Tell me about British Leyland
Discussion
yellowjack said:
Looking at the Austin Maxi specifically, I see that the last MAXI 2 ( LOV 476X ) came off the line in July 1981 and now resides at Gaydon. Yet I have a clear memory of a local woman driving a beige Maxi 1750 HL wearing an 'A' prefix plate which would suggest it was registered as late as '83/'84. Is this possible/likely. My memories are quite clear about the plate too, because she nearly ran me over in it, and as a result of the near miss she stopped to apologise. Despite her being a good 11 years my senior, she became the woman who would introduce me to "the sins of the flesh'.
Did you use the fold-down bed? 
My dad was an Austin man through and through, even to the extent of persuading his dad to chop in a Vauxhall Velox for an Austin 16. He himself went through 2 1100s, 2 Maxis, a Princess, a Metro, 3 Montegos and a Montego Countryman, with the odd foray into Land-Rovers for good measure.
brrapp said:
Fermit The Krog and Sexy Sarah said:
I've just read the thread through, and it's been very enjoyable. Some top bearding going off!
I don't have anything much to add about BL, but can give a titbit regarding quality in the industry back then.
I have a friend who, when we were younger, collected old copies of CAR and Autocar Magazine, some from the 70's.
Reading these one day I was shocked to see a section of the review titled 'faults upon arrival'. It then went on to list said problems, which should never have got past quality control, let alone on a demonstrator to the national press!
I remember thinking how slack this was of BL (I can't remember the car, but it was something BL) but when I continued reading the mag the same section was in every review, regardless of manufacturer. It was evidently a time when every car sold likely had faults upon delivery. How on earth that was deemed acceptable is beyond me.
Yes, it was like the house building industry is today, with 'snagging' on brand new houses. Absolutely no excuse for it, just down to poor(almost nonexistent) quality control.I don't have anything much to add about BL, but can give a titbit regarding quality in the industry back then.
I have a friend who, when we were younger, collected old copies of CAR and Autocar Magazine, some from the 70's.
Reading these one day I was shocked to see a section of the review titled 'faults upon arrival'. It then went on to list said problems, which should never have got past quality control, let alone on a demonstrator to the national press!
I remember thinking how slack this was of BL (I can't remember the car, but it was something BL) but when I continued reading the mag the same section was in every review, regardless of manufacturer. It was evidently a time when every car sold likely had faults upon delivery. How on earth that was deemed acceptable is beyond me.
My Dad used to work for BL.
At the Longbridge plant unpainted body shells were stored outside, so they were often rusty even before they made it onto the production line.
When he worked at the Land Rover plant he uncovered an issue. The wheel manufacturer for Range Rovers went on strike, it was too expensive for BL to shut down production but they needed wheel to get the finished cars off the production line into a storage compound. The answer was to order wooden temporary wheels. When Dads team came to audit the numbers they discovered that every car had 5 wooden wheels. Like the metal wheels a spare had been ordered for each car.
In order to save money, some bright spark divided that if Rover dipsticks were made 1 inch shorter there would be a good saving. A whole bath of cars came back with warranty claims after being over filled with oil.
We had BL company cars, changed every 3 months, apart from Jags we had every single model in every single colour at one point or another. I learnt to drive in an Ital and an Acclaim, Some of the cars were nice places to sit in (not the Ital) eg Princess and even the Maxi which had stacks of legroom.
Favourites of mine were: MGB, Princess Vanden Plas, MG Montego, Dolomite Sprint. Rover SD1
The ones I hated were: Allegro, Marina (especial the base models), Ambassador,
At the Longbridge plant unpainted body shells were stored outside, so they were often rusty even before they made it onto the production line.
When he worked at the Land Rover plant he uncovered an issue. The wheel manufacturer for Range Rovers went on strike, it was too expensive for BL to shut down production but they needed wheel to get the finished cars off the production line into a storage compound. The answer was to order wooden temporary wheels. When Dads team came to audit the numbers they discovered that every car had 5 wooden wheels. Like the metal wheels a spare had been ordered for each car.
