project 1951 Lanchester LD10 - Brake Switch & Mouse

[Datsuncog]

I see no problem with that - just make sure you leave a little typewritten card stating 'Temporarily on loan to the Vulgalour Collection'... 👍

[vulgalour]

Remarkably, the original steel splash guards are still mostly present on this car, perhaps lending credence to the low mileage shown on the odometer, especially given the total lack of any rust protection whatsoever beyond factory paint.  I decided to make some new ones and it ended up a little bit more involved than I was expecting.

 

[Angrydicky]

Great to see an update. Love this old girl!

[SilverMachine]

nice update vid fella, although im assuming recorded last year? that u channel stuff looks handy and the rubber mat

[vulgalour]

Yeah, the Lanchester footage, and the Princess footage for that matter, is from a while ago.  Just taken me a while to get through the editing pile.  Lucky for me really, it means I've had plenty of content to upload while I've been unable to record new stuff!

I'm trying to get things balanced out a bit over the next couple of months, hopefully there will be a few more Lanchester updates sooner rather than later.

[vulgalour]

 

A proper look at that donor car we acquired a while ago and why it wasn't worth even attempting to restore.  As a parts car it was absolutely ideal.

[vulgalour]

Digging into the spares that came with the car, including the nightmare jigsaw puzzle that is the engine.

 

[vulgalour]

One thing that hardly ever comes across on camera is just how far gone a donor car really is.  While the donor car looks like it could be repaired, realistically it had every kind of rot it was possible to have and required some extensive reconstruction that really wouldn't make any sense.  That's before you even get into the bits that were missing, like the entire gearbox, which were going to be a nightmare to source.  No, far better that this one dies so that ours can live on.

Angle grinder time for this rusty old hulk.

 

[SilverMachine]

i was secretly hoping you would take the face off for some outdoor art or possible trailer face to go behind the complete car! endless possibilities with the end of a car!

when i was a teenager i always wanted a caddy or 57 chev boot sofa that were not terribly common over here! think i looked at an austin 3 litre in a scrapyard (kinda the closest thing similar at the time!) and then realised id not get the back end in my room....  - maybe i should have another look next time im at the yard, there was an old rotten rover p6 there a while ago, or look at jaaaaaaags....

https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1957-chevrolet-bel-air-style-sofa/

 

[purplebargeken]

There is some advanced levels of rust on the donor car but at least it is providing some useful bits as well as potential repair sections, so a clear win.

[vulgalour]

Another instalment in dismantling the donor vehicle.  If you ever wanted to know how Lanchester LD10 doors are held on, this is the video for you.  Some bonus de-rusting content too.

 

[vulgalour]

Want to know how to remove the fuel tank and windscreens from a Lanchester LD10 sports saloon?  Wonder no more, I've got a video for that.

 

[vulgalour]

The donor car strip down continues, pretty much down to the chassis in this one.

 

[vulgalour]

Rod operated drum brakes in a 1950s car?  It's more likely than you think.  Taking the front suspension apart was interesting since I had no instructions and couldn't get spring compressors in to help... turns out it wasn't really an issue.

 

[vulgalour]

Time to put bits back on and together!

 

[lesapandre]

On 12/11/2025 at 11:27, vulgalour said:

Rod operated drum brakes in a 1950s car?  It's more likely than you think.  Taking the front suspension apart was interesting since I had no instructions and couldn't get spring compressors in to help... turns out it wasn't really an issue.

 

These little Lanchesters were designed and scheduled for launch in 1939 - so the War stopped all that as most of the UK car companies turned to the War effort. 

The parent company made the famous Dingo armoured car during the war - again with a pre-select gearbox.

It was finally introduced in 1946 - so by the early 1950's Lanchester were still making what was basically a Pre-War car.

Rod operation of brakes at BMC persisted on the rear of the Austin A40 up to 1964 and remained on the rear of the Austin A35 van until it's demise in 1968 - which is probably the last use of rod operation on a mainstream UK vehicle? 

[vulgalour]

 

[vulgalour]

Okay, in a bid lately to try and get back to the old words-and-pictures posts, I'm here with one for the Lanchester.  We'd got up to part 25 before my nicely organised way of posting went all pear shaped, so this is part 26 of the series, and chapter 11 of replacing the wiring, because it was that sort of a job.

 

The big update on this one was that I finally had working headlights!

How about that?  The only issue was that with the ignition on, the dynamo was running, which it shouldn't be.  I didn't really know what I'd done so I speculated at the time that it might be that the battery was low or something like that.  I made sure the auxilliary belt was removed to reduce any potential load on the dynamo should that be the issue, you can see the dynamo here, it's a nightmare to get out or fit.

Because of this, and some other gremlins, it was time to start some trouble shooting.  This is made more difficult because I couldn't find a wiring diagram that matched our car, or the wiring loom provided, exactly.  I'm also a complete novice at this sort of thing and not particularly confident and, at the time (this was January 2023).  I didn't have anyone to call on for help and as usual was too skint to call someone out to help so it was a case of persisting, trying to be methodical, and learning. This corner is the most complicated looking bit where the loom emerges into the boot from the chassis, and then feeds out to the rear lights.  It's also where one of the main earth points is, something I'd had to guess at since much of the wiring the car came to us with had been messed about.

The biggest issue was that I couldn't get any of the rear lights to work at all.  There aren't many connectors back here, so there's only so many  combinations of colours that apply.  Trouble with electrics is you can't see a problem in the same way you can with something mechanical so I was very quickly out of my depth here since I'm a very tactile problem solver.  One suggestion was that perhaps the contacts in the voltage regulator were furred up or stuck, so I had a look in there and while there is some fuzziness, they're not actually that bad on the contact surfaces.  The only thing of any note was that the dynamo stopped whirring after opening this up and then, after a little while, started again. I would learn what the cause of this was later, I just hadn't at this point.

Rather than beat my head against a wall with this one, I decided to see if I could fix anything else and hopefully eliminate or find the problem that was causing the issues with the dynamo and the rear lights while doing so.  Sometimes this approach can help you to see a solution you'd not thought of.  I turned my attention to the driving and fog lights on the front of the car, a pair of Marchals in careworn condition that matches the rest of the car quite nicely.  This was also when I learned that while there is a wire labelled on the diagram I was using for  a 'pass light', it isn't present on the loom I have.  This was one of the things that would cause me to make a mistake without realising it, and a good example of how much my inexperience of this sort of thing was causing problems of my own making.

Going underneath the car, one issue that needed addressing was the speedo cable routing, that's the metal cased on in the foreground below, which is very badly routed here and is how the car came to us.  It really shouldn't be draped over the exhaust like this.  The routing of the battery cable, further back in red, is also not ideal.

These weren't the things I was going under the car to investigate.  I wanted to check if the brake switch was actually doing its job and maybe find out if that was interfering with the functionality of the rear lights.  Process of elimination here. What's fitted isn't the original brake switch, and it's not an original style one either, I don't actually know what it's from, just that it has enough plastic to it that it is likely from about the time the car came off the road in 1984.

While I was under there I was reminded of an interesting historic repair to the battery lead.  The battery on the Lanchester lives under the car in front of the rear passenger wheel, which is why the cable is so long.  Someone in the past has done something to this and it's not... great.  Given how close it is to the exhaust I do wonder if perhaps the damage is related to that somehow.  This cable shouldn't just be hanging loose under the car, it should be tucked away up in the chassis or similar.

Unfortunately, the front floor had to come out to access the upper side of the brake switch bracket because the nuts on the bolts were not captive, which was just brilliant, loved that for me.  I did eventually get it removed, nothing about the way it was fitted made removal easy.  With it off the car it was even more obvious that this was a newer switch than you'd expect to find on a car this age.  Still no idea what it's from.

I couldn't find anything amiss with it once it was off the car so I had to accept it was probably okay at this point.  This was also before we got the donor car, so at the time of recording I really didn't know what I was going to do for a replacement switch, and just assumed something generic would work, like the suggested Land Rover switch which sounded parts bin enough to be available when the Lanchester was built and would have been a pragmatic solution rather than fitting something proprietary.  I had a bit of a think about what was working and what wasn't, some components I'd tested were working as they should independently, and then not when on the car.  So the headlights were only working on main beam, the rear lights weren't working at all, the brake light switch didn't seem to do anything, and no running lights.  The indicators weren't yet wired up which is why they weren't working, but that shouldn't have affected anything else anyway at this point in proceedings.

With all that in mind I decided to have a break, stop staring at a problem I couldn't see, and turn my attention to testing the rear lights off the car.  If I could prove that they were working independently, than I could at least eliminate those as the reason for things not working on the car, in theory, and chase the problem further down the wiring to find out where things were going wrong.  Rear lights are nice and easy to test, it's just three wires (brake, running, and earth) and a battery.  It would also be the best way to check the bulbs themselves were okay.

Don the Lucas L464 ribbed lens that I didn't break (well done me) so we don't dazzle the camera, and see if these units work.  Happily, they work just fine, as you can see.  Off, running, and brake respectively.

The other thing we did was test the reflector colour.  Originally these are painted an off white cream colour, at some point one of ours had been repainted in red oxide so we opted to give that a go with chrome paint to see if it improved the light output, the idea being if it didn't we could always paint it cream to match the factory finish.  In person, the difference was noticeable so both were upgraded to the chrome finish as any improvement to light output on this car is going to be a good thing since the lights are so tiny and dim by modern standards.

