Cheap Bentley Turbo R Project! What Could POSSIBLY Go Wrong?

We've all seen those adverts for tantalizingly

cheap

Bentleys, but if you do it right - our colleagues at Classics World bought a 1990

turbo

art site unseen during the 2020 lockdown, we might add - to find out we've basically done

what

we always did. We advise people, never ever. to do and, in fact, we have done

what

every Rolls-Royce and Bentley specialist has ever talked about and said should not be done. We went and bought a

turbo

R sight unseen over the internet. What

could

go

wrong

? This was a £91,000. car from 1989. It's a little dirty because the guy who gave it to us had to drive it here simply because at 2.4 laps it was too big to fit in his transporter.

These are all-terrain tires, basically we have Pirelli scorpions. a 4x4 owner's choice, so they really belong on a Shogun, not a turbo R. I think this little dispute here

could

do with a replacement. I bet it's not expensive, although one has to wonder what it could be hiding, one of the specialists I spoke to. I said a while ago that a lot of these cars have been hit in the corners simply because they are so big, so it's no surprise that the trunk is aluminum, so it's pretty rusty and the paint has chipped, but not that one. is the end.

Of the world, I've got a little bit more bubbling under the door handle here and there's a little bit under here too. I don't think any of that is alarming, so the interior, which is quite nice, could probably stand a little staining and cleaning, but it's not split, the piping doesn't appear to have split and the leather itself is fine, we have a blouse, a top-of-the-line cassette player from Bamberg, Michael Crawford plays Andrew Lloyd Webber, who may not stay there. I have something absolutely tremendous, we have a fixed portable Motorola. I don't think we're going to get any calls.

If she is. Oh, the six and three-quarter liters are very loaded there. There was also Rolls-Royce. They were always very shy about power figures in this era, they always described them as adequate, but when they sold the cars on the German market, the authorities required them to reveal the actual power figure, so I think this is something like 350 380 something like that. It's um, that's enough and on that kind of padding First impressions, so I think we've brought a presentable and fairly honest car, is what I'm going to say for now, plus we better hear a little bit of Michael Crawford playing Andrew.

Lloyd Webber, to be honest, is not my thing. I haven't driven one of these cars in a while and it's funny how they remind you of an older Range Rover. You really sit so high and they feel like a huge beast when you ride them. First, put them on that fit me because we have all-terrain tires anyway, just adjust my power seat and it works fine. I've done a couple of miles and it's certainly pretty quiet and relaxing. I will give it my all. What I can hear is a slight creak of the leather, no clunking noises or suspension knocks or anything like that, so first impressions it seems to drive pretty well with the sun shining and the Bentley looking good, things were going well and then No.

Oh I think we have a problem, we have the charge warning light on and the ABS light so I think we're going to have to stop. This certainly explains why the charging warning light and ABS light came on, so not entirely. I'm sure what to do now, we'll probably head back to our company's parking lot. I think we've had our Bentley for a while and apart from that initial little hiccup when it went through the alternator belt, everything has been going well and we've covered quite a bit. We've come a few miles but we don't really know what's hiding behind the scenes to trip us up, so today we've come here, to Nigel Sandals Place in Isleworth, what they don't know here about Rolls Royces and Bentleys of any age.

It's not worth knowing, so these people will tell us if we bought an absolute disaster or if we got lucky. What have you found? Nigel. You had it on the ramp for a few seconds. Well, he orders. of the usual types of features we have a little bit of corrosion on this lower right rear corner here um again this is unusual the four hour spare tire carrier looks like the mice have been there how to go eat that handbrake obviously it has a lot, a lot of fat again. These are very common. They have a lot of water in a lot of salt, and that's why someone greased them so much.