In order to save money, some bright spark divided that if Rover dipsticks were made 1 inch shorter there would be a good saving. A whole bath of cars came back with warranty claims after being over filled with oil.
We had BL company cars, changed every 3 months, apart from Jags we had every single model in every single colour at one point or another. I learnt to drive in an Ital and an Acclaim, Some of the cars were nice places to sit in (not the Ital) eg Princess and even the Maxi which had stacks of legroom.
Favourites of mine were: MGB, Princess Vanden Plas, MG Montego, Dolomite Sprint. Rover SD1
The ones I hated were: Allegro, Marina (especial the base models), Ambassador,
AW111 said:
Speaking of the Rover SD1, who else knows about this 1973 4.4 litre v8 Michelotti precursor?
link
The Force 7 : a stillborn Leyland Australia product, so sort-of BL
The Leyland P76 used a local 4414cc version of the Rover V8 (same capacity as the Volvo/Yamaha B8444S link
The Force 7 : a stillborn Leyland Australia product, so sort-of BL
) producing 200 PS and 380 Nm. Export versions were planned but the closure of BL Australia put somewhat of a damper on that.blueg33 said:
Some of the cars were nice places to sit in (not the Ital) eg Princess and even the Maxi which had stacks of legroom.
The Princess inherited the massive rear legroom from the landcrab, which is to the credit of Issigonis up to a point. He decided that by designing it to be a bit bigger than originally spec'd it could make it extremely space efficient inside. The snag was that the buyers wanted something to drive around solo all week and maybe use the rear seats at weekends for the kids. So a less nimble car with more rear leg room didn't appeal.Interestingly the landcrab doors weren't only used for the 18/22 the Maxi and the 3 litre. They were seriously considered by Rolls Royce who were looking at making a relatively cheaper car at the time.
Dr Jekyll said:
Interestingly the landcrab doors weren't only used for the 18/22 the Maxi and the 3 litre. They were seriously considered by Rolls Royce who were looking at making a relatively cheaper car at the time.
It's strange which parts they decided to carry across from one model to another - doors and which not - enginesDr Jekyll said:
blueg33 said:
Some of the cars were nice places to sit in (not the Ital) eg Princess and even the Maxi which had stacks of legroom.
The Princess inherited the massive rear legroom from the landcrab, which is to the credit of Issigonis up to a point. He decided that by designing it to be a bit bigger than originally spec'd it could make it extremely space efficient inside. The snag was that the buyers wanted something to drive around solo all week and maybe use the rear seats at weekends for the kids. So a less nimble car with more rear leg room didn't appeal.Interestingly the landcrab doors weren't only used for the 18/22 the Maxi and the 3 litre. They were seriously considered by Rolls Royce who were looking at making a relatively cheaper car at the time.
saaby93 said:
It's strange which parts they decided to carry across from one model to another - doors and which not - engines
It is really odd, they never figured out how to unite multiple brands. On the one hand they didn't organise models into specific ranges like Ford, or with specific brand identities like VW, on the other they would make cars worse than they could have been to avoid competing with their other models. Dr Jekyll said:
saaby93 said:
It's strange which parts they decided to carry across from one model to another - doors and which not - engines
It is really odd, they never figured out how to unite multiple brands. On the one hand they didn't organise models into specific ranges like Ford, or with specific brand identities like VW, on the other they would make cars worse than they could have been to avoid competing with their other models. blueg33 said:
In order to save money, some bright spark divided that if Rover dipsticks were made 1 inch shorter there would be a good saving. A whole bath of cars came back with warranty claims after being over filled with oil.