With those tested and proven working fine, as well as repainted to give them a little boost, I splashed some paint on the outsides too.  Purple, because it's what I had in, and the back of the lights is never seen once they're fitted so it doesn't matter really.

I also found I have to replace the webbing strap that holds the toolkit down (we don't have the toolkit) as one half had rotted out and both were that sort of oil and grease soaked horribleness that old stuff like this tends to end up being after a while.  New webbing will be easy to get and fit, and I salvaged the buckle so I'll have that to refit once I get some fresh webbing to sort this out with.

Another job was to remove the rear bumper.  The whole thing was a bit loose, and I found that was because one of the bolts for the passenger side bumper iron is missing and the other is loose enough that you can do this with it, which you shouldn't be able to do.

A previous owner had clearly had issues of some sort here, because to make the bumper clear the boot lid they'd used this stack of washers between that loose bumper iron and the bumper itself.  When I refit the bumper this could be can of worms territory and I do wonder where the bumpers on the car came from because a much older advert for the car shows it with some far nicer bumpers fitted than it came to us with.

It could also be down to the bolts on the overriders, that bolt into the bumper irons, being bent a bit more than looks right.  Perhaps they just backed the car into something.  Hopefully I can either straighten out the bolts, or replace them, or even just fit coach bolts instead and do away with the over riders if I have to.  We'll see.

A few more cosmetic things were done since I had things apart for testing, including cleaning up the number plate light that lives on the boot lid.  You can get new ones of these, but given how well this one cleaned up I thought it best to just keep it since it looks good as new and did bench test fine.

New mirrors were sourced, and since I didn't want to be drilling into the bodywork if I didn't have to, opted for some clamp mount rectangular Stadium brand ones.  They're not great and they need new rubber blocks in the clamps, went for them because they're in keeping with the car and anything is an improvement over the single round wing mirror on the driver's side.

Also fitted something new.  We'd opted to have an upgrade to a power socket since the car didn't have one fitted at all.  Made use of some existing holes under the dashboard to fit a generic 'marine application' holder for the generic power socket, and then dug in my spares to find a more suitable looking lighter to go in it, something I suspect is from a 70s Ford originally.

It was dark enough in the garage to check the interior lights, namely the restored instrument panel which had the inside painted chrome instead of the dull white it was when I opened it up.  The light output on this is pretty impressive compared to how it was, especially since it's still running the same style incandescent bulbs.  They weren't noted for being particularly bright when new.  There's also the factory under dash switch still in place so you can turn off the instrument panel illumination to reduce distraction when driving at night.  Gentler times.

There's just one problem.. well two problems.  One problem is the red ignition light isn't illuminating now when it should be.  Give the dynamo isn't behaving properly, that will be a related issue.  The other problem is that when you turn the headlight switch on, all the running lights turn off and so does the instrument panel.  That's not supposed to happen.

29,000 miles may well be accurate for this car too.  We have no history to prove otherwise, we can only go off the overall condition of the car, and I doubt very much that it's gone around the clock already. It's rough, but it's not that rough.  I decided to go and have another look at the headlights and see if I could figure out the weird lights issue.  I did manage to find a mistake.  The red wire with black trace I thought went to the accessory light on the front of the car, the information I had at the time suggested this was so.  It was not so.  The give away for me was that there are three connectors on the headlight socket and only two wires to connect up. With the correct wires attached, I now had dip and main beam on the front as I should, hoorah for working headlights.  Interestingly, there is no main beam telltale inside the car and that's how it was built, so you've no idea whether or not your main beam is on when you're driving... and they're so dim I doubt anyone else notices either to be fair.

However, when you go around the back things aren't quite right still.  These are screenshots from the video, hence the text, don't worry about it.  With sidelights on we do now at least have rear lights...

 

.. but as soon as you turn the headlights on to dip or main, the rear lights all go out.

During the process of testing, one of the filaments burned out on one of the headlights.  I'd not seen this style of headlight bulb before so that was an interesting thing in and of itself for me.  Unfortunately, I also found that one of the terminals for the wiring had snapped and it looked like it was due to metal fatigue that had caused it.  A previous owners rewiring meant changing the old brass sleeves with the copper core bent over to a more modern bullet connector style and that in turn meant opening up the copper sockets, that combined with my careful efforts to return the socket to its original shape and size for the proper connectors is probably what did for it. I did my best to solder it back together, which did work well enough for me to reconnect the wires and refit the headlight.

And that's where we leave this one because that's the end of the video.  I did return to more troubleshooting and I'll do a write up on that in the near future or, if you can't wait, go and see the playlist on Youtube by following the video at the top of this post.

[vulgalour]

Time for another words and pictures instalment of the Lanchester saga, and we're still on the wiring battle.  I can't remember exactly what we worked out and what we didn't, it's been a while.  Here's the video for those that would like to watch:

The first thing I was trying to figure out is what I might have got wrong with the ignition switch.  At this point I had two separate wiring diagrams, finding anything definite for this car was proving a bit of a challenge and I'm well out of my depth with this sort of thing anyway.  I was trying to figure out what was going on with the rear lights turning off when the headlights were turned on.  I couldn't use the wiring the car came to us with as a point of reference because it was a mess, non-original, and things didn't work anyway so it was back to basics.

I'd wired up the ignition switch in what I thought was the correct way.  I thought the blue and the white-with-black trace were swapped the wrong way around here but that the rest were probably correct.

To try and help myself out I had a look back through the photo archive and dug out how the switch was wired when the car came to us, which was like so.

A bit of trial and error later, I'd moved the wires around so they look like this.  The rear lights problem persisted regardless.  The other issue was when I put the wire for the clock in I could get a smell of burning, whether or not that was the car or an outside smell I didn't know, so I left it disconnected to be sure it wasn't the car.  However, the oil pressure light was very dim and the lights didn't function, which was a bit odd and made me wonder if it was actually a defective switch.  This would compound my situation since I don't know exactly how it should be wired, and even if I did wire it correctly but the switch had an internal fault, well... that's going to be hard for a novice like me to identify and fix.

After asking on the forums and getting some hints and tips, I decided the best course was not to fiddle with this and instead try and find a wiring schematic for the switch itself to see if that would help me out.  The ignition switch fitted to the car is a Lucas PLC6.  The biggest issue I was getting (and this was pre-AI slop internet) was getting the wrong diagram listed for this switch, so you had to be on the ball a bit when looking up information.  I dread to think what it's like now with the advent of the Confident Lying Machine poisoning everything.

I did try to take it apart but stabbed myself in the hand with a screwdriver, so gave up on that idea and doused it with switch cleaner which flushed a lot of detritus out of the housing.  The diagram did at least suggest I was partially correct, so I went on to see if I could figure out the wiring at the voltage regulator, another part I wasn't sure of.  This was recorded before we got the donor car which had its original wiring intact, and I had been struggling to find a good reference to show me what colours should go where here, so again, out of my depth and confused on this one.  This is how I'd got it set up at this point at any rate.

After going through the diagrams again, and getting more frustrated and feeling like I was running in circles, I made what I hoped were the corrections needed, although I wasn't by any means confident at this point.

That resulted in something being live that shouldn't be, I didn't know what it was, just that something was.  That meant I pulled everything out and isolated just the ignition switch related functions and went back to basics.  Looking back on this I can understand the frustration other people were having with me at the time, I was so stressed and confused by all of this I was just getting information overload and making mistakes because of bad practices on isolating the issue.  Anyway, we went back to this as our status to try and problem solve.

We have two big problems at play here.  Problem one is both of the wiring diagrams being incorrect for the car, at the time of recording I didn't know the older diagram was actually not only for a different car, it was also for a different voltage regulator, and there were extra things on the other diagram like an ammeter that our car simply didn't possess.  Problem two was me, plain and simple.  This wiring job is one of those things that can very often be the death of a project, the sort of thing where you're banging your head against a wall with a problem and just can't seem to see way through it and whenever anyone helps it just seems to get worse.  It's the part of the project a lot of people like to forget, myself included.  I did spend time digitally colouring in the wiring diagrams I had to try and understand them better, I really struggle to decypher any wiring diagram, my brain just doesn't seem to be able to understand anything more complicated than a household plug.

Because the stress levels were increasing and the problems weren't being solved, I stepped away from the project for a bit to get a bit of perspective, refresh the old grey matter, and come back with a more pragmatic approach.  Might not be the most entertaining viewing, but it is the reality of the situation.  Step one was to figure out what the wires actually did.  I needed to make this as visually simple for myself as I possibly could, remembering what colours meant what was like learning a different language so I needed to translate it all into my own language.  Label all the things!

After doing the labelling, and to double-check, Pat helped me check continuity with the multimeter so we were sure that the wires we saw in the engine bay were the same ones in the cabin, trying to eliminate as many mistakes as we could in the process.  We also managed to disable all of the lights, taking something of a step backwards.  Rather than work through the stress, we took another break from it to come back fresh.  There's no rush, no deadlines, we can take our time.  Come back to the car on another day we checked through a few things and looked at the wiring for the dynamo which had been acting a bit strangely in the previous video.

