Wednesday 23rd February 2012

 It was a busy day for Snowdrop the vintage Rover that we are gradually restoring here in the workshop. This car is thought to be one of only eight left in the country. As such we are trying to get every detail right down to the correct wood screws in the base of the seats correct so that the car can hopefully become a rolling record of what one of these cars would have looked like when new. This way if another is unearthed in the future, there's a point of reference.

 

Currently most of the work is centred around the sill or rocker panel assembly on the main body tub. The complexity is quite surprising as the section is made up from four or five sections of steel built up. Some run the length of the car, some are short odd shapes that layer over each other like scales on a fished back.

Between each layer is a layer of rust. The dilemma is how much to cut away at each stage before the shell becomes too weak to support it's self and sags out of shape.

The whole area has already had a second visit to the blast cleaner and the exposed metalwork, once cleaned back has been treated by a solution of Rust Buster- which was highly recommended by Practical classics magazine after year log trials. Over this where steel will be resting against steel, a layer of my favourite anti rust paint ( Bonda resin based high zinc paint, hard as nails and heat proof for welding) has been put on and allowed to dry off. The edges of the repair sections were then polished back to give a good key for the welder to bite into.

Owner Chris has made the repair sections up firstly by making a template from cereal packet and then transferring the design to the sheet steel. The first sections are a good fit.

 

Welding was disturbed last night by the arrival of the new wooden roof structure. Our local joiner ( ex graphic designer and car enthusiast) has mad a fantastic job of replication the original. One deviation is that he has formed the curvature of the roof line from a solid beam of wood on each side which is very clever. The original however turned out to be a straight plank that the manufacturers simply cut slots into and then bent to shape and held in place with copious amounts of mastic.

                                                     Who is that handsome devil? Oh it's me!

 

Further welding and panel manufacture is planned for the next few days.

 

Thursday 1st August 2011

Here's a selection of recent photographs of Chris's Rover 10hp.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I'll try to add some comments to the photographs later on.

 

1th August 2011

 

Thursday 10th August 2011

 

The vintage Rover Luvax system.

 

Chris has taken full advantage of his knowledge of the Luvax lubrication system as fitted as standard to his 1934 Rover. For those unfamiliar with the system, a reservoir situated in the engine bay is filled with oil. The oil is pumped along a set of thin bore brass tubes to various lubrication points on the chassis.

 

 

The pump for this is powered via the vacuum from the engine inlet manifold. As the oil enters the various points it's filtered by a tiny filter in the last union which also administers the correct amount of oil.

 

Ingenious really. 

 

Sadly the system regularly failed in service because mechanics would try to pump grease into the thin bore pipes and before long the whole system would be clogged. Chris spent some time heating the tubes up to liquefy the congealed mess and clear the pipes. The unions were cleared by gently tapping them on a bench ( you can't poke them with anything for fear of damaging the tiny filters).

Since completing the job, Chris has located a Bentley garage that still supplies the parts for this self lubricating system. Apparently the Bentley had a slightly inferior version....

 

Today Chris was in applying the final touches. He's added some later connections to the system not used on a 10HP rover of this year. The extra pipes feed the water pump and one of the brake unions to the rear of the car. You'd be hard pushed to realise that this was non-standard- even if you know your Rovers as Chris has taken pains to use the right clips screws and washers for the job. It all looks very authentic. 

Next week the welding on the main chassis tub resumes.

 

 

 

 

Tuesday, 22 March 2011

 

Rover 10hp update

Snowdrop has had plenty of attention lately. The welding has begun to the inner bodywork and  the remaining mechanical jobs are just about done. A few weeks ago Chris the owner fitted the car's stainless exhaust back on the car. 

A problem immediately obvious was that the silencer had not been welded up quite square. Not a problem in its self as you can't really see the exhaust that well on the completed car. However to get the exhaust mount to fit the chassis was going to be a problem and even if the exhaust was bent towards the mounting area , the result would have eventually been a fracture at some point. The first job was to wheel the oxy-acetylene kit over and heat the exhaust pipe just beyond the silencer until it was glowing cherry red. By using two suitable lengths of timber the exhaust was straightened out.

      Now that Chris has re-painted the area you'd never know.

