I have an '86 Carlton Auto which has done about 96000 miles . It has just been MOT'd -needing a couple of brake pipes,front pads and downpipe and rear box-middle section and rear shoes were replaced last year .The reason it needed pads was a sticky sliding caliper which obviously had worn the pad down on one side. Only hiccup was two of the studs at manifold to downpipe were sheared ( thats why it failed as it was blowing at that joint)-no other MOT problems.
The interior is excellent and outside there is a bit of work needed on one wing and also the rear quarter below the bumper is needing attention due I think to water getting in to the boot .
What i wanted to ask is how long can these cars be expected to go on for . Considering the age of the car I thought the MOT was pretty good.
Stuart
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I'd have thought that like many cars from the 80s a major factor is the time (not necessarily money) spent on repairs, maintenance and generally looking after the car.
If it goes on and cost less to keep going than a newer alternative, just keep running it until you've got to decide about a major bill or cluster of bills.
Why get rid of something that still has life in it?
David
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Stuart, I have an 88 CD and it has cost next to nothing to run over the last 6 yrs other than servicing. They tend to get expensive to keep going when the rear chassis rots, which they inevitably do. Great bangernomics cars.
Mike
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These seem to be very durable cars, especially mechanically. One thing that might be worth taking note of ...
A few years ago, a 2-litre Carlton belonging to a colleague at work was getting severe oil contamination of the air filter. He took the car, which had done 135,000 miles, to his local repair garage and was told that he needed a new engine.
I thought it worthwhile checking out the cause of the problem, because the engine ran so sweetly otherwise, and found that it was nothing more than a blocked breather gauze in the top cover. I replaced the gauze for him and the engine ran faultlessly for many thousand more miles.
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Hi David -
ther has been a thread on uk.rec.cars.maintenance about this recently,reports of serious blowback from the ol filler cap etc and all the suggestions are that the fault was blocked breathers .I am not sure if the up to '86 Carltons suffer from this .
Did you mean in your reply the problem was inside the Airfilter housing or the Rocker cover?.
Stuart
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Had a 1985 Carlton for many years . Cracking car,just went on and on. Left it a bit late getting some welding done to the bay panels and the suspension spread.
Used it for towing. I now run a 93 Carlton turbo diesel, a good car but not a patch on the old one
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Stuart,
It was a long while ago now and I can't remember the year of the car but it would have been around the same year as yours. It was the 2-litre cam-in-head engine (not the later overhead camshaft one). The problem was the gauze in the rocker cover, nothing wrong with the air filter system itself. I might have got the mileage a bit wrong, but it was very high and the owner was an all-year touring caravanner who didn't service his car very well, which says even more about the reliability and longevity of the Carltons.
What happened was that the engine was not running very well so he lifted the bonnet to see if he could spot anything wrong. He saw oil dripping out of the bottom of the air filter housing and when he took the lid off he found a pool of oil in the housing and the element badly wetted with oil. The garage man thought the oil was coming up through the carburettor and said that the engine was completely worn out.
But how could all this oil come up from the cylinders or wherever via the carburettor? And WHY? Knowing that there is a high flow oil through the camshaft chamber on these engines, I wondered if there was any way THIS could be getting to the air filter. I can't be sure (my memory is very weak on this) but I think there might have been two hoses from the rocker cover and the resistance to breather gas flow through one of them caused by the blocked gauze led to an excessive flow of gas (and hence oil carry-over) through the other.
Hope this helps.
David.
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A mate has a 88F with 225,000 miles on it he has replaced the cylinder head only because he got hold of a low mileage (100,000!!) engine cheaply however the gear box is original, It goes much better than his brother's 93L !! The interior still looks pretty good as well and will no doubt be still going in 225,000 more miles!
Still regularly gets over 30 mpg in it aswell
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