Access is pretty dreadful to sort this out.  What I'd done is put the two wires for the dynamo the wrong way around, which is something of a rookie error.  Field and Main were swapped and that led to some odd behaviour with the dynamo running when it shouldn't.  I also managed to get the rear lights working during this process, and the headlights (sidelights weren't connected yet, so they don't count), so with that fixed I decided to move on to sorting out the starter motor.  Annoyingly, the starter motor didn't want to work for me and that is a theme with this car.  For whatever reason, when I pull the starter knob it usually doesn't engage but when Pat pulls it it usually does, clearly the Lanchester likes him more than me.  To add insult, one of the eyelets for the wiring to the dynamo sheared off when trying to swap the connectors around, which was just super, not only that the stud that said eyelet goes on to was spinning in the body of the dynamo.  No idea why on this one.

Getting the dynamo off the car is a nightmare.  Look at this.  Not only is it frustratingly difficult to get to, held in with annoyingly located fastenings, and covered in grime, it's also weighs about the same as a small moon.

One thing that helped a bit was slackening off the front wing bolts so that I could remove the inner wing and the engine side cover to get slightly better access.  The engine bay of this old car is quite hard to work in, the bodywork is very wide outside of the engine, and the bits I'm working on have to be accessed from the top and live at the bottom of a very deep engine bay in relation to the other proportions.  I did try and do things from underneath and found that the chassis is in the way.

Time to down tools for this video and come back to it another day.  Physically and mentally exhausted at this point and doing my best to convince myself it was worth persisting with.  Which it is, I'm sure.

[vulgalour]

We're doing well with words-and-pictures updates lately, I hope you're enjoying them.  I've been making some changes to my work-life balance and trying not to worry about how it's impacting my income and the result has been a bit more energy to go around.  It has highlighted just how little work-work I can do before it impacts my health which I'm not thrilled about.  The one positive is that I'm actually able to enjoy some hobbies like these updates and that's doing my mental health the world of good.  Grinding away at work every hour you're able to, it turns out, isn't great for the old headspace, who knew?

Anyway, time for another Lanchester wiring update, this time the stator tube wiring.  Here's the video if you fancy watching that.

To start, we need to find out where the wiring for the stator tube actually goes.  As I understand it, this is a fairly standard set up on cars of this era, so there shouldn't be any surprises here.  The wiring connects to the main loom at the front of the car, emerging from the centre of the steering box through this end plate where you can see the twisted wire.  To remove the wiring you first need to unscrew a nut (not shown) that the wiring passes through which reveals a brass sealing olive which in my case was completely stuck in place and would not come out.  I very carefully filed through the olive with some modelling tools as I was pretty sure I'd have to replace it anyway and it should be a standard size.

With that disconnected we can get into the driver's seat for the next bit.  Start by prying off the horn button which gives access to the stator tube boss.  Someone had been in here before us, unsurprisingly, and we were missing the horn push spring.  It looks like someone in the past was trying to fix a problem in here, not sure what exactly.  In theory, I should be able to pull the boss and the whole tube out of the car without it hitting the roof.

Then, after very carefully prying to fully dislodge the brass olive on the other end, it was just a case of pulling the tube into the car.  The stator tube itself is a solid steel rod with an end plate that the bakelite boss screws on to, this means you have something to pry against if like on our car the brass olive is being stubborn, just be careful with the force you're applying to the cast aluminium hub of the steering wheel when you do it.  Then pull the tube out and wonder if it actually is going to fit inside the car, it's a bit of a clown's handkerchiefs moment.

With the solid part released from the steering column, you then just have to pull the wiring through.  When you do pull the tube it almost touches the roof and just when you think it's not going to fit, the wires appear.  It's quite a tight fit, and it's a good thing that the roof line is so high on this car because otherwise I'm not entirely sure how you'd get this out with the body fitted.

One thing that did surprise me with the brand new wiring harness we bought for the car is that this section of it isn't included, that's something you have to do yourself, which seemed a bit odd.  If you're going to the trouble of rewiring the car why would you leave this one bit unattended?  The brass olive I mentioned earlier, that was completely stuck and had really bad access to deal with, was this one.  You can see here where I've hand-filed one side to weaken it enough that it could come off the steel stator tube.  This is what stops all the fluid coming out of your steering box, so it's pretty important.

Now that I have the tube removed I can get to the screws on the back of the flange that holds the bakelite control module, something that I'd previously tried to remove from the cabin side because I hadn't understood how this part of the car went together and couldn't find references for it at the time I was working on it. I would of course find reference after the fact because that's how these things go sometimes.  I'd ended up having to drill out the brass screw heads, it was one of those jobs, so now I had to fix all that which is a shame.  However, I would also be able to clean out all the old grease and clean up the connection points so it's not all bad that we're in here doing this.

Next job then is to replace the old wiring and get the new installed, which means bringing it indoors.  Here's what the back of the bakelite boss looks like.  We're pre-heatshrink here and it looks like what was being used originally was perhaps some sort of wax, the brown stuff near the silver connectors.

The wires terminate in an eyelet with a leg to prevent it spinning and goes through what was a brass screw with a chrome hex head dome nut to clamp it all together.

I went through one wire at a time and reattached the old eyelets to the new wiring, as well as adding new heatshrink rather than trying to replicate the old wax or whatever it is.  This was quite a fiddly job and well outside of my comfort zone, I just hoped I'd done a good enough job to ensure it wouldn't need to come out again.

The new challenge was going to then be threading the new wires into the stator tube.  Because clearance is so tight, I couldn't just tie something to the wires to pull them through and when I tried to simply push the new wires through they didn't want to.  I wasn't too concerned about adding a protective sheath to the new wires since they're all individually protected and the inside of the tube is nice and smooth.  The other issue would have been the fact that the original wires had much thinner insulation than the modern ones, so the modern wires only just fit inside the tube without additional sheathing anyway.  After some brainstorming, Pat and I settled on using electrical tape at regular intervals to keep the new wires bundled neatly and make it easier to thread them all through together.  This was very much a two person job.  To help, the old wiring was kept in the tube to give us an idea of how far we had to go because you could feel when the new and old wiring met.  Pat then pulled out the old wiring as I pushed the new wiring in and eventually we got the whole thing threaded through.  There might be an easier way to do this, this was very much our first attempt on figuring this out.  The important thing is that we got it done.

With that part out of the way, the next job was to rebuild the steering wheel boss.  On the lanchester, the boss is a bakelite unit that seems to have been used on quite a few different cars and houses a sprung horn button in the middle and self cancelling indicators on an outer ring.  It's also a floating hub so it's always facing the same way regardless of the steering wheel position.  For us, this is something of a novelty since we're both so used to having control stalks rather than everything being in the middle of the wheel like this, and having self cancelling indicators seems remarkably fancy for this sort of car, a true sign that the Lanchester is a step above your average conveyance.  I spent some time cleaning up all the internals, getting rid of some truly black grease and making sure the copper contacts were nice and clean again so things will hopefully work properly when back together.  It's all very fiddly, while also being quite robust, the only piece I felt I had to be careful with being the bakelite housing.

To help me understand all this, I made use of the very good LD10 resource http://ld10.awardspace.co.uk/ which have all manner of handy little diagrams and information.  I'm not going to go into detail on reassembly here, the video shows it better than I can explain it from about the 6 minute mark.  Suffice to say, once reassembled and freshly greased I gave it a once over to check functionality and it all seemed to be quite happy so it could be buttoned up and put back together again.

That meant it could all go back into the car.  This whole process made me appreciate why I was being told people don't normally bother restoring this part and explained somewhat why the wiring harness didn't include this section.  Personally, I still find it a bit weird that because part of the job is difficult it's avoided commonly enough that people did tell me not to worry about doing it.  I'd rather go through everything as properly as I can on something as important as wiring so that I can hopefully eliminate any weird problems further down the line.  Getting it threaded back in wasn't too tricky, happily, and a bit of masking tape around the end of the wires help get it threaded down the steering column pretty easily.  One final push and it was home.

Nice little cameo by the ACE brand front number plate there.  One other benefit of the masking tape is it made threading the new olive and the old brass nut on to the wire so that it could be threaded on to the steering box.  We had one issue where the olive wasn't seating all the way and preventing the stator tube from sitting home properly, probably because the olive was brand new and not quite deformed enough to make the seal required.  To solve this, we pulled the stator tube out a little bit at the steering wheel end, and got the brass nut at the steering box end started on a few threads.  Our thinking was we could use the nut to compress the olive and pull everything together properly.  Access was, as usual, pretty awful and again this was very much a two person job.  You could do this on your own if you had masochistic enough tendencies, I'm sure.

Here you can also see where the self-cancelling ring interacts with the steering wheel boss.  Quite a clever little mechanical system really and quite hard to show you because once it's together and working you can't really get any sight line on what's going on, you just have to trust it's going to work.

Unfortunately I lost some footage but everything did indeed click together nicely and we reinstalled the horn push.  At this point I didn't have a return spring for the button and would later use a chopped down Series Landrover one until the donor car came along and happened to have the correct spring in the spares.  We got lucky there with the donor car because none of the rest of the hub was present, it just so happened the one bit we needed was the one bit it had and I'd had trouble finding exactly the right spring since it seems to be a part that doesn't usually fail or go missing.

Really it's not the most difficult job I've faced on this car, I'm not entirely sure why it's avoided or why the wiring isn't provided for it.  Certainly there have already been far more difficult and annoying tasks on this car than this.  Maybe I just got lucky and it doesn't normally go as smoothly as it did for us, and maybe it really isn't normally an issue and there wasn't any point us digging in this deep on it.  Time will tell.