Do you think so? I think we have an oil leak just looking from the front and it's blowing into the back of the axle here this oil here I think this is all blowing from the front if you look it's all oil, washed oatmeal, all the exhaust system, It doesn't seem to drop some oil in my driveway, but it just put on 100 miles, yeah that's right, so it pumped it into the top of the gearbox, so it looks like I got some oil too. oil coming down from the steering rack. has had a steering rack, it has been replaced, so it may be the engine or of course due to the racks at the bottom it all tends to culminate around the bottom of the engine, if that makes sense we have a little bit of moisture in that. front caliper, you can see there is a little bit of moisture around this caliper here, otherwise although the suspension brakes seem fine, apparently corroded headlight bezels are quite common, knowing that the hammering they receive from the stone fragments, these tilt caps are tall and that's yours. your bump on the front, so this couple of tilt bushings on the front here, these little cam bushings are starting to separate, so you've got these hydraulic belts and again, it's pretty common for them to leak, but they all look good and dry.

This is all a little bit off when you build this, when you do this what happens is they suspend the bolts inside the plastic if they are inside the cast compound that they make the bumper out of and what happened was over a period of time. every once in a while rust gets in especially being right behind the rear wheel we have all the dirt going up there you can feel it swelling up inside the brackets it's doing that and unfortunately I think I'll just leave it at that so these upper shock bushings come off and you can see it's run out of center, so that bushing should be dead in the middle, it should be right there, as you can see below.

Nigel connects instead of built up hydraulic pressure gauges to the test ports and first releases all the system pressure by continuously pumping the brake pedal, the first part of the test is zero to one thousand PSI of pressure and that will be what we call gas pressure in the sphere, so Josh, if you turn it on, please. click on that at the bottom of the store just turn them off so one has 900 and that one also has 900 so okay yeah they're only made for 1100 so they're pretty new if that makes sense so what we go for The thing to do now is to slightly increase the revs, so in the next part of the hood we want to make sure that both are going up to maximum pressure and maximum. it's 1100 no no no no no 2 500.

Next we see how much pressure the accumulators can generate, so we stopped at about two and three fifty. This one, if you look at this one, has a problem. This only goes up to 1,500 because What happens is that when you apply this pressure you have to return it under low pressure to the tank. See where it re-enters now, give it a little throttle to see one re-enters 1900, so that's the recovery. from the system so we know that that one over there 1900 that one over there gets a tick nothing

wrong

with that one this one can you do the other one can you pump it again please with all the pressure pumped our other emulator only works up to about 1500 so , what could be the cause of that?

It could be the height control, so the height control could be done by simply bypassing the hot height control valve. It could be a distribution valve. What we need to do is break it down into the system, so the first thing we would do is simply test the brake master cylinder, accumulator and valve body, disconnect the rest of the car and test that finally it could be the valve body. How much residual pressure would we have for the brakes if the engine failed? How many bombs were those 50? That's gone too, now you have quite a bit of residual, that's what you want to know, you have some residual pressure. security there if you have a distributor drive belt on this car yeah a little timing belt um and we might want to check the service history and find out that it needs to be changed every 30,000 miles if it breaks unfortunately you running with four cylinders, the car is going nowhere, what's the verdict?

Well, I think we've done well guys, to be honest, it doesn't look too bad, excellent, um, yeah, again, some bits of corrosion and whatever, but I think on the main thing, yeah, you know that it's pretty usable, you know it's safe and usable, that's all you want I think, and you've got some work to do and Bob's first port of call was the battered corner of the rear bumper, and how hard can that be? that? to replace the bracket, they weren't really gone on this one as you can see, and someone has done a really nasty trick, using a large star screwdriver directly on the bumper bracket to hold the corner molding on it. to get the screw out before you even start oh that's disgusting that's how broken it is this is completely cut this bolt should go in here it's completely cut we have a spring and a clip and a bracket and this is over hugely designed but it allows the thing to be move if you hit it.