 The next job was to fabricate the new bracket to link the exhaust to the chassis. Chris used a piece of cardboard to make a template and from this made up two rubber insulators. Using the insulators as the next template, the metal part was made from a thick off cut of steel that I had in my scrap bin. Once painted the parts were made into a "sandwich2 of  insulator/ bracket/ insulator and bolted in place. The result looks right. A small item on the list of jobs but it's good to get it right.

 

The restoration of Snowdrop, the 1943 Rover 10hp continues to move along nicely. This is despite the false alarm that the Body shell ready to be collected from the blast cleaner. Apparently they phoned to say it's ready to be blasted not it's ready.

The challenge of getting the pin through the rear spring shackle and chassis has been met by Chris. As mentioned last time no-one ever bothers to change this pit so it wasn't really well known that this is an interference fit. In other words the pin was almost too large for the hole it had to go through.

Chris spent some time with a blow torch heating up the chassis to expand the metal and make the hole larger while the pin sat in the freezer contracting. At the critical moment the two were brought together and the pin was tapped home. Apart from an accidental missed blow with the hammer which created a chip, the job on both sides went well and we were impressed that the pour 15 paint form Frost Restotaion stood up well to the heat and general bashing going on. With the pin in the next job was the fun re-fitting of those leaf springs using a tool that Chris had mad from a pair of long threaded bar.

This is one of those jobs that looking at it doesn't reveal the amount of time effort and forethought that goes into getting to this stage.

Other jobs on the boil involve getting the right gasket for the carb to manifold joint on the engine. Chris bought this from Meteor spares who I would say we are quite lucky to have around making spares for these cars ( there are only eight known to the club).

Unfortunately, in this instance our luck didn't hold and the wrong gasket appeared. Chris also ordered from the same supplier some door rubbers. Last time he made some from some bicycle brake blocks but as some types of door rubbers are now being re-manufactured by Meteor he thought it worth ordering some new ones. Sadly these aren't quite right either and so it's back to the drawing board. I'm sure a substitute will be found.

Whilst working on the front end of the chassis, the water pump has been changed. The original has a crack in the mounting flange and although it won't be replaced, a reconditioned one has been bought. The replacement one has been well overhauled but continuing with the theme, the conditioners paint has been removed and it's been painted the correct black.

Other work occurring with this project:

Chris has taken all the glass away to remove the panes from the chromes frames and get the old seals off. Another of those time consuming jobs as the old Bostic that the windows had been glued in with in the '80's? was still pretty gummy.

The interior trim is now at our coach trimmers being re-done with Connolly hide. It's thought that the car will go through seven complete hides in order to properly cover everything. Readers of the facebook page will no doubt have seen that the front seats have at some point had "visitors". Woodworm.  The only thing to do was ask our local joiner to make some more for us. Stu did a brilliant job and managed to get all the details from the originals transferred. A second set have been made for Chris's next project. Stu is also making headway with the roof frame- the original is also rather woodwormy. This is a more challenging job as the ash frame curves in all directions. I'm sure that it will be a nice job though.

 

One final  job. The original Lucas junction box for the electrics on the Rover was made from Bakelite, the lid of which was a steel item that was pressed down with a pop- a similar idea to the tamper-proof lids on Baby food. Sadly the lid was missing and the Bakelite is cracked so with a little ingenuity, Chris has paid a visit to his local screw-fix outlet and made a substitute from PVC plumbing components.

Whilst this in no was could be described as a replica, it was very handy that even the pipe bore size was identical to the original! It should work well until Chris manages to find an original replacement.

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Previous update.

The Rover 10 has been progressing well although the new year started with the discovery that to fit the new rear spring hanger bolts, the chassis eye would require heating up as there's no bush for the hole, it's an interference fit. This will singe the paintwork but we really don't have a choice. Apparently few people remove this bolt so it's not common knowledge.

 

The hubs have also been removed. The original method for securing the wheel studs was to pean over the backs. All well and good until the car is the best part of 80 years old and the metal is getting brittle. Recent disturbance has caused some of the studs to work free. The solution was to pull the hubs, clean up the backs and tack weld as required.

This is now done.

On a more positive note, the seats have gone away to the trimmer. It is thought that seven Conelly hides will be needed to do this job. Again our little friends have been at the wood work. The tell tale holes and dust let us know that woodworm is in residence and most definitely live. 