[auntiemaryscanary]

6 hours ago, vulgalour said:

We're doing well with words-and-pictures updates lately, I hope you're enjoying them.  I've been making some changes to my work-life balance and trying not to worry about how it's impacting my income and the result has been a bit more energy to go around.  It has highlighted just how little work-work I can do before it impacts my health which I'm not thrilled about.  The one positive is that I'm actually able to enjoy some hobbies like these updates and that's doing my mental health the world of good.  Grinding away at work every hour you're able to, it turns out, isn't great for the old headspace, who knew?

Anyway, time for another Lanchester wiring update, this time the stator tube wiring.  Here's the video if you fancy watching that.

To start, we need to find out where the wiring for the stator tube actually goes.  As I understand it, this is a fairly standard set up on cars of this era, so there shouldn't be any surprises here.  The wiring connects to the main loom at the front of the car, emerging from the centre of the steering box through this end plate where you can see the twisted wire.  To remove the wiring you first need to unscrew a nut (not shown) that the wiring passes through which reveals a brass sealing olive which in my case was completely stuck in place and would not come out.  I very carefully filed through the olive with some modelling tools as I was pretty sure I'd have to replace it anyway and it should be a standard size.

With that disconnected we can get into the driver's seat for the next bit.  Start by prying off the horn button which gives access to the stator tube boss.  Someone had been in here before us, unsurprisingly, and we were missing the horn push spring.  It looks like someone in the past was trying to fix a problem in here, not sure what exactly.  In theory, I should be able to pull the boss and the whole tube out of the car without it hitting the roof.

Then, after very carefully prying to fully dislodge the brass olive on the other end, it was just a case of pulling the tube into the car.  The stator tube itself is a solid steel rod with an end plate that the bakelite boss screws on to, this means you have something to pry against if like on our car the brass olive is being stubborn, just be careful with the force you're applying to the cast aluminium hub of the steering wheel when you do it.  Then pull the tube out and wonder if it actually is going to fit inside the car, it's a bit of a clown's handkerchiefs moment.

With the solid part released from the steering column, you then just have to pull the wiring through.  When you do pull the tube it almost touches the roof and just when you think it's not going to fit, the wires appear.  It's quite a tight fit, and it's a good thing that the roof line is so high on this car because otherwise I'm not entirely sure how you'd get this out with the body fitted.

One thing that did surprise me with the brand new wiring harness we bought for the car is that this section of it isn't included, that's something you have to do yourself, which seemed a bit odd.  If you're going to the trouble of rewiring the car why would you leave this one bit unattended?  The brass olive I mentioned earlier, that was completely stuck and had really bad access to deal with, was this one.  You can see here where I've hand-filed one side to weaken it enough that it could come off the steel stator tube.  This is what stops all the fluid coming out of your steering box, so it's pretty important.

Now that I have the tube removed I can get to the screws on the back of the flange that holds the bakelite control module, something that I'd previously tried to remove from the cabin side because I hadn't understood how this part of the car went together and couldn't find references for it at the time I was working on it. I would of course find reference after the fact because that's how these things go sometimes.  I'd ended up having to drill out the brass screw heads, it was one of those jobs, so now I had to fix all that which is a shame.  However, I would also be able to clean out all the old grease and clean up the connection points so it's not all bad that we're in here doing this.

Next job then is to replace the old wiring and get the new installed, which means bringing it indoors.  Here's what the back of the bakelite boss looks like.  We're pre-heatshrink here and it looks like what was being used originally was perhaps some sort of wax, the brown stuff near the silver connectors.

The wires terminate in an eyelet with a leg to prevent it spinning and goes through what was a brass screw with a chrome hex head dome nut to clamp it all together.

I went through one wire at a time and reattached the old eyelets to the new wiring, as well as adding new heatshrink rather than trying to replicate the old wax or whatever it is.  This was quite a fiddly job and well outside of my comfort zone, I just hoped I'd done a good enough job to ensure it wouldn't need to come out again.

The new challenge was going to then be threading the new wires into the stator tube.  Because clearance is so tight, I couldn't just tie something to the wires to pull them through and when I tried to simply push the new wires through they didn't want to.  I wasn't too concerned about adding a protective sheath to the new wires since they're all individually protected and the inside of the tube is nice and smooth.  The other issue would have been the fact that the original wires had much thinner insulation than the modern ones, so the modern wires only just fit inside the tube without additional sheathing anyway.  After some brainstorming, Pat and I settled on using electrical tape at regular intervals to keep the new wires bundled neatly and make it easier to thread them all through together.  This was very much a two person job.  To help, the old wiring was kept in the tube to give us an idea of how far we had to go because you could feel when the new and old wiring met.  Pat then pulled out the old wiring as I pushed the new wiring in and eventually we got the whole thing threaded through.  There might be an easier way to do this, this was very much our first attempt on figuring this out.  The important thing is that we got it done.

With that part out of the way, the next job was to rebuild the steering wheel boss.  On the lanchester, the boss is a bakelite unit that seems to have been used on quite a few different cars and houses a sprung horn button in the middle and self cancelling indicators on an outer ring.  It's also a floating hub so it's always facing the same way regardless of the steering wheel position.  For us, this is something of a novelty since we're both so used to having control stalks rather than everything being in the middle of the wheel like this, and having self cancelling indicators seems remarkably fancy for this sort of car, a true sign that the Lanchester is a step above your average conveyance.  I spent some time cleaning up all the internals, getting rid of some truly black grease and making sure the copper contacts were nice and clean again so things will hopefully work properly when back together.  It's all very fiddly, while also being quite robust, the only piece I felt I had to be careful with being the bakelite housing.

To help me understand all this, I made use of the very good LD10 resource http://ld10.awardspace.co.uk/ which have all manner of handy little diagrams and information.  I'm not going to go into detail on reassembly here, the video shows it better than I can explain it from about the 6 minute mark.  Suffice to say, once reassembled and freshly greased I gave it a once over to check functionality and it all seemed to be quite happy so it could be buttoned up and put back together again.

That meant it could all go back into the car.  This whole process made me appreciate why I was being told people don't normally bother restoring this part and explained somewhat why the wiring harness didn't include this section.  Personally, I still find it a bit weird that because part of the job is difficult it's avoided commonly enough that people did tell me not to worry about doing it.  I'd rather go through everything as properly as I can on something as important as wiring so that I can hopefully eliminate any weird problems further down the line.  Getting it threaded back in wasn't too tricky, happily, and a bit of masking tape around the end of the wires help get it threaded down the steering column pretty easily.  One final push and it was home.

Nice little cameo by the ACE brand front number plate there.  One other benefit of the masking tape is it made threading the new olive and the old brass nut on to the wire so that it could be threaded on to the steering box.  We had one issue where the olive wasn't seating all the way and preventing the stator tube from sitting home properly, probably because the olive was brand new and not quite deformed enough to make the seal required.  To solve this, we pulled the stator tube out a little bit at the steering wheel end, and got the brass nut at the steering box end started on a few threads.  Our thinking was we could use the nut to compress the olive and pull everything together properly.  Access was, as usual, pretty awful and again this was very much a two person job.  You could do this on your own if you had masochistic enough tendencies, I'm sure.

Here you can also see where the self-cancelling ring interacts with the steering wheel boss.  Quite a clever little mechanical system really and quite hard to show you because once it's together and working you can't really get any sight line on what's going on, you just have to trust it's going to work.

Unfortunately I lost some footage but everything did indeed click together nicely and we reinstalled the horn push.  At this point I didn't have a return spring for the button and would later use a chopped down Series Landrover one until the donor car came along and happened to have the correct spring in the spares.  We got lucky there with the donor car because none of the rest of the hub was present, it just so happened the one bit we needed was the one bit it had and I'd had trouble finding exactly the right spring since it seems to be a part that doesn't usually fail or go missing.

Really it's not the most difficult job I've faced on this car, I'm not entirely sure why it's avoided or why the wiring isn't provided for it.  Certainly there have already been far more difficult and annoying tasks on this car than this.  Maybe I just got lucky and it doesn't normally go as smoothly as it did for us, and maybe it really isn't normally an issue and there wasn't any point us digging in this deep on it.  Time will tell.

Well done for persevering. How the hell did they make that mechanism on the factory? A jig? Someone doing it all day, every day at lightening speed?!

[Angrydicky]

Good to see an update on the old girl.

That trafficator switch is a right fiddly bastard isn’t it, I had the same fun and games threading the wires up the stator tube and repairing the mechanism when I did the Hampshire (same switch).

[vulgalour]

Right, I've had enough of wiring, let's do something fun.

 

The boot lid on our car has some minor issues and you'd think parts for a car whose manufacturer has been gone for over half a century, is hand built, and was made in very small numbers would be quite difficult.  Turns out eBay to the rescue yet again, these little cars are rare and yet they still keep popping up whole and in bits for not huge sums.  As a reminder, the Lanchester LD10 came in two body types, the Briggs type has pressed steel panels throughout and as I understand it no wooden internal structure, being a thoroughly modern car.  The Barker sports saloon which ours is, has been constructed more like a pre-war car having a wooden framed body clad in aluminium.  The two cars share rear wings, and all the bodywork in front of the A pillars.  This means that any of the aluminium panels - roof, all four doors, boot lid, rear bodywork - on the Barker is slightly different from one car to the next so those parts don't directly interchange unless you're very lucky and will usually require a bit of tweaking to make work.

The boot lid I acquired was from a very rotten car that was being broken on eBay and I wasn't sure if it was better or worse than our car's boot lid, both had damage in similar places and between them I was confident I could make one good complete panel.