I'm going to stop here because I have a nasty feeling that these are captive bolts and they're going to fall in. There's our budgeted cross head screw, which was uh. Just screwed horribly into the aluminum bumper bar here and this is the kind of thing you only find on Rolls-Royce in this area. The mounting bolts are well welded into the aluminum bumper. Let's use a big lever, but I just managed it. Take out this bolt even if we don't want to reuse these bolts, of course we need the free holes to fix the new part with some bolts.

This complicated spring bracket is riveted into the corner of the bumper, so it needs to be drilled and then riveted on the new one I guess I'll drill the rivets here we go, it has to be like this no it doesn't I have decided to do without the rivets. I have opted for a better one than Rolls. -Royce, I've actually used a couple of little nuts and bolts that I think are a little fancier, to be honest, I'm going to tighten it up here. I've even used washers. What about proper stainless steel work? rusts again, you know, I can reassemble this weird spring mount that I actually had to take apart to get this to work.

One of the biggest difficulties when doing this job is not smashing the new corner of the bumper into the ground, so you definitely need to do that. using a bit of cardboard or something strange to bite on here and voila, we have it all screwed back together. It's not perfect, we need to get the correct bolt to put into the rear binding here. I slid the aluminum trim piece on. In um, it's reasonably tight. I'm going to look at it again later because it's been beat up and warped here, so we really want to get a new piece of this to make it look good again, but anyway, not bad for a quick job. and it's certainly gotten better next time, Paul handed the Bentley over to Rob Hawkins of Classics monthly magazine, so three weeks later, what was it like servicing and servicing a Bentley yourself?

Three weeks ago he left me the car. I thought well, I have a three-week deadline to do a lot, but the basics were to look at the mechanical aspects, give it the proper service, do all the engine oils, gearbox and differential oils, check the brakes and see. what we need to change and that. I actually opened a bit of a can of worms because while the service was easy and I did most of the service myself, I need a new steering rack, rear brakes which were barely available anymore so we changed all the rear brakes, all the calipers too, which means the handbrake pads were also changed.

I looked at the fuel lines that were broken. They were Rusty thought it was safer to change them. They weren't leaking, but he knew for a fact that they would leak. This year, look, these guys at Prestige have helped us and I also spent a lot of time on myself, so I left a lot of time on the car. I suddenly discovered how easy it is to change the oil in the engine, gearbox and I was quite surprised at how much space there was and how simple it was a bit complex when it comes to hydraulics such as the suspension system and brakes , but we are just talking about fluid systems and various things that just need knowledge and luckily these guys from Prestige hadthat knowledge and they were able to guide me otherwise I would have been stuck and that's really the point.

I think what we need to do here is, look at it, you can apply a general principle to fix things, but sometimes you need specialized knowledge for certain procedures. The power steering fluid line burst and all the fluid leaked onto the floor. just look at it and try to predict what would happen in the future and think we should preserve this and should have preventive maintenance. The pieces are brilliant. I can't believe the flying parts they managed to get them and also the reconditioning stuff so you look at the steering rack and think you'll be lucky and it wasn't the same with the rear calipers.

And the most difficult thing, would you believe?, is the spare wheel holder. If you wanted a new one, it weighs over a thousand pounds, so we managed to remove ours and repair it because it has a little rust on it. We painted everything again to show off. As new, I think you could do most jobs. You definitely do most of the work yourself. The most difficult thing comes when you want to pressure test the hydraulic brake system and the hydraulic suspension, but the rest of the things, especially with the you know. a good shop manual most of the work you could do most of the maintenance work yourself, but keep in mind that things are awkward when removing those rear calipers, you have to undo about four brake pipes that will get stuck , but not only that, you can't remove the caliper unless you've loosened the four huge bolts holding the bushing to the trailing arm, so mechanically I think it's a great car to use, but if you want to win some Comcast competition , it may not surpass it, but mechanically it is solid and usable.

I'll be fine and now it's time to get on board for a long trip, so there you have it, inspect carefully, know parts prices and be willing to get your hands dirty and you can really repair and maintain a Bentley. yourself foreigner