 

Owner Chris tells me that the attraction for the pests is that the old ply used is held together with glue made from animal blood. Not very nice but then apparently modern ply glue leaches formaldehyde! Joiner Stuart has one sample of the seat bases in his shop now to make some woodworm free replacements.

 

Quite a fair bit has happened since the car was last featured. In fact I'm surprised at how out of date things have got

 

Once the restored chassis arrived from Chris the owner, the first stage was to get the main body tub back onto the chassis for assessment. The bodywork was largely complete and was sitting on a temporary "chassis " made from lengths of 2x4 timber and some car dollies so that it could easily be moved around.

 

Originally I had intended to borrow our landlords overhead gantry and simply lift the body tub into the air and roll the newly restored chassis down onto it. Of course in my usual way I'd not actually got around to firming plans up and so on the allotted day the gantry was still next door, locked up in another unit.

 

To make matters worse there wasn't the space in our workshop that I'd hoped for and so we had to find another way to do the job. In the end the whole thing turned out to be relatively easy with Sadie and Chris working together, the body was jacked up and longer timbers were lifted up under the car, the ends being supported by axle stands. The chassis was then rolled underneath and the body was lowered down.

It is known that the car has a bot of a thump in the 1950's and so the body and chassis were slightly twisted. The chassis has been straightened and I did wonder if the body would now rock on the chassis like a table with one odd leg. Worse still, if this was the case we knew that we couldn't simply force the body down onto the chassis without possibly introducing stress cracks later on.

 

Luckily I was impressed to see that the body fitted the chassis almost perfectly and only one mounting point has a gap ( even this is fairly narrow). 

It had been the intention at this point to completely build up the body onto the chassis for assessment but it became apparent that this was probably not required. A meeting was held between the painter ( Nick) the owner ( Chris) and myself to discuss what our next move should be.

In the end it was decided to now fully strip the shell down, get the body blast cleaned and then send it directly to Nick for paintwork. There will be some bodywork to do on this car but it seems to be fairly low scale. The worst of the problems will be the doors which have damage on the drivers side ( that accident) .

                                                                   Woodworm!

Luckily Nick has a wheeling machine and so he has very kindly offered to make  the compound curved door skins and fit them in his workshop. Meaning that when the car leaves here we won't see it again until it's a shiny kit of restored parts to put together.

 

The strip down started in earnest yesterday morning and didn't finish until after six that evening. Sadie and Chris put in over 18 combined hours and will finish the job today. As always the strip down was quite an education. Firstly Sadie had discovered that some of the white metal parts from the door lock had crumbled. We have some ideas on how to repair these parts- more on this as it happens. All four lower door skins had been repaired- not too badly by we need to review this after blasting.

There have been some un- invited guests. The sawdust told us that we have woodworm in dome of the trim. As we had assumed that we would be renewing much of the woodwork, this isn't a problem but we are trying to preserve these delicate parts as a pattern. Some of the woodwork to the rear of the car is missing. This explains why the rear blind had been mounted the wrong way around- nothing to mount it to. Luckily we have Denzil, Snowdrop's un-restored twin to use as a pattern for the missing parts.

Most of the car has now been dismantled, carefully wrapped, labeled and boxed for future work. 

 

 

Rover Update  November 2010

Things are gradually dropping into place on the P1 front. The very first job was to get the chassis of the first P1 project back together and rolling. The owner has elected to do this himself. 

 

 

 

You tend to think of a chassis being a very strong and rigid structure and whilst this may be the case on the latest super kit space frame, on a 1930's vehicle there will be a certain amount of flex. We intend to trial fit the body work back onto the chassis almost as if we were re-assembling it for the last time to assess what work needs doing.

 

 

 

If we were to trial fit the car onto a rolling chassis, restore it and then try to fit it to a rolling chassis with the weight of an engine fitted up front, we may find that the panel gaps are all over the place. For this reason the whole chassis is being assembled complete with the engine and gearbox.

 

 

 

I have to say that the finish of this part of the job looks spot on. I was wondering if the gearbox had been painted or vapor blasted as it was so bright. The owner informs me that it's silver paint. Not perhaps original but  cleaned ally castings powder over a period of time so perhaps this is more practical.

 

 

 

The running chassis is nicely detailed I'm looking forward to seeing this project further progressing in the workshop at some point this month.