Sorry, that sounds like one of those stories, like sending a trainee out for a 'left-handed screwdriver' or 'stripey paint'! TBH I'd be quite surprised if BL did anything to save money, let alone an employee-ideas initiative.2xChevrons said:
It's ironic because Datsuns used a lot of technology that had its roots at BMC. The 120Y's engine was an enlarged and improved BMC A-Series (with an eight-port cylinder head), and the Datsun 510 which secured the reputation for Japanese reliability in much of the world had Datsun's licensed copy of the B-Series. But both engines were improved in the typical Japanese way -five bearing cranks, brand new tooling with much tighter and more consistent tolerances and unified bolt and fixings sizes (so you only needed three spanners to dismantle a Nissan A-Engine, rather than the dozen or so (in both AF and Whitworth) that you need to overhaul a B-Series drivetrain.
So why didn't BL make at least some of those improvements to the A series? I had an A15 powered 120y wagon as a shed for a few years, and the engine was still going strong in a mate's car long after the body rotted away. The 1500cc version was used for a sprint car racing class here for many years into the 80's. An almost indestructible engine. Pedant mode on :
Although the base 510 used a development of the B series in some markets, the one that made their reputation was the L series (alloy head, chain driven SOHC) originally based on a Mercedes design. It started out as a 2 litre 6, and powered many generations of Skylines, Z cars, etc., as well as the 4 cylinder 1600 (P510) and it's successors.
Zod said:
How's this for an example of inexplicably s
t design:
BMW had introduced the driver-centric dashboard and meanwhile Morris came up with this. It's almost as if it was designed for a LHD car and they just jury-rigged it for RHD in their main market.
On the other hand BMW have never come up with a car that looks remotely as nice as this.t design:BMW had introduced the driver-centric dashboard and meanwhile Morris came up with this. It's almost as if it was designed for a LHD car and they just jury-rigged it for RHD in their main market.
Fermit The Krog and Sexy Sarah said:
I have a friend who, when we were younger, collected old copies of CAR and Autocar Magazine, some from the 70's.
Reading these one day I was shocked to see a section of the review titled 'faults upon arrival'. It then went on to list said problems, which should never have got past quality control, let alone on a demonstrator to the national press!
I've got a huge stack of Car Mechanics magazine which I use for work - almost every issue from 1963 to 1974. It's very illuminating because it deals with cars when they were secondhand and the demographic was someone with no money who had to do everything himself on his drive or in a draughty concrete lock-up. So it's a very good insight into how the cars of the time stood up in the longer term, which doesn't always come across in the road tests. Reading these one day I was shocked to see a section of the review titled 'faults upon arrival'. It then went on to list said problems, which should never have got past quality control, let alone on a demonstrator to the national press!
Everything more than five years old can be expected to have rust problems, and BMC/BL stuff is generally acknowledged to be very far from the worst offenders. Aside from infamous foreign makes such as Fiat, Datsun and Opel (very bad pre-1970s reforms), Vauxhall and the smaller Rootes stuff was horrific for corrosion. Rootes group cars also suffered very fast-wearing transmissions due to poor quality materials. Fords seem to be the source of most of the 'in the 70s your car wouldn't start in the cold' memes, mostly because Ford refused to fit ballasted coils or alternators until well into the 1970s, and then only on more expensive models (by contrast BMC and Leyland had ballasted ignition from the 1960s). The RWD Farina products are generally acknowledged to be stodgy and uninteresting to drive but solid, spacious, reliable and easy to maintain. The FWD stuff rusts quickly (but is generally easy to repair) and have endless transmission problems.
As for quality control, two anecdotes illustrate the madness:
1) When Mike Gould (future LR sales and marketing manager and author) joined Rover just after the formation of BL he found there was someone stood at the end of the P6 line with a hammer to put dents in the front wings so that the rectification team were gainfully employed. This had been thrashed out in a deal with the unions as being less costly and disruptive than trying to reduce or remove the rectification team.
2) When BL production managers went to Japan to tour the Honda plan in the run-up to building the Triumph Acclaim they asked "And how many people do you employ in your rectification department?" The Honda execs were baffled, because why would you let cars off the line if they had problems? The Japanese production system was all about minimising the potential for faults at the design stage and giving ordinary line workers the power to stop the line if faults occured, and then ruthlessly analysing why the fault occured and how to make sure it didn't happen again.
