Ha ha yes he does! Though if you gave me long hair and squinted a bit I look a bit like Dave Myers. And we both like cooking...
2 steps have been made forward, which is always a good thing. Unless there's 3 steps backwards. Which in this case, there were. My wife's stepbrother has a Mini and wants to put a 1275 engine in it eventually, so bought a 1980 Allegro. In Brown. On hearing this, I went to look at it and he very kindly let me have the rad in exchange for helping him eventually fit a stage one kit to the Mini. So out came the rad (took 2 minutes) and I pilfered the expansion bottle too. I'll need to get a bracket for it as the one on the car had morphed into a huge nasty rusty blob on the inner wing. I left it there. I also took the thermostat housing & the sandwich plate as these will be more suited to the heater I am using.
However, the problem with removing the thermostat housing on a 33 year old car usually means they haven't moved in those 33 years. It took 45 minutes of bad language, brute force, double nut technique and a little ingenuity. I had to remove one of the studs at home (broken of course) as it resolutely refused to move. New studs required. I will clean up the housing & the sandwich plate in due course.
I decided to back flush the radiator so blocked off the pipe to the expansion bottle and put the hose in the outlet pipe. A bit of brown sludge came out and then it all ran clear from the inlet. And the middle of the radiator. Yup, it has a hole. I might see how much it is to recore as this one has solid looking metal end tanks as opposed to the rather fimsy plastic ones on my old rad. There's a rad specialist not far from me so we'll see how it goes.
In the meantime I have done some more sanding and finally removed the remains of the old screws which held in the headlining. Am getting depressed about the body work again...
Radiator, fan & expansion bottle, as removed.
Sandwich plate & thermostat housing. They were a struggle to remove.
And the reason I won't be using this radiator.