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Dicky’s Disastrous Debris - Steering wheel restoration 3/9/22


Angrydicky

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2 minutes ago, Angrydicky said:

ah interesting :) so it looks like they have dropped that then

its a shame, you can no longer tell when an old car was computerised now!

thanks for grabbing that info for me, its something that I have been wondering for a while now so its good to have answer to it

(I wonder if the info is still on the system but just not printed anymore or if they dropped it entirely?)

 

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How how how have I missed this thread!! I saw it over on the book of faces, but so glad I’ve found the thread! This is truly the most epic of cars, utterly lovely and very glad you’re the one restoring this! Wonderful work!! Not enough like buttons available for all the likes I wanted to give.

(although I apologise for the number of notifications you will have received as a result of me catching up) 

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  • Angrydicky changed the title to Dicky’s Disastrous Debris - the Hampshire gives up its secrets 1/4/21
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1 hour ago, Angrydicky said:

....Does anyone know where or what “Ivy Series” was? He seems to have been a regular there, with various differently priced tickets.

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That £1 ticket for the NCP in Queensway: the NCP is still there.

The Ivy Series might be something to do with cycle races.

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Those 'Ivy Series' tickets are I think from a fairground or theme park, which does tie in with the other ephemera.  "Ivy Series" is either the print company or the brand of tickets, it's not the place or event.  They'd also sometimes be used at bingo halls, or more local fairgrounds and village fetes, though they look a bit more professional and large scale so I'd be leaning more towards Alton Towers and the like.  A lot of those places the car has been reminds me of the sorts of places we'd go when I was little so it must have been very much a Derbyshire sort of thing.

 

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I'm with you of the value and importance of the individual story of a car.  Any little snippets which help rebuild a forgotten picture are invaluable and your Austin clearly has many of those little gems. Did the owner's nephew inherit any photos from him? A car which has been such an integral part of the family to the point that the owner stored it for three decades as he couldn't bear to part with it speaks volumes. Photos of it in its heyday would be the cherry on top I'd have thought. 

On a different note, how's your welding? 😛

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Crikey, what a history file. Astonishing that so much of it has survived so well, despite the endemic damp.

I'm always interested in price equivalencies - so couldn't help but feed some of the numbers into the Bank of England's inflation calculator...

If the Hampshire had a windscreen price of £285 from Lee's Car Sales in September 1959:

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That's nearly £7k in today's money - for what was then a nine year old car.

A fair whack, it has to be said - and the £40 charge for the Hire Purchase arrangement would add the equivalent of over £1000 to the overall cost in 2020 prices.

The Gold Seal engine in 1962...

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Grand and a half - plus another £170 equivalent for the new carb.

That's serious coin, for a twelve year old car which would have been looking pretty dated by this time - the same year the Cortina and Morris 1100 were launched. Clearly, this Hampshire was really cared for by someone who appreciated its very traditional qualities.

It's the social history from the files that really draws me in too - the details of who owned it and fretted about it, the streets where it would have been a familiar sight, the places it travelled to. The trove of tickets in the glove box really is the icing on the cake.

I'm very glad this one's been saved!

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On 30/03/2021 at 23:07, Angrydicky said:

The main identity plate on Counties Austins is a little Bakelite plate usually fitted on the back of the drivers sunvisor. Sadly, the sun visors in this car have really suffered. have have a good spare Somerset one that looks the same to me but the all important plate is in very poor condition on this car. There is a bloke in Canada doing repros but they’re just not the same. The chassis plate, the one riveted to the chassis, has actually corroded through the middle on this car! 

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Pendant mode - that's not Bakelite. It looks like Ivorine, which shrinks with age - hence the state.

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8 hours ago, LightBulbFun said:

(PS may I advise you crop the image so the right side of your first picture so the Chassis number etc is not visible?) 

Ordinarily perhaps; I doubt there's a Moriarty out there waiting for an opportunity to ring that priceless Austin Hampshire they've been lumbered with.

  

1 hour ago, R1152 said:

Pendant mode - that's not Bakelite. It looks like Ivorine, which shrinks with age - hence the state.

Fascinating rabbithole there; also called Ivoride, Ivoroid, Pyralin and French Ivory, a form of celluloid which was easy to colour and used as an ivory substitute for cost and "we've nearly killed all the elephants to make billiard balls" reasons. Wildly flammable and as shown not exactly stable. Made by the marvellously named British Xylonite Company, amongst others.

  

On 3/30/2021 at 11:07 PM, Angrydicky said:

The main identity plate on Counties Austins is a little Bakelite plate usually fitted on the back of the drivers sunvisor. Sadly, the sun visors in this car have really suffered. have have a good spare Somerset one that looks the same to me but the all important plate is in very poor condition on this car. There is a bloke in Canada doing repros but they’re just not the same. The chassis plate, the one riveted to the chassis, has actually corroded through the middle on this car! 