While it did have the hinges and other chromed hardware, there were issues.  The release handle is completely jammed and has no key, that would take some effort to unjam and become a useful spare.  The number plate lamp also had some useful parts and some dead parts.  Unfortunately the hinges aren't in the best condition, they do seem to suffer from being exposed to the worst of the elements and these clearly put up a bit of a fight when the boot lid was being removed from the donor car.

The really useful bit for us on this boot lid is on the inside rather than the outside, which isn't the hinges (we have a few sets of these now), but rather the specific machine screws that hold them on because on our car these are a mix of different bolts and screws.

The boot lining itself I initally hoped would be useful, it's held in with about a million screws and should in theory just swap over.  The nature of this hand built panel might say otherwise.  The other useful bit is the lock mechanism cover, something we'd made already for our car since it was missing, and for which we hadn't had a reference image until getting this boot lid.  You can also see where the steel inner frame has rotted out making this boot lid worse than ours in that regard.  The way the boot lid is put together is an ash (I think) frame over which a steel inner frame is fastened, then the aluminium outer skin is dressed over, and then the inner aluminium trim panels.  One thing of note with this boot lid is that it felt a lot lighter than the one on our car and given how rotten the donor car was I had my suspicions that all might not be well inside this boot lid.

Amazingly, the hinges unscrewed without a fight which was very unexpected.  That gave me a full compliment of the correct fixings to sort out our car properly and was considerably easier than trying to work out exactly what fixing I needed and then find a supplier of said fixing.

The number plate light housing outer came off easily.  The chrome and the special nut came undone with no bother but the chipping around the hole in the glass lense suggests this may have been over-tightened in the past.  The mounting plate hadn't fare particularly well, the sealing gasket was long gone and the bulb holder disintegrating.  The remove the mounting plate you have to remove the inner aluminium trim and then unbolt the two nuts from inside the boot lid so that's a little bit more involved.  Also, the screws for the handle didn't come undone, or rather they did and then just span in what should have been the wooden frame behind.

The lock mechanism trim happily just unscrewed, so that was set aside safely for using later.  The million screws holding the larger inner trim panel were a mixed bag of mostly very stubborn and disintegrating screws so rather than waste my time fighting them I just carefully removed the heads using the flapwheel on my angle grinder.  I knew I could repaint the inner trim panel anyway, it's just a standard textured satin black paint finish, so this was a sensible approach.

With the inner panel removed we get our first look inside the boot lid and we can see the fairly complex arrangement of the wooden frame that gives everything its shape.

It does look like the wiring is probably the original in this boot lid and has soldered bullet connectors that join it to the rest of the loom.

This wire then passes through a hole in one of the boot lid's horizontal wooden frames and is stapled further down to the vertical central wooden frame so that it can get to the number plate lamp.

Try as I might I could not get the lock mechanism to free up at all and on looking closer, found that the central wooden frame had broken which certainly wouldn't be helping.

Other finds inside the boot lid was the remnants of a number plate bolt that had been drilled long enough ago that the drill hole was rusty, and a lot of powdery corrosion that was a combination of sawdust, steel rust, and aluminium oxide as far as I could tell.  Nature's thermite, probably.

By this point I had fully decided that the boot lid on our car was in better condition than this one and I had learned that this sort of spare part didn't have much of a market so fell firmly into Rare But Nobody Cares territory.  Better to make use of it for our car and other projects instead.  I wanted to strip the outer skin off the frame as the aluminium was easily the most useful thing here and originally I was just going to take the angle grinder with a relevant disc to the folded edge and just quickly buzz through it.  What I learned in that process that just getting a pry under the folded lip and unfolding it was actually a lot quicker, quieter, and went through far fewer grinding discs.

The more I worked on it, the more rot I found.  The lower rail of the boot lid made very crunchy noises as more rust fell off and the wooden rail itself showed signs of being incredibly dried out and brittle with rot.

On the top rail it wasn't much better, not only was the wood crunchy, one of the nuts that held the stud for the hinges had rusted almost completely away, suggesting this had been wet and unable to dry out for a very long time indeed.

Removing the hinges, some of the studs snapped with the nut, one had to be cut through, and it was generally not a great time.  I did salvage the hinges complete and once I had them off the car I could see it looked possible to remove the broken studs so they could be replaced and that made it worth keeping hold of the hinges just in case ours failed in the future.  These are by the look of it a more standardised part so if, for example, the socket for the hinge pin snapped on one half we should be able to swap a good one in from another half hinge.  Into the spares box they go for now.

Because I was salvaging parts rather than the whole panel I opted to simply cut a hole in the outer skin to get the lock mechanism out.  This way I could address it in the future when I had more time and tools to strip it down fully and this would also serve as a useful spare should we or another LD10 owner need this part.  The boot lid is a pretty vulnerable location for mazac parts to be so I imagine mishaps where bits of handle get snapped off isn't totally unheard of and having spare bits would certainly be a good bit of future security.

With the boot lid now skinned we could get a proper look at the wooden frame.  Everywhere that you see it looking dark it has water damage, the frame itself is unpainted, and it is beyond reasonable repair.  The missing central bar had rotted off, and it was rotten all around where the handle was supposed to be held in place.  There were some nice thick steel brackets attached to the frame, presumably for strength and to prevent the boot lid twisting, and while I was unlikely to use them on another boot lid I could see them coming in handy for other projects so they went into the useful stuff pile too.  At the top of the frame there's a little ear comes off with threaded holes, this is where the boot hinges screw into which was interesting to discover since I wasn't sure whether the screws went into metal plates or the wooden frame until I saw this bit.  The other handy thing with finding these metal brackets is if it turned out the medley of fixings used on our boot lid had been forced into the threaded holes and ruined them, I now had spare brackets to replace that instead of trying to re-tap or helicoil damaged threads.  Fortunately, this wouldn't be needed, but it was nice to know I had the option.

Everything was now ready to go for sorting out a good boot lid out of these two differently damaged ones.  That meant getting the Lanchester out of the garage which is a feat in and of itself since the car wasn't running, couldn't be driven, and the brakes barely functioned so instead whenever the Lanchester was worked on it had to be pushed in and out of the garage and it's a remarkably heavy old lump!  I'm not sure I could do it these days with my health being what it is without a bit of help, it was enough of a struggle a couple of years ago when my health wasn't so bad.

I was very happy to discover that the bolts that had been put in the hinges before we got the car were actually a matched thread and nothing had been damaged.  It did look an awful lot better to have the proper countersunk flat head machine screws in there instead of the hex headed bolts.  It's a small detail, and one that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

After checking the bolt holes were all good, I could then disconnect the hinges from the boot and carefully fold the boot lid up and rest it against the rear screen.  This would make removing the inner trim panel an awful lot easier and allowed me to discover a few more minor differences between our boot lid and the donor.

This plate is what holds the boot hinges on to the boot and on the donor car, the steel flange you see to the left partially obscured the screw heads on the bracket.  This was one of the reasons I was hoping I wouldn't have to swap the bracketry over, such is the nature of hand built panels that there are little variations like that.  Also of note is that the inside of our boot lid is painted whereas the donor wasn't, whether this was done by Lanchester or one of the two owners that had the car before us I couldn't say.  To decypher the fixings here, the four flat head screws go into the wooden frame, the three thread holes are what the hinge screws into, and the two countersunk holes appear to have no purpose at all on this car, which makes me wonder if this is a part that had multiple purposes for different models, with someone just making batches of these plates to suit all applications.

With that investigated I looked at fitting the slightly better condition boot lining and very quickly discovered that all the screw holes were in different locations.  That would mean drilling a whole bunch of new holes to fit this panel which would sort of defeat having a nicer condition panel in the first place.  The other problem is the panel itself wasn't cut the same so didn't fit our boot lid as well as the original, yet more hand-built car stuff that.

Instead of fighting a battle I won't win, I opted to put the donor panel into storage - and it would come in useful later, so I'm glad I did that - and refit the original panel after giving it a splash of satin black paint to spruce it up.  I'd also dressed out a puncture in the panel as best I could, it looks like in the past too much stuff had been put in the boot and it had just been slammed shut, well before the car came into our ownership.

This was the exact moment that I realised, once I'd refitted the repainted panel, just how many screws I had to now screw in, by hand.

Look at them all.  My goodness, why?  It's not a plane, we don't need this level of fixings redundancy! Sixty eight screws to hold that one panel in when a dozen would have probably been fine.

Happily, the lock mechanism cover panel which I was now a bit worried might also be unique to each boot turned out to be a mass produced thing.  They must have done the pressing and drilled the holes before putting them on the cars because the one off the donor car fitted out car perfectly with all the screw holes lining up exactly with the holes in our boot lid.  That was a relief, and a much more reasonable quantity of fixings.

With all of that work done and the hinges reattached with the correct fixings, you'd be hard pressed to see I'd done anything.  Not because I'd done a particularly amazing job, just that this part of the boot lid is basically invisible unless you're just about inside the boot!  Oh well, at least I know it's done and now so do you.

[vulgalour]

Did you know Lanchesters are edible?

One of the things I was warned about perhaps the most frequently with pre-war and pre-war style cars was the threat of woodworm.  Our car hadn't shown any signs of it and we had been keeping an eye on things to make sure that continued to be the case.  The trouble is by the time you normally see the woodworm signs they've usually done a lot of damage because the wood they're going after is underneath layers of body panels and interior trim.  Luckily for us the car was partially dismantled when we saw the signs and that would also make it a bit easier to combat.  The most obvious giveaway with a woodworm infestation is lots of little holes and what looks like sawdust, this is frass, the bits of wood that the larvae that's burrowing through your woodwork doesn't make use of.

