1964 Lancia Flavia Coupé

[vulgalour]

While my day (and sometimes a good portion of the night too) job is creating artwork for people, I do occasionally offer my time and services to JMP Restorations.  Find them on Twitter @jmpclassicresto and see what's been happening.  Had a natter with the owner of JMP and he's happy for me to put up a blog on one of the long termers, a car that's been shoved to the back quite a few times as it's not a customer's car but one JMP is restoring to enjoy and promote the business eventually.

 

Lancias aren't exactly commonplace to begin with, the Flavia coupé is even less so and that means finding some parts is going to be difficult though not impossible.  Things started off with what looked like a promising survivor in an unusual colour scheme, the reason for this two tone would become all too evident as you'll learn over the course of this thread.  Here's a couple of pictures from the advert, I've not been able to find any others of the car when it arrived at JMP but it looked the same as in these shots.

 

 

It looks quite nice really.  What you can't see are the scores to the paint on the roof, bonnet and boot lid, the bubbling around the edges of things or the very tired interior.  Nor can you see that the only brake that works is the hand operated one.  That said, the car had been in regular use for much of its life and it was only the failure of the braking system that saw it taken off the road... or so I'm told.

[eddyramrod]

Lovely!  When are you drawing it?

[Stanky]

That looks like a lovely beast, though from what I can only assume is many angles, the wheelbase seems to be contained within the centre 20% of the car, with the remaining 80% being overhang.

 

I assume, being a Lancia - the handling humbles every car built after about 1975, despite this obvious hindrance?

[Cheggers]

I still say they should have put the rear lights on the fins...

[HMC]

I love these pre fiat lancias, the detailing especially. One was being offered at a very salty price at an 'oldtimer' event I attended at the nurburgring last year. Lovely old thing....

[vulgalour]

With the interior removed - more on that at a later date, got to seek out some pictures - so that it could get retrimmed and repaired it was possible to get a look inside the cabin.  The Flavia is front wheel drive and the floor is almost completely flat with some box section for strength.  That means plenty of space to get around and do any repairs.  It's surprising how good the floor and arches appear to be too, especially so for a Lancia of this vintage.

 

Front passenger corner is probably the worst.

 

Driver's corner is pretty solid.

 

Driver's rear corner needs a little attention but again, nothing too complicated by the looks of things.

 

Passenger rear corner isn't great either and you can see the signs of a replaced arch (more on that later), there's a bit that looks slightly fiddly where the wiring loom attaches too.

 

Then the car got sidelined for quite a while when the garage got busy, as happens.  With the arrival of some new polishing gear I was set the challenge to see what I could do with the tired looking paint.  It became clear quite quickly that the dark grey is likely original while the pale grey is definitely later and didn't respond as well to being polished.  The brightwork, while dirty, is still in really good condition which removes a lot of the potential expense of restoring this car.

 

There's enough paint that some of the scratches from poor previous storage (not JMP, I hasten to add, it came with the scratches) actually polished out.

 

The roof is the worst panel, there's a couple of bits of damage in the paint that need touching in with a matching paint.  Easier to see in person than in pictures.

 

Left is the after and right is the before, really did come up well.

 

The grille badge needs a polish and repainting, an easy job.

 

There's some neat features on the Lancia too, like the central boot ram.  The boot itself is cavernous.

[vulgalour]

I've a couple more posts to make to get things up to today's date so I'll reply to comments then.  It's good to be getting stuck in to this one finally.

[purplebargeken]

Stunning car and I love the colour combo.

 

Nice to let you play around with the car and I can't wait to hear more about it.

[vulgalour]

Again, the car got put away for a while. I managed to take the dirty and dry steering wheel off, strip and clean it back and then apply a few coats of Danish Oil to refresh it. Terrible picture, but the wheel looks and feels far nicer now. It may get more work when the interior is retrimmed and fitted, depends how it looks against the new stuff.

