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Troubles with an Hillman Imp remembered

The Hillman Imp was another troublesome car, although comfortable with some extremely good features, for instance the wind up door windows (the Mini in the early 60’s, had draughty sliding windows.) Another good feature was the opening rear hatch, very useful for carrying long items. The floor on the Imp remained dry unlike the rusty Mini.
A starting handle, was another unusual extra that could be specified on Imps.
The Imp was quite economical, easy to drive, with reasonable performance, mine would reach about 90mph. but it had quite a few fundamental faults. All the expensive to rectify troubles let it down.
A design feature with the Imp was that the boot at front of car, contained the petrol tank and had to be opened to refuel.
The small front boot space was usually occupied with a convenient heavy item, like a bag of sand to keep the very light front end in contact with the road. The front wheels had excessive camber angle, which had the effect of wearing front tyres out on outer edges, the weighted boot helped to keep wheels and tyres level to alleviate this.
All the first Imps had a pneumatic throttle, this never worked correctly and was soon ditched in favour of cable operated.
The heater failed to work properly, probably because the heater pipes had to run through the sill’s on each side of the car, consequently water reaching heater matrix did not attain a very high temperature.

Imp’s have an all alumium engine, this was prone to overheating a new head gasket thermostat and radiator, was fitted to overcome this problem on my vehicle.
Next the gearbox started to make grinding noises, a gearbox overhaul plus a new clutch put this right, rotoflex couplings, and a hardy spicer were also renewed at this time. These troubles made a large dent in my bank balance.

The steering became heavy and modified kingpins and bushes were fitted to cure this.
The water pump started leaking and an expensive replacement was fitted.
One day after driving off the motorway, near to home, the Imp engine stopped, the distributor drive had sheared, although to be fair, this was an unusual fault.
I cadged a tow to my house and a replacement part was eventually obtained and fitted.
I had many other minor troubles with the Imp, Shortly after I decided enough was enough and after covering less than twenty thousand miles I sold the car.
R.I.P. Rootes

The Hillman Imp enthusiast’s club, have permanantly fixed most of these problems on their cars a lot of immaculate examples are still being used on a daily basis, making decent reliable transport. Bas.

Barry, from Hereford restored his Imp to perfection.