The Posh Thread. 1991 Bentley Turbo R.

In reply to OHSCrifle :

Not yet. I'm leaning toward building my own relay board and not having seat memory. 

Unfortunately I've been on the road almost every weekend for the past month and haven't had a lot of time to work on it. 

This has been less than fun so far. 1.5 hours to get it out. Now off to search for belts and hoses. 

Sorry if I'm repeating myself but I quote Bentley's print  advertisement from the time quite often because I think it's really cool

"...on a test track it covered 140 miles in one hour..."

Think about that.  That's quite different than saying it will go 140 or 160 or whatever.  It actually went 140 miles within an hour.

It was probably lost on everyone but car geeks like me.

Zero luck with belts and hoses. According to the FLAPS they are a nonstandard belt with an odd width and odd angle to the V. The belts have Rolls Royce part numbers that don't cross to anything else in Gate's or Goodyear's parts list. The hoses don't cross either. 

I pushed the heavy bastard back in the shop and ordered the expensive parts from the UK. 

5 belts and two hoses set me back a little over $500 including freight. 

First of all... love this. And the fact youre documenting the ownership of it. Always liked these cars.

Here's a silly question..  would it be worth it (if you have any machinist friends) to talk to them about machining a second set of pulleys, modified to make use of stock off the shelf US available belts, that are actually stocked over here. I'm sure something could be knocked up relatively easily. It's just a matter of how long you plan on keeping / driving it, as far as wether or not it's actually worth the initial price hit to solve some reliability and long term ease of maintenance issues. 

The other upside to that, is I am sure there would be a secondary market for such a kit, though likely rather small, for those guys that actually drive these cars. Might knock a good chunk of the initial cost off doing such a conversion down to nwxt to nothing, if not eventually even turn a profit. 

For somebody with a machine shop, it would be a no brainer to sort something out using off the shelf belts, machining new pulleys and maybe a redesigned bracket or two, to make use of available belts. 

Just thinking out loud of how I would approach that problem, were it mine. 

In reply to Toyman! :

Nice that you left the intimidator and the persuader sitting on top of the engine so it can think about things before you install the new belts.  Probably not in the Bentley manual I’m guessing.  

In reply to GaryC83 :

That's a good long term solution if it's viable. Might be cost neutral the first time and then massively easier going forward. 

Machining the pulleys is worth looking at and I could do that at home easily enough. The only issue I can think of would be I would have to go to the next wider belt and might end up with the 4 grooves on the crank pulley running into each other. I will have to do some careful measuring when I push it back out of the shop.

In reply to 11GTCS :

Those were necessary to remove the fan clutch because naturally, my fan clutch tool set didn't come close to fitting. This thing is a strange mixture of fasteners. Almost as bad as a GM car. 

In reply to Toyman! :

Holy Pulleys, Batman!

In reply to Toyman! :

What are the odds you'll find some Whitworth in there?

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Apparently fairly high if you get into the engine. 

In reply to Shadeux :

Crank and WP.

Javelin said:

In reply to Toyman! :

Geeze no wonder these ride so well, those suspension arms look like a trophy truck!

Lol, I was thinking the exact same thing. These Bentleys have pertnear a center mount front suspension apparently.

Toyman: what kind of travel numbers is this thing pulling?

In reply to thatsnowinnebago :

In compression, not much more than any other car, call it 3"-4". It has an enormous amount of droop. I don't have a jack tall enough to jack up the frame and get the tires off the ground. It must have 15"-20" of droop travel. I have to use my 12-ton jack stands to get the frame in the air and unload the suspension. With that much droop, no matter what the road does, the tires stay on the ground and if they are on the ground then the shocks and springs are still controlling the chassis. It also feels like there is a fair amount of compression stiffness and not much rebound stiffness in the shocks, but they are electrically controlled so that can change depending on how the car is driven.

I think a lot of the ride quality is based on chassis stiffness. Usually, if you twist a chassis by jacking up one corner, the doors get out of alignment. More so on body-one-frame vehicles, which this is. This chassis, with one corner 24" off the ground has zero twist. It doesn't get jittery like a truck chassis does over road imperfections. 

Why not check industrial supply warehouses for belts?  Somebody makes the right size and you wouldn't have to pay excessively.  I used to work in a few factories and there are tons of belt drive machines.

I could also probably send you a set of sheave gauges that we have as promotional items for distributors. Bentley (probably) doesn't have their own sheave angles and belt molds that nobody else uses.