As I've been working on the Lanchester I've been keeping the loose bits mostly in the boot and I'd got to the point where I needed to reorganise it all and check that what was in there actually should be in there.  This is a pretty important part of the process for me, I haven't got a lot of space to be as organised as I'd like so I employ this system to prevent the project spreading and taking over too badly.

That's when I noticed we had a problem.  It's not something that immediately jumps out at you unless it's a very well established infestation and I'm not sure how long our problem had been ongoing.  What I do know is that this plywood cover panel didn't have any woodworm damage when we removed it from the car initially so this is a fairly recent problem.  I suspect that the insects that cause the problem had arrived quite naturally while the Lanchester has been in and out of the garage and were then free to do their usual life cycle thing totally unconcerned with the affairs of man.  The signs, as mentioned earlier, look like this, finger tip for scale.

 

As soon as I saw this, and knowing a little bit about how these sorts of things affect furniture, I isolated the panel from the car and anything else wooden to prevent the likelihood of this infecting anything else.  Remember, the Lanchester has a wooden structural frame for the body, wooden structure for the front seats, and the back panel of the boot that the rear seat bolts to, wooden panels for the boot floor and cabin floor, wooden dashboard and door cappings, and wooden door cards so this sort of thing could render the entire project into a big pile of scrap if ignored.  Understandably, this job immediately queue-jumped everything else and would take me in a slightly different direction to what I'd planned to do, such is the nature of a project like this.  Luckily, with the panel being in the boot, there was some chance that it hadn't spread into the rest of the car because the majority of this area isolates the wooden elements with steel bodywork and might have helped keep the wood munching larvae contained to a smaller area.

Which was a sound theory until I investigated a little further and found, hiding just under the Rexine covering the plywood panel in the back of the boot, a fresh little hole.  Very much not ideal.

To deal with this I picked up some Cuprinol woodworm killer because that's what was in the shop.  I know the theory behind solving this, I've never had to put it into practice.  Decanted a good quantity into a jar so I could brush it on to the plywood easier.  It's worth noting that the plywood itself is completely devoid of any protective coating and seems to have been that way forever, it looks like an original panel to the car.  Wood eating beetle larvae will always go for the easiest wood to get into, so any sort of coating you apply is going to deter them which could well be why this very dry bare plywood panel was their first target.  Two to three coats are required, and 24 hours to dry.  If you have one, a syringe is recommended for squirting the fluid into the holes to make sure it gets through to all the areas where the creatures might be living.

I felt monumentally guilty doing this, because I'm silly that way, it's hardly the grubs fault that they took up residence here and I'm a monster for committing genocide.  Ah, the ethics of car ownership.  While that was drying, and the air was bubbling out of the little burrows, I had to turn my attention to removing the rear seat.  The rear seat base is held in with friction, no fastenings, so simply lifts out as is really common for cars of this era and older.  The rear seat back, however, needed some investigation.  There's a wooden batten underneath the rear seat back that has a few flat head screws that look to be holding it to the rear plywood panel I needed to treat and I wasn't particularly hopeful they were going to cooperate.  I might be the first person to ever remove this since the car was built, so it's had 70 odd years to really get itself comfortable about where it is.  At this point I wasn't sure which screws were holding what in place and, as you might expect, there wasn't much in the way of guidance out there on this since hardly anyone would have call to do this job.

In the boot, the back of that panel has some captive nuts that it looks like those flat headed screws go into.  Heat isn't an option here because of all the wood, so we're relying on hope and penetrating fluid to get us past the rusty antique fixings.

Looking for positives in all this, I could remove and re-glue the Rexine better with the plywood panel out of the car so I should hopefully be able to get a nicer finish on that, and on looking at the other panels in the cabin there was no sign of woodworm damage in the floors or the panels that lived under the back seat.  Interestingly, those panels did have some sort of black finish on them, possibly a bitumen based finish, which could have deterred any creatures from having a nibble.

After some fighting with fixings I finally got the rear seat back out so I could get a look at the plywood behind, and find some original factory chalk marks which must have meant something to someone at some point.  The seat back is held to the plywood with six screws, four of which go through what I had thought was a batten on the cabin side earlier in the post but turns out to be the plywood back of the seat back itself.  I assume the big square holes are to allow air to escape with the seat is compressed and prevent it from making embarrassing noises.  The other two screws go in the top of the plywood and are undone from the boot side just at the bottom of the peach-ish coloured wool section.  The reason for the wool section, which is fabric that is glued to the plywood, is it sticks up above the parcel shelf in the back of the car and can be seen through the back window, just.   Construction follows the same inconvenient process as much of the rest of the car, it's built like a cabinet and clearly not really designed with a view to regular disassembly being a thing.  Happily there was no sign of woodworm damage at all on the seat back.

With the rear seat out of the way I could turn my attention to the back panel behind it which is held in with more flat headed screws, this time going into those captive nuts I showed before.  The reason I want to remove it is it will be a lot easier to inspect, treat, and retrim than it would be if I left it in the car.  Nothing is ever that simple with this car, to get the panel out I've also got to remove the rear arch interior trims which are glued over the top of some of the screws holding it in.  Layers and layers, like an ogre.

With the rear seat out I did have slightly easier access for the high level auxilliary lights I want to install, these are from a motorbike and I'll come back to this in the future.  At this point I thought I'd be figuring out the modified brackets and such I'd need to install them, where wires were going, all that jazz and it didn't happen in this video.  The wiring harness we ordered did have the provision for flashing indicators added as an optional extra.  I wanted a high level brake and high level indicators in the Lanchester given how tiny the rear lights are and how effective the same has been on the Princess, without altering the external look of the car if I could help it.  This is all prototype stuff, I don't know if it'll work yet, and have identified some potential issues like light bleed and unwanted reflections... anyway, we're not here for that we're here for woodworm correction.  Also of note here is the damage to the wool trim, this is caused by moths and I won't be fixing it because it isn't seen and the moths are no longer present or an issue.  Lavender and cedar are surprisingly effective moth and spider deterrent.

So just a case of unscrewing that back board right?  Wrong.  It's held in with a mix of machine screws into captive nuts and wood screws that you access from the boot side, and then the wool trim of the parcel shelf is wrapped over the top and tacked down to it.  Just... yeah.  Thanks.  There's four screws hidden on each side behind the leather trim of the rear wheel arch which is glued down over them too.  There's also a small trim panel that fits above the rear wheel arch which is tacked to the wooden frame of the car, those need prying off carefully too.  Those little trims are very thin plywood and happily for us showed no sign of woodworm.

I only had one stubborn bolt which I couldn't get out, it was totally seized.  My impact (both manual and electric) wouldn't fit and try as I might with a regular hammer and screwdriver it just wasn't having it.  There's so much fastenings redundancy going on here that I just opted to take the corner off the board, it wasn't going to be a problem and was the most practical solution to the problem in the circumstances.  With the board removed you can see the felt pads that are added to prevent squeaks and rattles when all the other trims are installed, a nice touch really even if it does give me a little bit more work later to replace them.  The felt pads are on the boot side of the board and I've removed the Rexine covering here ready for it to be reinstalled.  I've been very careful handling the Rexine, it's very thin and brittle, and while I could replace it with a modern vinyl (which would be thicker and the wrong grain pattern) preservation is the aim of the game here so I'm going to see if i can do a bit of work to improve its appearance somewhat when everything goes back together.

Removing the plywood panels under the rear seat revealed again that there was no sign of woodworm there, which was a relief, and with the exception of one stubborn fixings they came out with no trouble.  The good thing with all of that out is that I could see some of the wooden frame of the car which has more of that black coating on it and happily looked in excellent condition.  No signs of rot or insect damage at all which was a big relief!  Here we're inside the car, looking up into the boot.  The two silver dots are the end of the bolts for the boot lid hinge, and you can just make out the black covered wire that goes to the number plate light.  The edge of the aluminium body where it is literally nailed on to the wooden frame is also visible, demonstrating once again that any areas where it's not on show, the finish just isn't that perfect on this car, and I'm totally okay with that.  Why bother spending labour on bits that nobody is going to see and doesn't affect the way the car functions.

Here as well you can see the different approach to trimming on this car, with the boot space being done entirely in functional black materials and the cabin in more plush browns.  There's a lot going on with the structure here too, and a lot of specialised craft involved in creating a remarkably low volume vehicle that was never really intended to last as long as it has.  When you stop and think about how all of these parts and pieces had to be put together by people presumably using more hand tools than power tools it's amazing that these sorts of cars are so cheap really.

With everything now stripped down as far as I hoped I'd have to, the only other wooden panel I needed to deal with was the intermediate boot floor which had been removed from the car while I worked on various bits and pieces and had stored in the garage to one side.  I hadn't expected to find anything untoward with it so imagine my surprise when I found this.  Fortunately the infestation hasn't compromised the integrity of the plywood so this was repairable without me having to replace what would be difficult shapes to cut.