EED79E22-CCE9-4FDA-8A07-6AD74EEC4B27.thumb.jpeg.c55e4b7f0e02955a0b38241b52403661.jpeg

What's amiss with the repros? Is the typeface wrong? It is quite distinctive, almost like it was molded rather than stamped; from what I've read of Ivorine it probably was a hot stamping/pressing process as it's a thermoplastic, even the chassis and engine numbers don't look engraved and they would be indexed for every vehicle so the typesetting must have been an easy or automatic process.

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The fidelity of 3D printing is probably near enough there to recreate that look, although if the typeface isn't a standard one recreating it would be a ball ache; as the original is a 2D artifact it might be amenable to being scanned and processed that way.

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We've got number stamps at work but they're much bigger than those ones. Reading the Canadian website again, they also just supply the plate itself and it's up to you to hot stamp it. 

Knowing how fussy Healey owners are I'm surprised no one's stamping these up with the correct stamps. At least the plates themselves have been remanufactured. They never would have been had they not been used on early Healeys.

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10 hours ago, somewhatfoolish said:

Fascinating rabbithole there; also called Ivoride, Ivoroid, Pyralin and French Ivory, a form of celluloid which was easy to colour and used as an ivory substitute for cost and "we've nearly killed all the elephants to make billiard balls" reasons. Wildly flammable and as shown not exactly stable. Made by the marvellously named British Xylonite Company, amongst others.

It can also be a casein-based plastic; which IIRC was derived from milk!

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Absolutely brilliant finding all that old paperwork, that's one of the things I love about old cars, they have a story to tell and the scraps of paper often say more than the car can.  I was a bit disappointed that my Princess came with almost no paperwork at all, so I was delighted to find some long-lost garage bills and tiger tokens (plus a 1992 tin of cat food) under the back seat when I took the carpets out.  

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Cleaned up an obvious bad connection at the fuse box. Operating the trafficator switch produced a small noise as one trafficator tried to operate. I helped it out and sprayed lubricant onto the hinge until it worked really well. Did the same on the other side. Both trafficators now work superbly, even the bulbs work. They are very nice ones with none of the usual slop, which is probably because it’s had flashers since the early 60s and they haven’t really had much use. The wiper motor also now works correctly, albeit it is very slow. I’ve lubricated the wheelboxes behind the dash but the motor ideally needs opening, cleaning and greasing. The flashing indicators are completely dead but I’m not bothered about those as I intend to remove them anyway.

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Having spent the last few days indoors, the foam base of the rear seat dried out nicely, so I popped it back in. I still can’t believe how good the seats are on this car.

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I spent some time today going through the electrical system trying to get a spark. I have 12v at either side of the coil (with the other wire of the multimeter to battery earth) but put the two multimeter wires on the two coil connections and I get nothing whatsoever. I’m guessing this is something broken inside the coil? I’m not overly confident with electrics, but I have started with the obvious by cleaning all the connections in sight.

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I’m not sure what that small cylinder wired to the coil SW terminal is. It looks like another condenser.

One of the good things about this car is the wiring is very good. It’s had one or two modifications over the years, but it’s mostly original and sound.

I did discover some more serious rot unfortunately. A 12” wide section of the middle of the horizontal bulkhead, under the battery tray and the box that would have contained the optional radio, is rotten as a pear. The only way of sorting this really is cut the radio box out get access to do it from on top. I guess the tarp was torn over the scuttle as you can see where it’s been exposed long term. The water has been running down past the seal in the scuttle air vent and the wiper spindle grommets (one of which has a load of tape around it) for years. I’ve pulled out the last of the soggy and mouldy sound deadening under the dashboard now so I can get a proper look at the extent of the rust. Ah well, I’ll ignore it for the moment. I’m not planning to rush into the welding.

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  • Angrydicky changed the title to Dicky’s Disastrous Debris - Trafficators 2/4/21
57 minutes ago, Angrydicky said:

Cleaned up an obvious bad connection at the fuse box. Operating the trafficator switch produced a small noise as one trafficator tried to operate. I helped it out and sprayed lubricant onto the hinge until it worked really well. Did the same on the other side. Both trafficators now work superbly, even the bulbs work. They are very nice ones with none of the usual slop, which is probably because it’s had flashers since the early 60s and they haven’t really had much use. The wiper motor also now works correctly, albeit it is very slow. I’ve lubricated the wheelboxes behind the dash but the motor ideally needs opening, cleaning and greasing. The flashing indicators are completely dead but I’m not bothered about those as I intend to remove them anyway.

34120555-29F3-44A4-BC1D-8423ECB031DE.thumb.jpeg.ba88adad5c70045cc5b2e1eda52cec4f.jpeg

 

8519BDCB-2F19-4E52-AD7A-7F9008256FE1.MOV 17.66 MB · 6 downloads

that was quite interesting, I had never seen trafficators operated up close before :) I like the nice Thunk they make!

(if you sneak up behind the car shout BOO! really loudly do they both spring out in an alarmed fashion? :mrgreen: )

do you plan to add a flasher unit so the lightbulb inside flashes like a modern indicator, or do you plan to leave it as is?

 

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