In reply to Parker with too many Projects :

I wouldn't have thought so. As Anthony said, someone somewhere makes belts for it. The belts aren't the big expense. They are only 25-30% more than a quality regular belt. For 5 belts, the premium is only $50-$75. If that breaks the bank I had no business buying a 32-year-old Bentley. 

The hoses, on the other hand, are a little over $100 each. Even there, rather than digging through the catalog to find something close I went ahead and ordered them as well. It will be at least 10 years before I have to worry about them again. 

Man, I've always loved the looks of these. This thing is as old as I am, but by the time I was able to comprehend and appreciate what this car was, it was still going for $$$. Seeing how involved it is to maintain one of these has me second-guessing my desire to own one... Maybe find a cleanish shell and swap something else in

I actually had a dream the other night where there was a more recent Bentley Continental, but not with a W12, but my mind conjured up a W15, so three, 5-cylinder banks, constructed like a Napier Lion aircraft engine (dreams have a way of making things fit, I guess), rather than the Volkswagen WR12 that came in the actual car.

I wonder if mower deck belts might actually be an alternative as well, they come in a variety of sizes and widths. Won't look pretty, however.

In reply to Azryael :

I don't think these are much worse than most other vehicles as far as maintenance. They are a little complicated and parts are expensive but as long as the maintenance is kept up, they aren't too bad. 

What you don't want to have to deal with is deferred maintenance. Everything I've done so far is deferred maintenance. Tires that were 12 years old, belts and hoses that are who knows how old, and a blown accumulator on the suspension. I'm not counting the seat ECUs because they don't make the car unusable or unreliable and I can fix those for little to no money. The average price of a Turbo R is around $20k-$25k. I'm into this one for about $15k so far so I can put some money into it without crying. I didn't have to do the belts and hoses, but I have some plans for longer trips beyond the Sunday cruise or Cars and Coffee and don't want to have to try to find a hose or belt and change it 500 miles from home. 

If it's a dream car, do it, but do it with your eyes wide open. My only recommendations are, don't buy at the top of the market unless it's mint with a fat folder of proven maintenance, don't buy a basket case expecting it to be cheaper in the long run, and don't buy one if you can't afford the parts.  

I would imagine it's not as bad, the photos make it look somewhat daunting, but things always appear different in person.

Catching up on deferred maintenance is often why I turn down most cars I see that I'm interested in. Playing catchup is never fun. However, doing some preventative maintenance always makes sense for something that's going to be a driver or see longer runs when it is driven. Looking back again, I'm amazed to see Bosch CIS on this thing, but I'm by no means surprised. How is that system holding up? Assuming it's KE-jet. I've always wondered if CIS systems are only ever jacked up on VWs, Porsches, and MBs

CIS has been my biggest headache, given that I have a car with a system that was hacked together by a shop to meet EPA requirements when the car was imported from Lebanon.

Definitely wise words on having both eyes open, and spending/choosing wisely.

In reply to Toyman! :

Nothing you've had to deal with so far has turned me off from wanting one yet.  I'd be tempted to look for a mechanical basket case, as their looks are the most important part to me, and doing an drivetrain swap would not bother me.  Problem is, I suspect anything mechanically bad, probably doesn't have a great body/interiror, either.

$100 is not out of line for a factory custom fit coolant hose, especially on an older low volume car. The lower radiator hose on my E39 M5 is $134 from Pelican Parts, for example. It would cost $270 to replace all the main radiator hoses.

Toyman! said:

In reply to Parker with too many Projects :

The hoses, on the other hand, are a little over $100 each. Even there, rather than digging through the catalog to find something close I went ahead and ordered them as well. It will be at least 10 years before I have to worry about them again. 

Many many years ago, when I was just a parts gopher I was handed $400 and told to head across town and pick up two radiator hoses for a Ferrari (308 or 365, I can't remember anymore) and two for a Rolls he had in the shop.

"I can keep the change, right?" I said with a gleam in my eye.

Chuck laughed, and with a matching gleam replied "sure, get yourself a coke."

I looked confused and he just waved me off and said he'd explain it when I got back.  When I returned he asked how much change I had and I showed him, less than $5.  He laughed and laughed.  "If its an Italian or English exotic, take the price of a normal part and add a zero to the end." He told me.

Not quite that price difference now apparently, but close.

In reply to Azryael :

Bentley lists the injection system as KE3-Jetronic with K-Motronic Control. I'm sure it's slightly different from every other system because that's how Rolls does things. 

At present, it runs very well beyond an occasion low idle that is probably caused by a dirty IAC. That's on the list after the radiator replacement. It only acts up after a hard run through the gears with the AC on. Bentley set the idle speed at 530 rpm so the margin for error is small and a low idle usually means it dies.