It turned out that it was worth removing the back panel from the car because once I'd cleaned off the new glue I'd put on for the Rexine, and the old glue that originally held it on, there were more woodworm holes.  All of the damage had been hidden by the glue and interestingly it was all on the boot side side of the panel.  It looks like the black coating on the plywood had done a very good job of deterring the insects and they'd stayed to the bare plywood sections instead.  It looks like the larvae have munched into the untreated side, got close to the black finish, turned around and gone back out through the untreated side.  Whatever Lanchester used, it was quite effective, I just wish they'd done both sides!

Now I just needed to get all the coats of woodworm killer on and let it dry before I can make more progress.  The drying times really slowed everything down a lot and there's no hurrying it up.  The black finish repelled the treatment which again made me wonder if it was perhaps bitumen related.

Once everything was dry I got the wood filler out to fill all the holes and, of course, dressed correctly for the occasion.  The filler is not just a cosmetic choice, by pushing it into the holes the woodworm had made I could hopefully make sure everything was forced out and there would be no easy access points for critters to get back in, whether or not this makes a different I have no idea, I felt better doing it all the same.

Plenty of sanding later, and I had a peppering of filled holes on the affected panels and a nicely keyed surface ready for paint.

Then it was time for arguably the fun bit, which was painting everything.  This would not only make it all look lovely, it should deter future infestations.  I made sure to paint the edges of the plywood too as that's arguably the easiest way for things to get in and given how much the plywood had soaked up the woodworm treatment, it was clearly also very dry and this would help the paint soak in and give a stronger finish too, I hoped.

While the paint was drying I made use of some green canvas from my fabric stash and made a replacement pull handle for the battery inspection panel since the original had long since rotted away.

Sprucing up these trim panels was a lot further down my list of jobs to do, the intention was to sort all of this out once the car was back on the road.  That it queue jumped this far up the list was a little bit annoying.  Everything did turn out looking great and in a future episode I'll show you this all reinstalled back in the car because there's actually more work to do before any of this can go back in!  Talk about project creep.

[vulgalour]

Let's restore some antique trims.

Rather than modern vinyl which is mostly plastic, the Lanchester uses the older version of it which is Rexine, a cellulose based synthetic fabric that mimics leather in the same way that vinyl does now.  The biggest difference is that Rexine has a finer grain texture and, quite often, a variation of colour that more closely mimics leather than many of the modern offerings.  Over time it does get very dry and brittle so is prone to tearing and shrinkage which is why it can be so difficult to save.  On our car the only original piece of Rexine that isn't present is a B pillar trim, every other piece is still there, so we want to make the best attempt we can to save it.  I've got some experience with fragile materials so let's see if I can apply them to what we've got here.

First of all, I need to flatten out the big piece of black Rexine that covers the plywood board in the back of the boot.  As long as you're careful you can flatten out a panel even as crinkly and curled as this one.

Setting the iron to a moderate heat, "wool" in my case, and not using steam you want to put the Rexine face down on your ironing board and then use a piece of kitchen towel down to protect your iron from anything that might be on the back of the fabric.  In my case there was old glue and new glue that I didn't want to reactivate and stick to the iron so the paper towel really helps there.  Using a smooth steady motion you want to carefully push the crinkles out towards the edge of the piece of fabric.  This will take time, you don't want to rush this, and as the fabric warms up it will become more pliant and press better.

After a little while you end up with something that while not perfect, is certainly good enough for where this panel is going to end up.  There's definitely some diminishing returns to contend with on this and you will find some creases will not come out and you just have to accept that's how it is.  For us, that's not a problem.

Some areas, like where the fabric goes around curves or is folded behind trim, you won't get to go flat again and that's okay.  Over a long enough time, the fabric will lock in to the shape it's been pushed into and you shouldn't try and force it out of that shape, this is a seventy odd year old piece of fabric after all, it's going to have settled into the shape it's been held into for all that time pretty firmly by now.  Here's a good reason for using the paper towel too, rather have all this on the paper than on my iron!

I opted to press this panel before cleaning it, it's not vital to clean it first unless it's exceptionally grimy.  The advantage to cleaning it after pressing is that you don't have to try and get into folds and creases where the dirt is going to be harder to get out and, in turn, you're going to be putting the fabric under less stress if you're cleaning it once its been pressed. It's important with Rexine and other 'skin' type fabrics (leather, vinyl, etc.) to leave it to rest for a bit so it shrinks back to whatever its natural state is.  This will also let you see if it needs more pressing, or is going to present any problems when you come to refit it to the panel.

I was initially going to put the Rexine on to the plywood before refitting it but I couldn't actually do that because of how everything is layered.  The Rexine actually goes over the fixings that hold the plywood in place and I didn't trust I could leave the edges unglued and not damage it installing the panel, to then glue the edges down.  To hold it in place I opted for spray on carpet glue since it would be the easiest to apply and would allow me to reposition things.  A regular contact adhesive would have been too strong and not have enough working time for me to feel comfortable doing this job safely.

The layering here is again clearly not designed to be taken apart.  The plywood board goes in first, then the Rexine panel we've been fixing, then the padded covers for the rear wheel arches,  and then the plywood intermediary boot floor.  This hides all the raw fabric edges and gives a nice neat finish once it's all in.  It's very awkward to do because it's quite a reach to get all the way to the back of the boot space and smooth everything out, not to mention getting it perfectly aligned so all the edges meet.  Luckily, the fabric doesn't look to have shrunk noticeably, probably because it's protected from heat and sunlight being hidden deep in the boot here.

A few years ago when we got the car this panel was in really bad shape and I had already made an effort to improve that by mostly smoothing it out and gluing it back in place, well before we had any idea that woodworm would set up home in the future and need all of this to come out again.  We started here, this is the only photo I can find in my archive of just how droopy and sat it was.

My first attempt, just smoothing it back in place.

Now this attempt, after pressing.  Still not perfect but a further improvement on where we were.

Now that's in place I can put the upper interior trims in place which hide the wiring and the wooden frame of the car.  This is quite a difficult panel to show you because, well, it's in an awkward place and isn't really seen.  The panels themselves are some sort of fibreboard with a texture black finish.  These panels were fortunately in the car when we got it, they just weren't fitted, and the way you fit them is to hammer nails through them into the wooden frame of the car.  I don't think I'll ever get used to just nailing bits of trim to the car.

Turns out the wooden frame of the car is very hard and likes to bend the nails I was using.  I picked the nails I did based on the size of the holes in the trim and the panel and what I could get that was the nearest match. The tacks I'd used elsewhere were much too short and small to use here.

Once it was all nailed in I realised it might have been better to screw this panel in for ease of access in the future... too late now, never mind.  It does fit quite snug in there and really does tidy everything up a lot even if the grubbiness makes things look a little bit amateur.  It's fine for the inside of a boot.

With those trims installed the only other trim that needed attending to was the side panels that are made from the same fibre board.  These are held with a couple of tiny screws and the hinges for the boot.  Unfortunately, the screws for the hinges are completely seized into the captive nuts and I stand no chance of removing them, this is because the back of the captive nuts isn't protected from any of the dirt and water that gets thrown up from the tyres, they just hang out in the inner arch rusty away merrily.  This gives you a good idea of the various trim panels and layers going on in the boot.

The next task would normally be refitting the intermediary boot floor that I restored in the last update.  Unfortunately there's a little bit more work to attend to before I can do that and the only really significant area of rot on the whole car.  It will be another new challenge too since to fix this I've got to weld next to wood.

The restored wiper motor was reinstalled, mostly to keep it safe, and the wires fed through ready to connect.

I also finally figured out what was going on with the headlight wiring after much head scratching.  The new harness we bought had a mystery black with white trace wire that didn't match anything I had on diagrams and made no sense applying it to the car.  Turns out, the headlights piggy back one off the other and this wire runs from one headlight, under the radiator frame, and up to the other headlight.  The wire it's piggbacking is red with a black trace which is why I was confused about this and had thought it was for the 'pass light' which our car it turns out doesn't actually have.

A nice little update at any rate, showing that you can reuse ancient materials if you don't mind them being imperfect.  I wonder if from the factory the Rexine panel is oversized and trimmed down once fitted, though I can't imagine that would have been any easier either!  I did toy with the idea of getting in with my iron to press everything flat but give the access being what it is I'm not sure I actually could.  I'm just happy everything is all together now and it's quite a large cosmetic job off the list.

[vulgalour]

Back to some wiring, including upgrading the headlights.  If anyone can identify what kind of caterpillar it is on the flowering currant in the video intro, I'd love to know, never seen one like it before or since.

Happily, I did figure out the headlight and sidelight wiring at the front of the car.  Indicators are yet to come.  The goal is to keep the car looking externally original with only period accessories so I needed a headlight upgrade that wouldn't look too modern.  Moving the sidelights into the headlight bowls allows the original sidelights to become flashing indicators which will supplement the semaphores that will still be operational once all of this is finished.  You can get clever two-way bulbs that we could have put in the sidelight housings for a combined indicator and sidelight but there's not a lot of space in the housing to get everything in, so this route is a lot easier for what we're doing.

Original fitment on this car is British Pre-Focus Bulbs, and I learned when looking to upgrade our car that there are two different headlight sizes fitted to the LD10.  Luckily, we've got 7" headlights here so upgrade options are much wider and easier and cheaper to acquire.  The telltale as far as I've been able to figure out is the headlight bezel. On some cars there's just a single profile that goes from the edge to the lens of the headlight and these are the larger headlights, ours has an extra step in the bezel which reduces the inner diameter to suit the smaller headlights.  This may have been something that happened in production when headlights were becoming more standardised and lighting technology was improving, or perhaps it was an optional upgrade, I don't know.

