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The 1957 Dope Dauphine

felt it didn't match the front with half of that missing. Again easy swap about if needed, which will probably happen as i get bored easily.
 
I have been bashing about 25 miles a day on the Dope over the past 2 weeks. Its been great fun for me, not so much for my daughter who may be starting to get embarrassed her Dad keeps turning up to school in the rusty old car. The lack of tunes was starting to get to me so an old Desperado's Bluetooth speaker was stuck to the screen to take the edge off the rattling and road noise whilst bouncing along :D

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I think once I sort out a heater for it, it could genuinely be used as a daily. Tempted to fit a diesel heater under the bonnet and pipe it to the oem air duct/intake. Seen a few with remote start too so I could potentially pre heat the car before use.

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No fun in winter! On my Dauph I have a GR4 Alp Radiator which is 2 feet long by 7" high by 6" thick it has 2 M/C fans behind it for cooling, but i managed to squeeze a small 4" fan at the hot end ducted into the original plastic plenum under the front floor. It seems to work well enough, although is a bit slow to heat. I'm hoping the thickness of the core will stop any water actually passing through it in the rain up the duct and onto my feet! I will let you know. Wish me luck
Small programmable diesel heater is a good shout, had one in my old transit. It was nice going out to a warm van on a frosty morning !
 
Started the day with the plan of going for a drive and catching up with a few people at a local coffee and cars type place. Ended up snapping a drivebelt on the way and waiting nearly 3 hours for the AA to turn up. Got some cool pictures whilst milling around in the freezing cold and rain though (y)

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Adey
Find your local bearing /power transmission place and get a Pix Blue kevlar drivebelt. No noise, black dust, and they never wear. The one on Liz's 8 used to see 7500rpm regularly whilst driving the R8 6 blade propellor and had been on it for about 9 years, it's probably still on it yet! They are no dearer than standard, it will be an L section and you will be between a 345L and a 365L for length
 
So I knew the pulleys were out of alignment, but after slapping a belt on, it worked so I didn't revisit it. Anyway I checked it this eve and I was 5mm out from the water pump pulley. Luckily I have a stack of spacers from a few different alternators and was able to put a stack together that got it pretty much perfectly aligned to everything. This should solve the issue of snapping belts and took all of 10 minutes. Just need to wait for the new belts to turn up and she will be back out and useable 👍🏻I didn't even notice the amount of rubber dust it had thrown off!


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So I had abit of a school boy moment. When I slapped the dope together I had lots of revisions of the cooling system, by the end of it it was filled with straight water.... not sure how its been in your parts of the country but its been very flipping cold here in endor....

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Any way after warming things up with hot water and flushing the block through I managed to jump start the car and got everything warm enough to flush the rad and pipes out too. @Jezer101 saved the day by donating his left over coolant. Ive now flushed and filled the cooling system fully and hopefully caused no damage 🤦🏻‍♂️
 
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