The Triumph Dolomite Club - Discussion Forum

'Ere we go then. This is what I got from Mick Dolphin, HARD is his writing and he ought to know the difference as he had both in stock to compare.

Mounted up in a vice with a clear brown splodge of paint.

Add two bolts from the bucket

a long screwdriver

and a stick for a pointer.

Measure 12 inches from the centre of the bush

and make a mark

also mark the stick.

2 tins of beans and a couple of bolts & washers reads exactly 1kg on the kitchen scales.

and the deflection is 19mm


Easy. If you can replicate this with your stock JPB & Cheesy hopefully soft ones will show a significantly different twist. I'll be down at Wins later this week & I'll see what he has for comparison.

Have vice, have mounts (same Metalastic batch numbers, but in Express Factors [o/e] boxes with the other part number on them, but same pink paint blob, as per my earlier pics. Also have ones with red blobs), will set this up when I'm next at home and report back with findings.

interestingly that the hard ones are 149934 which is the 1500 mount. john for a real comparision it would be better for Julian to test your mounts.

1300dolly wrote:interestingly that the hard ones are 149934 which is the 1500 mount. john for a real comparision it would be better for Julian to test your mounts.

That hopefully won't be necessary Justyn, Mick Dolphin says that the softer ones are a lot more flexible. This one is exactly as Mick described in that you can barely get any twist on it by hand whereas the others he describes as easily flexed.

I'm hoping that John finds one colour spot is close-ish to my brown one and the other colour markedly different. Or perhaps pink is just faded red and they'll all be different. We shall see.

It's ok chaps, I am just about capable of using a tape measure, taking some pictures and in other ways replicating the conditions used in Julian's test.

I may have to use a screwdriver with a black handle and make the mark in white, and my vice at home isn't painted, though it may have been 70 odd years ago when one of my Grandfathers bought it new but I think that my tape measure still has some visible markings on it so we'll be fine as long as it's ok for me to attend to the more urgent stuff first.

I'll have to use a bag of sugar for the weight since I'm planning to eat my last two cans of beans tonight and will probably be unable to find my old Hardy's spring balance - the only accurate means I possess of measuring weights above 28 grammes or thereabouts.

Sorry John I didn't mean it to sound as so you don't know what you are doing just that in my mind if someone does any type of test or comparison it it will get more accurate results if the same person does both comparisons but then this isn't an exact science.

tinweevil wrote:'Ere we go then. This is what I got from Mick Dolphin, HARD is his writing and he ought to know the difference as he had both in stock to compare.
...
Easy. If you can replicate this with your stock JPB & Cheesy hopefully soft ones will show a significantly different twist. I'll be down at Wins later this week & I'll see what he has for comparison.

I just love this test, brilliant!

I'm, afraid I fitted ours as soon as they arrived, so no opportunity to carry out tests!

The paint splodge on them looked very much like the one in the photo above, I described it as red but it was more of a mucky reddy-orangey-browny colour. However when I tried to twist the mountings by hand there was very little movement, so given the marked difference between "hard" and "soft" mountings I would say we now have the correct ones.

At Wins yesterday signing over another large slice of my soul for GT6 parts and he had one Metalastik in stock so I nabbed it for the science.

Here's the only paint mark on it.

And the result is....

So as hoped for markedly different. It's pointless trying to describe how twistable these are in hand, until we build confidence in the coloured markings this test is the way to identify any you have in stock. Even if the marks did go on in the factory (which we have no way of proving) we have no way to know they used colours consistently, they may have simply used any two colours that came to hand to differentiate a days batches.

Here's both in daylight hopefully go give a better colour rendition.

To my eyes and those of Mrs Weevil the brown is just brown, no ish-ness about it. The other I see as pink and Mrs Weevil calls peach.

Wins had some pattern ones in stock that felt closer to the hard than the soft but he had no matched pairs.

NB: All results are provisional pending independent validation at test site B. Which may of course throw a spanner in the works if the paint marks are reliable and red is a 3rd grade. The more people can repeat the test the bigger our sample size and the better chance we have of making sense of it.

And the results from Martyworld are in.......................

number 1 mount =NOS in rover box marked as 1850 mount with a peachy coloured paint blob, easily twistable by hand
Number 2 mount=NOS in rover box marked as 1850 mount with no paint blob, can not be twisted by hand.
All other mounts, mostly unboxed or box too tatty to read numbers do not have any paint blobs and are hard to twist.
The one with the peach coloured blob was far more noticably softer all are marked 'metalastic'.

Checked the mounts on my car yesterday and I'm after a pair of hard ones to use. There's a pair on ebay marked for Toledo, does anyone know the correct part no for Toledo? I've tried asking the seller for the numbers off the boxes but got nowt back.

I eventually got a reply on those mounts and now they're mine

Snagged another too

The remains of the paint on this one matches the brown on the other 3 so I am starting to believe the colour splodge may have more than passing significance. All three of these are concrete hard like the first one I tested. But what does red mean

A fairly unscientific way to tell what you have fitted on a car is just grab the rocker cover and try to move the engine side to side. On my HL (incorrect mounts) the engine moves a tiny bit. On Mrs Weevils TC the whole car moves before the engine moves relative to the bay.