 

 

A couple of days later I got some work in on some of the fiddlier brightwork. The petrol filler flap lock and the windscreen washer jets had both been painted badly, unfortunately the chrome isn't perfect on these items but they look better for being cleaned back. No picture of the filler lock.

 

Made a start on the grille too which came up surprisingly well. When the car arrived it had the remains of a badge bar and the clamps have crimped the grille surround which will need some gentle persuasion to be smooth again. Nice that the dirt and rust stains clean off to reveal more shiny, pit-free brightwork. Likewise the bumper which is surprisingly excellent.

 

[rainagain]

That's one nice looking car!

[HillmanImp]

I still say they should have put the rear lights on the fins...

 

I do agree but every beauty has a flaw.

 

Lovely looking car. 

[vulgalour]

With this post I bring you bang up to date because today the messiest job was undertaken on the car. Since the car arrived at JMP some cracks in the pale grey paint had begun to appear on the arches. It's no great surprise that someone might have used filler on the arches, it's a known problem on just about any old car. There was nothing for but to get stuck in! If this were a customer's car it would have been sent away for shotblasting to get everything cleaned back but with this one we have to keep the costs as low as possible and do as much of it as we can in house. It's a slow project, but it also has to be the lowest price it can be without overtly compromising the end result. Besides which, we didn't expect there to be enough filler in this car to warrant shotblasting it... how wrong we were!

 

Between bouts of flapwheel work the floor was wet down to try and keep the dust down and I was, of course, wearing eye and respiratory protection which was absolutely vital. I still ended up white from head to foot, the amount of filler in this car was astonishing and unnecessary.

 

Late in 2014 a start had been made on the rear driver's corner and a large chunk of filler came off. It was rather worrying because the car looked superficially sound. Today I finished that job and found some interesting repairs and an approach to panel beating that bore more resemblance to that episode of Father Ted with the Rover than actual repair work. Most of this will panel beat out because the metal is fundamentally sound and while there will need to be repair work to the bottom of the wing, it's a relatively simple shape. After stripping off the filler and rust, grey primer is applied to make it easier to see the condition of the panel, this will mostly be removed when the remedial work is undertaken and reprimed before paint.

 

This is an original arch. It needs some localised repairs on the lip and has had one in the distant past to the leading edge. There's some rust damage to the juncture between sill and rear quarter too and there may have been a replacement sill on this side. Without investigating further I shan't know.

 

The other rear arch has been replaced, as suspected, but in a very strange way. There's additional patches on the trailing edge that carry on the bottom of the rear wing, there's more filler to remove but the black underseal needs removing separately first. This arch is much worse too and ideally needs chopping off and replacing.

 

At this point I took a well earned break to let the dust settle, have a clean up of the garage and myself and something to eat. I was determined to investigate the serious bubbling on the bottom of the front passenger wing so I did that when I came back. The filler was almost all 1/4" thick, the bottom of the wing where the bubbling was most obvious the filler came off in massive flakes revealing a very rusty repair and some water. In places the filler was up to an 1" where it had been brought up to and well past any sensible body line.

 

Large chunks just came off, I was very worried at one point that there might not actually be any metal underneath and, in the case of the sill, there wasn't.

 

 

I got this far before having enough. There are traces of a Lancia teal colour on this repair so I think it was actually cut from a donor car a long time ago, the same could be true of the rear arch on this side. The welding on the repair is very solid, if ugly, but the technique is horrible. They've cut out the bad on the original wing, bashed the wing inwards then step-joined the new patch in from behind. To finish they've filled not to the line of the original wing but to some point about 1/8" beyond it and then smoothed it down to give an approximation of the original bodyline. Because the whole side of the car appears to have had this treatment you don't notice it until you start digging.

 

In places there are inexplicably big patches of pink fibreglass resin. They're not hiding joins or dents or flaws of any sort so goodness knows why they bothered.

 

Everything bar the last thick patch of filler primed ready for another day.