That last point applies to everywhere outside of Japan, of course. Until the arrival of the second-generation Golf/Polo etc. Volkswagen had an incredibly high defect rate of cars coming off the line at Wolfsburg because they were very different, and much more complicated, than the Beetle-based cars that the plant had been designed and had been honed to perfection to build for 30 years.But they had a very thorough rectification department to make sure that defects were eliminated before dispatch. And the problems were fed back to the workforce and the designers to carry out improvements. BL tried the same thing but much of the workforce wasn't interested and the ones that were were stymied by the continual disruption to the production process by strike action. It's hard to get consistent standards when, say, one week you're fitting Lucas 43D distributors, then the next week you're using a crate of Ducellier distributors shipped in from Seneffe because Lucas have gone on strike, then the next week the supply of 43Ds still hasn't resumed but the warehouse does had a batch of 45Ds which engineering say will fit but have different backlash settings, then the 43Ds are back and you forget to reset your dial gauge...[ad infinitum]
Dr Jekyll said:
It is really odd, they never figured out how to unite multiple brands. On the one hand they didn't organise models into specific ranges like Ford, or with specific brand identities like VW, on the other they would make cars worse than they could have been to avoid competing with their other models.
BMC did - mock the badge engineering all you like, but if you've committed to maintaining half a dozen brands then they did it very well. Three basic RWD platforms, three basic FWD ones, all sharing drivetrains and running gear. BL's problem was twofold - eliminating brands and platforms would mean job losses, which would have led to (near-literal) civil war in the Midlands if imposed to the full extent required. The second was that designing a full range of new corporate platforms (such as VW does today) would have required up-front investment that BL never had the capital to afford.
Alec Issigonis saw the light in his 9X proposal for BMC, which was basically a VW Polo six years ahead of time, and underpinned by a fully scaleable platform and drivetrain which could have been produced in Mini,1100 and Landcrab sizes with very high parts commonality.
Roy Haynes (who planned and designed the Marina) proposed a fully modular corporate platform which could be used for FWD and RWD applications, accepting nearly all the existing corporate drivetrains with independent or live rear suspension. By changing the external panels it could underpin everything from a Morris to a Jaguar. BL rejected the idea on cost grounds (and I imagine Sir William Lyons was not at all keen on the idea of a Jaguar that wasn't entirely bespoke!) and because Haynes had worked up the idea in secret by hiding a design team at the Pressed Steel Fisher offices at Cowley, far away from the watchful eye of Longbridge management.
AW111 said:
So why didn't BL make at least some of those improvements to the A series? I had an A15 powered 120y wagon as a shed for a few years, and the engine was still going strong in a mate's car long after the body rotted away. The 1500cc version was used for a sprint car racing class here for many years into the 80's. An almost indestructible engine.
Because the cost/benefit never weighed up right for a cash-strapped company. The A- and B-Series are perfectly good, reliable engines that, right through to the end of the 1980s, had competitive performance and economy. There was no immediate need to reengineer them, so why 'waste' the resources on doing so? It was also a case that for many years replacement engines were always 'just around the corner'. The small E-Series was supposed to replace the A-Series, but proved to be worse in every respect. The O-Series (basically an OHC B-Series) was in development from 1971 to 1977, and was supposed to be in production for 1974. The original K-Series (not the HGF one!) was an OHC conversion of the A-Series but showed no real benefits in return for incurring a lot of expense in tooling and production. AW111 said:
Pedant mode on :
Although the base 510 used a development of the B series in some markets, the one that made their reputation was the L series (alloy head, chain driven SOHC) originally based on a Mercedes design. It started out as a 2 litre 6, and powered many generations of Skylines, Z cars, etc., as well as the 4 cylinder 1600 (P510) and it's successors.
