now look as old as Old Mr Wilkinson from whom I bought it? Please don’t answer that.