 

 

I suspect I'll have to cut out that front wing repair, clean up and straighten as much of it as I can and reweld it along a more proper line. I also suspect the other wing is going to be just as bad and I'm not looking forward to that. There's no sign of welding that I recall inside the door skins so we may be lucky and just have a lot of filler to remove from them, we shall have to see. It's very likely that everything painted pale grey is going to be stripped to bare metal now to find the extent of the problems before we begin to think about final paint colours.

 

That's you brought up to speed. Any time I have chance to work on this I'll update you. There is no timescale or deadline for this car and it's something I work on in my spare time. I should be doing the panel beating, welding, paint prep, interior retrim (apart from the seats), carpetting and brightwork restoration both to improve on existing skills and to save JMP a lot of labour costs. The end result will hopefully be stunning.

[vulgalour]

Lovely!  When are you drawing it?

When it's finished. Whenever JMP restores a car, I do a portrait for the owner.

 

That looks like a lovely beast, though from what I can only assume is many angles, the wheelbase seems to be contained within the centre 20% of the car, with the remaining 80% being overhang.

 

I assume, being a Lancia - the handling humbles every car built after about 1975, despite this obvious hindrance?

It does have rather strange proportions, really big wheels quite close together and long overhangs front and back. I don't know how it handles, but it pushes well.

 

I still say they should have put the rear lights on the fins...

Agreed.

 

I love these pre fiat lancias, the detailing especially. One was being offered at a very salty price at an 'oldtimer' event I attended at the nurburgring last year. Lovely old thing....

It's difficult to give them a nice adjective. They're not pretty, or handsome, but they're not inoffensive. I do like it though, certainly don't mind having the opportunity to work on it.

 

Stunning car and I love the colour combo.

Actually, that's a really accurate adjective for it. There's several choices for the new paint, sticking to the weird two-tone is one of them.

 

That's one nice looking car!

Yes... and yet sometimes I think 'nice' is a bit strong to describe its looks.

 

I do agree but every beauty has a flaw.

 

Lovely looking car.

Lovely is definitely too strong. The beauty of this car is comprised entirely of styling flaws, I think that's why it works so well.

[danthecapriman]

Lovely looking car, and well worth the effort restoring it.

It's amazing what filler hides! It looked pretty decent in the first pics.

[warren t claim]

All pre '65 cars are cool because you can remove the seat belts and drive around looking like a man confident about his driving.

[Sudsprint]

Mine has been off the road now for about 7 years and is a 1965 (but 1967 registered) Kugelfisher PF Coupe.

 

IIRC I think Sunbeam Arrow (i.e. Hillman Hunter) rear arches and used for to repair Flavia Coupes. 

 

Don't loose the rear lights as Jensen Club members have driven the price sky high (they also fit first series Interceptors).

[vulgalour]

When researching, Austin 1100 arches seem to be the favoured option though the Hunter/Minx arches might be the cheaper option.  I reckon we only need one, the driver's rear arch looks repairable.

[purplebargeken]

This has to be the best thread on here at the moment. Look forward to updates as and when. 

[flat4alfa]

Great thread

 

I wonder if this is the same car I used to see driving about in all weather around Kingston-upon-Thames in the late-nineties - as the top colour matches.  It was ropey (but lovely) with tappets as loud as a Simca (but still lovely)

 

A few years back I was close to buying the face/arse lift of this model in the form of a 2000 PF Coupe.  Much prettier rear deck styling for a start.  But it probably would have had no less rust than this one once it had been attacked with a flap wheel.   So I kept my Rover 3500S P6B instead and ran that for a year or two more.  Chicken.

 

Hats off to you!

[carlo]

Very enjoyable thread from the best forum in the world

[anonymous user]

Was this bought off ebay? I recall seeing something similar up for sale a while back; so far i have not bought a Lancia, came close a couple of times once with a later Fulvia which was a complicated deal involving a swap of my Morgan for the Lancia and an S4 Lotus 7, stupidly I walked away from that one as I didn't have space for two cars. The other was a Lancia Appia, it was a very pretty pillarless saloon which appeared to sag slightly if you opened all the doors at the same time, sensibly I walked away from that one.

