Morris Minor Owners Club

Are there supposed to be air ducts running from the heater (1963, round recirculating type with the rheostat on the front) to the demister vents under the windscreen? Mine appears to just vent into the general under-dash area. If there are meant to be ducts there, anyone got a set for sale?

there should be. Any auto place would do you some flexi pipes.

I used pipes that normally go from inlet manifold to airfilter housing, on modern cars. They come in all sorts of sizes.

Onne

I need to take the heater off to have a closer look at it (the motor doesn't run), but from peering under the dash with a torch it doesn't appear to have round outlets, so presumably there's supposed to be some kind of fitting that goes between the heater and the demister pipes? Was there any way to control whether the air goes to your legs or to the demisters, like the little doors on the sides of the Series Land Rover heater?

I don't know if you can control on the flow, but I can't on my Series II heater. It should have two pipes on the top, which should have ducts to the demister holes

Onne

I've got a feeling I might have seen the widget that goes between the heater and the pipes when I was sorting through the boxes of random junk that came with the car (there's loads of stuff that clearly doesn't have anything to do with Moggies, but I haven't thrown any of it away in case there's more useful stuff in there that I haven't recognised). I'll take a look when I get home.

I found the heater widget in among all the junk!

that's the one

Next mystery: there's a flap in the air intake that controls whether the air comes from the cabin or the crossmember at the back of the engine bay, but there's no mechanism (cable/lever) for controlling the position of this flap. I'm fairly sure I don't have one of those in among the junk.

The cable should be connected to a bracket on the bottom of the parcel shelf.

You're quite right, I've found it. I didn't think of looking at the parcel shelf because it wasn't attached to the car when I bought it

Sounds like you've got a proper 'bitsa' there mate. If the heater is un connected to the car take the oppurtuinity to flush it out. You will be quietly horrifid how much goo comes out and, hopefully, amazed how much better it works afterwards.

Ps love the signature, can't agree more

If it doesn't work, you're not hitting it with a big enough hammer.

Alex, you can just see the de-mister hoses through the speedo hole in this pic of Sophie.

Yep, it took a lot of flushing before the water turned clear. I had to take the rheostat apart and clean it up too, and the air passages will need cleaning out as they're bunged up with tiny flakes of rust and fluff.

I've been using this signature on the Internet for years. I think I first came up with it while attempting to remove the rear springs from my Land Rover with the aid of a small hammer, then a lump hammer, then finally a sledgehammer (the bolts had rusted solid into the bushes).