Good point. I should have noticed that because I'm fed up of correcting people who insist that the 240Z's engine is just an OHC version of the BMC C-Series. Although the base 510 used a development of the B series in some markets, the one that made their reputation was the L series (alloy head, chain driven SOHC) originally based on a Mercedes design. It started out as a 2 litre 6, and powered many generations of Skylines, Z cars, etc., as well as the 4 cylinder 1600 (P510) and it's successors.
Edited by 2xChevrons on Wednesday 21st February 12:44
Raygun said:
Zod said:
How's this for an example of inexplicably st design:
BMW had introduced the driver-centric dashboard and meanwhile Morris came up with this. It's almost as if it was designed for a LHD car and they just jury-rigged it for RHD in their main market.
On the other hand BMW have never come up with a car that looks remotely as nice as this.t design:BMW had introduced the driver-centric dashboard and meanwhile Morris came up with this. It's almost as if it was designed for a LHD car and they just jury-rigged it for RHD in their main market.
![](https://thumbsnap.com/sc/Zn8RioZX.jpg[/img]</a> <a href="https://thumbsnap.com/osdlpJTr" Target="_blank" rel="nofollow">[img]https://thumbsnap.com/sc/osdlpJTr.jpg)
The reason I mentioned BMW was simply that the dash angles towards the driver unlike that stupid Marina dash. The Stag is a beauty, but its engine is not.
Edited by Zod on Wednesday 21st February 12:39
saaby93 said:
KillianB4 said:
This is a great read, still remember the stories my dad would tell about the Marina and the Allegro his family had way back when.
His aunt bought a Mini new in the early 80s which he proceeded to roll into a ditch and she never replaced it or drove again. Although that was his fault, not BLs.
He fondly remembers the 3 wheeled Scammell lorry my grandfather used drive for British rail on Jersey in the 60s. We have a Corgi die cast of one in the same colours at home proudly displayed in the living room.
One still nearly aliveHis aunt bought a Mini new in the early 80s which he proceeded to roll into a ditch and she never replaced it or drove again. Although that was his fault, not BLs.
He fondly remembers the 3 wheeled Scammell lorry my grandfather used drive for British rail on Jersey in the 60s. We have a Corgi die cast of one in the same colours at home proudly displayed in the living room.
I was fascinated with these as a kid which is how I ended up watching the video.
Zod said:
The Stag is a beauty, but its engine is not.
Looks okay to me...
Interestingly, people tell tales of the heads being impossible to remove, the chains being made of chocolate, the waterways being contaminated and blocked, and so on...
After 75k miles, and 42 years of being in the car, mine came apart very easily. The chain and sprockets were good, in fact the only real issue was the piston rings, mainly through lack of use by its elderly owners in latter years. Still it was apart, so we took it back to a bare block and started again.
fido said:
blueg33 said:
In order to save money, some bright spark divided that if Rover dipsticks were made 1 inch shorter there would be a good saving. A whole bath of cars came back with warranty claims after being over filled with oil.
Sorry, that sounds like one of those stories, like sending a trainee out for a 'left-handed screwdriver' or 'stripey paint'! TBH I'd be quite surprised if BL did anything to save money, let alone an employee-ideas initiative.Dad has loads of stories, but they were looking to save costs like any business. The problem BL had though was the cost of not making things due to strike action
Dr Interceptor said:
Zod said:
The Stag is a beauty, but its engine is not.
Looks okay to me...
Interestingly, people tell tales of the heads being impossible to remove, the chains being made of chocolate, the waterways being contaminated and blocked, and so on...
After 75k miles, and 42 years of being in the car, mine came apart very easily. The chain and sprockets were good, in fact the only real issue was the piston rings, mainly through lack of use by its elderly owners in latter years. Still it was apart, so we took it back to a bare block and started again.
As another point of BL and another case of snatched from the jaws of victory, the overheating problems was basically casting sand left other in the block waterways, you can keep replacing the head gasket but until the block was clear of sand you was never far from overheating.
This was standard even down to two sets of points and I would take the car any distance without worrying about a breakdown.
This was standard even down to two sets of points and I would take the car any distance without worrying about a breakdown.
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