[vulgalour]

Yeah, I think it was on the strength of some photographs.  It was an early purchase for JMP before I was involved with the business, things are done a bit differently now so these sorts of purchases are avoided or gone into eyes open much more.

[vulgalour]

I found one picture of the interior as was.

 

I also found a couple of pictures of the carpets/mats and seats.

 

 

The interior is going to be a lot of work, it needs completely redoing. Originally it was the colour of Morning Coffee biscuits. The front seat foams have dessicated. The carpets were given to a trimmer to make new ones who then discarded the originals and didn't provide replacements. The rear seat bench was given to a trimmer who only redid the base in red leather, and not brilliantly, so needs redoing in places. The parcel shelf and door cards need remaking and retrimming. The headlining was literally torn out of the car (by someone who no longer has anything to do with JMP) so I need to remake a new one from what's left. The dashboard foam has dessicated and the vinyl covering is fragile so that needs redoing, ideally in the original thermo-vac method of vinyl over foam. The dash veneer was broken by the same person that ruined the headlining.

 

But other than that, the interior is complete and not missing any of the difficult to find rare bits, as far as I know.

[anonymous user]

Almost one for the understatement of the year there, after describing the wholseale carnage of the interior, including parts ripped out and thrown away.

 

But other than that, the interior is complete

 

 

[Uncle Jimmy]

I clearly remember this Lancia for sale on the 'Car and Classic' site a few years ago- maybe ebay too....It was cheap for a coupe. The use of filler you describe is horribly familiar to me, I think it was sprayed on 1/4" thick. To me the colour lets it down; personally I'd see if Lancia did a suitable white.

Always seems odd to me that prole Fiat's in house designs as well as those they contracted were so much better than those of up market Lancia, with the exception of the Fulvia and 2000 coupe.

[vulgalour]

I don't rate them in white or silver, they look like the worst sort of wedding car crap.

[The Reverend Bluejeans]

I'm clearly missing something but:

 

a) are you still in Darling Ton?

 

Where on earth are you working? I know a few places in 'Darliow' having lived there 2-3 years.

[vulgalour]

Near Darlywarly, but not in.  We're over in Thornaby.

[barrett]

This has to go dark grey, dark blue or black. And for gods sake paint the wheels the proper colour and sack off those fog lamps. Yum.

 

It's a long way off, but if/when the 404 eventually moves to pastures new I plan to get one of these with my half of the proceeds. So hopefully while they are still relatively cheap. One of the best looking cars out there and, though I've never driven a fwd Lancia before, I bet one of the nicest drives too.

 

I know the easy option is to get this looking shiny and brand new but bare in mind any deviation from original will detract from its value, so if this is being restore to sell on you should stick with the correct cloth for the retrim. Lancias always look odd with leather, and I can only count on one hand the number of even half-decent leather retrims I've seen ever. Any decent trimmer can make a good job of cloth and it will appeal to the Lancia nerd who buys this (trusty me, Lancia folk are the most anal you're likely to encounter).

[vulgalour]

When I first saw the car and recognised its rarity I fought for originality, that's something I've learned about the market over the years.  You can't just slap a fashionable colour and trim the insides in leather and get megabucks on a car now unless it's something there's lots of.

 

There's enough original of the car left to keep it that way and a cloth interior I'm much more comfortable doing than a leather one because I've done it before.  A bottom half respray to match the top half, the wheels returned to factory colour, the interior retrimmed in biscuit cloth and a new white headlining will not only look right but cost a lot less than a full colour change.

 

I'm actually having trouble with the headlining fabric.  The B and C pillars are covered in a matching vinyl to the headlining which is a fine grain off-white and they don't need recovering.  Unfortunately, I can't find a small grain off-white vinyl to match them and the large grain modern vinyls don't look right.  I expect I'll end up having to retrim the B and C pillar trims and remake the headlining all in one go.