Mk2 Fiesta XR2 rebuild/restoration

[Gallons Per Mile]

Another day, another update!

This time, it comes in the form of front grilles, CV boots and stickers. You may have noticed in the last three pics that my front grille had gone AWOL. One of the clips had broken and it was loose so I decided to remove it before it caused damage to anything else. This meant I needed a new one. Luckily one such grille appeared on Ebay - a genuine NOS item for a reasonable price so I snapped it up.

Here it is:



Fitted:



Much better, don't you think? Best thing is it fits perfectly (as did the old one which was also genuine Ford), yet the front panel on the car is an after market one. I'm pleased it was obviously a decent reproduction because small things like this can be a pain to fit on after market panels. This one is perfect

Onwards to more mechanical things. Remember that split inner CV boot I was talking about? I got the car jacked up and had a poke about underneath. I couldn't actually see an obvious split but I knew the CV boots were knackered as the rubber was all perished when I rebuilt the car in a hurry last summer. I found a reasonable deal from Euro Car Parts; four CV boots, clips, packets of CV grease and a couple of hub nuts for less that £25 delivered to my door. If you're going to do something, might as well just do it properly and replace them all! I tackled the long shaft first as this was the one that sprayed grease up the bulkhead.

Sans long shaft:



With outer CV and all boots removed:



Here's the state of the old CV boots. No surprises really. They were al like this:



The outer CV joint. In good condition it seems so no need to replace:



The rebuilt shaft: new boots, clips, and the outer CV attached. I made sure I knew which way around the shaft went so I didn't rebuild it back to front as this can cause fatigue in the metal where it's been torqued one way all its life.



I repeated these steps for the other side with the short shaft too. I didn't bother with pitcures as it's exactly the same with just a slightly shorter shaft. I did have fun and games getting it to click back in to the inner CV joint with limited space. Made a bit of a mess with CV grease getting everywhere but I got there in the end and tidied everything back up again. I got the hub nuts torqued to F tight spec, made the punch in the edge of the nuts' thread so they can't undo and the job was jobbed

That was yesterday. I took the car out for a spin and everything felt great. Left it out in the rain over night but it had dried out by the time I was ready to do some more today. Mainly sticking stickers on! I bought a new 'XR2' badge and some pin stripe in the correct size and colour. I think it turned out ok considering I'm no expert. I thought I'd messed up the boot badge again but it turned out fine - no bubbles and it seems to be on straight enough, so I'm very happy. The old boot badge was a bright red and I'd got it on a tiny bit wonky. I'm pretty sure the badge and pin stripes should have been a darker red, so that's what I bought. Really love the look with the new stickers:





Oh I almost forgot to say - you'll notice a new aerial in place of the hole in the front wing too! Sadly not a genuine Ford item, but a generic Halfords job. If a genuine one comes up one day I'l definitely replace it so it looks 100%, but this one will be ok for now.

Edited by Gallons Per Mile on Friday 28th April 15:15

[Gallons Per Mile]

PHSS virginity officially lost! Was a nice morning out, even though one of my wheel bearings decided to destroy itself on the way home. Really wasn't sure if I'd make it all the way home as it got VERY loud on the M11 and I was still a good 50 miles away at that point. Everything held together though and I made it back in one piece. I'm a bit annoyed as I changed the wheel bearings all round as part of the rebuild. Must have bought bad quality ones or somehow contaminated them. I had to change the front passenger bearing just the other day for the same reason. The driver's side seemed fine at the time but didn't like the long trip to Santa Pod. I'll change it in due course...

[Gallons Per Mile]

I got on with fitting the other new wheel bearing last weekend. The best thing about the fact I've not long rebuilt it is I know it'll come apart very easily. It took me no time to have the drivers front wheel arch looking like this:



The fallout from that was all of these bits and pieces on my drive. Do you like my shiny bearing pushing tools?



A pile of nuts and bolts, as well as a shiny brake disc and hub flange. Good thing I know where all the bolts go just by looking at them!



Standard Haynes procedure of "refitting being the reversal of removal" and I had a complete XR2 again. I went for a test drive and seeing as it was a nice day I thought it would be rude if I didn't take a couple of pics





Wheel bearing noise has now disappeared and all appears to be good. Time, and a few more miles will tell if it's a permanant fix, but it should be. The new bearing races went in with no trouble and I made sure everything was very clean and well greased before putting it back together. I don't really want to be changing wheel bearings every few hundred miles...

[Gallons Per Mile]

Door cards are finally back on! That means I spent today fitting speakers, sound deadening and a waterproof membrane to the doors, and then the door cards on top. The speakers sound good, well worth £30 from Halfords. The sound deadening mats were free from a friend and they seem to help quite a bit - road noise is lower and the door shuts with a slightly more solid sound! Pictures shall be posted soon...

[Gallons Per Mile]

Gav147 said:

Cracking job OP, just seen this for the first time and read it all, looks as good now as when it rolled off the production line!

Used to have one exactly the same back in 1995 when I was 19 (C366JUD from memory) so brings back some great memories seeing yours, will see if I can find any pics of it.

Thanks! I don't think I've done too badly considering this was my first full strip down and rebuild and first time I've painted a whole car I'd love to see pics from back in the day!

marky911 said:

Gallons per mile, you've made a cracking job of that. It's great to see a one being brought back up to scratch.
One of the few hot hatches I wanted but never got around to owning.
Mk2 XR2 and Renault 5 GTturbo.

The XR2 would be my choice now. I agree on the noise too. So distinctive. Nice and raspy.

Anyway, great thread. Well done.

Thanks also! Absolutely love the exhaust note, my Magnex exhaust is possibly a little loud when on the motorway but otherwise it's great. Really quet at low revs but a bit boy racer if you put your foot down

Squadrone Rosso said:

There are two nice ones on Autotradet

http://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/advert/2017...

And

http://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/advert/2017...

Thoughts?

Silver one looks very nice, and a rare colour too. It's definitely had some restoration work as there are a couple of bits I noticed but nothing that detracts from it. If the mileage is genuine then that's probably a very nice car. Mine says 31k on the clock but I know it's 131!!

The red one looks lovely - wheel trims too! The pepper pot alloys were an option I think as the one my dad bought new had wheel trims as he didn't want to pay for the alloys wheels. That's a very eary car with no sun roof, no side indicators on the wings and the early dark interior. Might need to check if it's the hemi head (which it should be if it's the original engine) as I believe they didn't have hardened valve seats so it might need LRP or the head to go off to a machinist. Still, it's only a half hour job to take the head off! It looks very original and unrestored.

Gav147 said:

Squadrone Rosso said:

Thoughts?

Looking at the prices, I wish I'd kept mine lol

Yep, they do seem to have gone up rather a lot in price. To be fair, most of them will be rotten these days so there won't be many really nice ones left. Unsure what to do with mine now, I deliberately built it not to be perfect so I can use it on the road, but I've just sent my RS Turbo away for welding and respray as I've not got the space to do it myself currently. Once that's back I'll want to get it on the road too. Too many toys and not enough space!!

[Gallons Per Mile]

Here are a couple of pics of the door cards now on:




Quick pic of the complete dash now I've put a random CD player I found in the house in to the hole:



And a cheeky pic of the car on the drive, because I like it:

[Gallons Per Mile]

Hmm, Photobucket not doing picture linking means you can't see much on this thread now...

I've decided to sell the car so you can view the latest pics on the ad in the classifieds section