A happy day today as I made good my shonky choke lever that stared at you like a broken finger in the console. Here was my starting point. The cause of this some time in the car's past is a combination of un-lubed 'sticky' choke cables and perhaps a flaw in the manufacture of the prong. It appears that the hole for the grub screw was not central to the metal and was for larger grub screw. Two together equalled weakened metal and snapped prong.
I recently sourced an entire series 1 assembly, with cables, at a
bargain price.
Mike (SacCyclone) kindly took a US delivery on that for me and brought it to the UK on his recent trip from California to Europe. So now to do the business ...
First up, having explored the fittings of the centre console a few weeks ago I decided I was going to replace the choke prong in situ for two reasons (1) not removing the entire centre console because I cannot yet determine how it detaches under the radio area (2) not detaching the full choke assembly hwich fixes upwards underneath the console plate because the forward screw towards the gear stick is not well accessible.
The approach the was simply to unscrew the rear of the console and lever it upwards, supporting it both at the rear and in the fragile area near the gear stick so the unit stayed straight.
Removing the broken piece required removal of just two screwed bolts. Access a little tricky from the back - you need to hold the bolt heads in order to remove the nylon lock nuts. I used both a ratchet with extension and an adjustable head wratchet spanner.
Once off, an interesting comparison of the two. It seems two sub-variants of cable attacment housing on series 1 choke assemblies. The next pic is one for all you geeks out there
What looks like the older version has a brass screwed bar, brass cyclinder and metal widget for the cable to loop through. The metal widget makes quite a narrow radius for the loop What I'd say is the improved version has a nylon widget for the cable loop, the radius is also larger, and there's a standard nut+bolt fixing - the cable itself (not pictured) is also plastic coated where it makes its loop around.
The trickiest manoeuvre of all was installing the new prong. After a few attempts I worked out to tackle the cable fix first - clipping on the widget, squeezing the nylon washers between it and the prong and with much wiggling and faffing pushing the bolt through all five elements from the rear. Once on, a simple job to put the bottom bolt back on.
Now all is good. Looks smart and is now a very rare example of a complete series one choke/throttle combination