We're not upgrading to crazy lighting, this car is never going to see much serious night time or winter use so there's no need to join the lighting arms race.  However, to make it easier to move the sidelights a little bit of modernising to halogen H4 headlights is a pretty sensible upgrade and won't lose the character of the car when the lights are on.  Rather than opting for a conversion kit that had the flat plastic lenses, I spent some time searching for a domed glass lens with the sidelight in the bowl so the upgrade isn't as obvious.  The lens pattern is different to the original Wipacs, and as I understand it you can't just put halogen bulbs into a BFP fitting because your beam pattern will be all sorts of wrong through a BFP compatible lens, so replacing the whole headlight bowl is the sensible choice here.

The other thing that needs to be changed to accomodate the upgrade is the wiring to the bowl itself.  I can't use the original bullet connector style because H4s use a spade connector and the most sensible way to do that is with a general plug kit.  The wiring colours are wrong and I would like to upgrade this to a better quality plug in the future that could be wired straight to the new harness, but for now this will do just fine.

Another thing I acquired was the missing hardware for the headlight.  Amazingly you can still get all of the headlight hardware for this car, presumably because this system was almost universal across all cars for such a long time.  There's something to be said for the longevity of standardised parts over unique proprietary ones! I got mine from https://www.vintagecarparts.co.uk and haven't had an issue with the quality etc since recording.  The two pieces here are what helps keep the headlight bezel in place, the B shaped piece being a spring that the chrome hook pulls on to keep tension on the bezel.  Although the bezel does have a snap-fit to the headlight bowl similar to how a hubcap is fitted to a wheel, this additional mechanical system should prevent it from being jostled free on a rough road I imagine.  Losing a hubcap is less of an issue than losing a headlight after all.

At the back of the car, the lights were giving me a new problem.  Both of the rear running-brake lights had stopped working and I suspected I had a short on the driver's side that might be causing that since the passenger side piggy-backs off it.  The number plate light still works as it should so that suggested it wasn't the same issue I was having before where when I turned on the headlights all the rear lights went out.  Something else was clearly amiss so that would need investigating.

Let's deal with the headlights first.  Pop off the headlight on the driver's side by prying the bottom of the bezel towards me, you can do this by hand, no need for tools.  If the bottom hook is fitted, unhook that first.  That then revealed that the repair I'd done to the holder had failed, unsuprisingly, so another point in favour of doing the upgrade.  You can also see the wire clips that hold the headlight bowl into the bezel here which are also still readily available.  There are four of those to remove which you do by pushing down the outer legs and letting them spring out from underneath the lip of the bezel, very easy.

Another reason for the upgrade as that the silvering on both of our headlights is deteriorating.  Now, this car is MoT exempt so it probably wouldn't ever by highlighted as an issue, and given the rarity of driving this in the dark it would probably never pose a problem.  However it's a problem that can be easily fixed so it's a problem that should be fixed.  You can get headlight bowls re-silvered, it's costly, and if this were a more exotic machine with special headlights then it might be justified, for this car it isn't.

Fitting the new headlights is very easy, they go in exactly as the old ones came out you just have to make sure you've oriented them correctly.  To help with that there are some locating tabs on the back of the bowl, there's also the sidelight location, and on the headlight bezel there is the hole that the chrome hook fits into which you know is on the bottom.  A little bit of common sense and this is easy enough to put together correctly.

With the sidelight and that hook location hole aligned to the bottom, one of the three locating pegs on the headlight bowl locates in a stand off section on the top of the bezel so really it's very hard to get this wrong.  Once that's all done you put the springs in by pressing the legs under the lip of the bezel.  The spring clamps are a little bit fiddly so patience is needed with these if you're having a bit of a moment with them.

With that ready to go, time to prepare the wiring.  In the headlight bowl on the driver's side there are three wires.  The red is the earth, that goes to a fixing inside the bowl.

The other two wires which come up through the headlight stem which is essentially a hollow bolt that a big nut goes on to lock the headlight in place, are black with a white trace for dipped beam and yellow with a blue trace for main beam.  Normally, the sidelight wire would go up, obviously, to the sidelight unit on the wing but since we're not doing things that way it has to go into the headlight bowl.  Sidelight is red on this car, which isn't confusing at all when the earth is also red in this instance.

For the indicator, in the case of the harness we ordered, that's green with a white trace and that will go up into the sidelight unit which we will be using as a flashing indicator.

The challenge here is getting all the wires into the relevant locations.  Because the new wiring is thicker than the original wiring and there's more of it than would normally be going where it needs to be, I'm going to have to be a bit clever.  I did find that trimming back the protective black sheathing helped reduce the thickness a bit for feeding the three wires through the headlight stem.  The real challenge is doing that in the wheel arch where, even with the wheel removed, there isn't the most amount of room for where things need to go.  I'm not entirely sure how the wiring is supposed to be held to the wing bracket, it looks like there are some fastenings there, and it might be easier to do that with the wing off the car which would mean also removing the headlights so we'll not get that involved this time around.

Before doing the next stage I wanted to get the clip back in.  If you're looking for these, they're called spectacle clips because they look rather like a pair of spectacles without the arms.  The reason our original one is missing looks to be because one of the rivets holding the metal plate that the clip slots into has gone missing.  Imagining that rivet is still there, this is how the clip should sit and then you feed the chrome hook from underneath to catch the 'bridge' of the clip.  The rubber gasket on this headlight needs to be replaced, it still works but its showing its age.  We'd already done the headlight-to-wing grommets (again, still available remarkably!), we just hadn't got as far as ordering this part to get it fitted.

Next up, wiring in the new bulb adaptor plugs.  I already knew from doing the passenger side that earth was yellow (yeah, I know, that's not annoying at all), but I needed to find out which was dip and which was main for the other two wires to make sure it was correct.  I employed my very high tech testing rig to do this.

I can then touch the blue and red wire to the negative on the battery to find out which function of the headlight it operates.  I connected the yellow earth wire to positive, since the car is positive earth, although I'm not actually sure it makes any difference at all in this scenario.  Now, a smarter person wouldn't need to do this, they'd understand how the bulb was set up.  I am not a smart person so this is how I chose to do it and it worked so it can't be that bad an idea.  Just maybe don't do as I do on this one just in case it's dangerous somehow.  Anyway, this told me that red is main beam, and blue is dipped beam.  Again, not confusing at all on the colours which is why I'd like to rewire this properly with the correct colours to match the rest of the loom.

My next challenge is how to wire this connector to the car and honestly... if you're an electrician I apologise.  This is a mess.  It's a decypherable mess, but still a mess.  As a bit of a fool proof approach for consistency since the colours aren't consistent I used spade connectors and made sure that I used the opposite connects on main and dipped wires so you can only sensibly connect them in the correct way.  The corresponding wires on the main harness have matching connectors to the plug so even though the wire colours don't match, the connectors do.  Given the materials and knowledge I had, this felt like the best way to do things.

There is another confusing element with the headlights too.  The black with white trace piggy backs off the passenger headlight, which is fed by a red with black trace for the same function. I have no idea why this would be, that's how the harness was provided to us (with no instructions or colour key, I might add) so it's just how it is.  One correction I made was to replace the red earth wire, in part because the power feed for the sidelight is also red and I didn't want the confusion.  Since the earth wire on the headlight socket is yellow, I used yellow for the sidelight earth too, with the red braided wire being the live feed for the sidelight.  Both earth wires go into a brass bullet with the copper core strands folded back and then the whole thing pushed into the copper earth socket, in the original style.  I think the sidelights normally earth somewhere else, maybe the wing bracket, but this seemed a sensible solution for how things have been re-wired here.

All that done, there was nothing more I could do so it was time to test, let's see how we did.

Excellent! Nothing caught fire even a little bit.  One thing I haven't done is fit any sort of relay and on the Lanchester originally power is drawn straight from the switch so as an extra safety precaution in the future I will be fitting a relay to prevent burning out the switch and improving the light output a little more.  Of note also is that the spade connectors here will get protection but on them to prevent shorting and eventually I'd rather replace either the connectors with better insulated bullet connectors or, better yet, just wire  the new harness wires directly to a proper headlight plug so I have no joins in here at all.  Consider this proof of concept since there are further improvements to be made so this isn't the final form.  With that sorted, I could move to the back of the car and try and find out what's going on with the rear lights.  The first thing I tried was simply swapping the rear lights from one side to the other, this is a simple way of testing if I've got a faulty unit.  That didn't change anything. Then I checked for continuity both on and off the car and found I was getting power to both rear lights as I should be, so it was curious that the lights weren't doing anything at all.  I did know the brake light switch didn't work so that was disconnected to rule it out of the equation, which shouldn't have affected the running light ability, only the brake lights.  I therefore narrowed it down to an earth problem.  I've owned enough French cars, British cars, and messed about with enough 80s Fords over the years to know that almost every rear light funkiness problem is down to a bad earth somewhere.

When we got the car it wasn't at all clear where the main earth actually is at the back of the car, the wiring diagrams I have didn't help, and the donor car I'd get later wasn't yet on the scene to help out in any way here.  So I'd made a best guess and put an earth point into the rear inner wing as it seemed to be where the wires wanted to go.  First task was to clean that up as best I could and see if it helped.

With the sidelights on, I had sidelights at the front of the car like I should but only the number plate light at the back, nothing at all from the rear lights.

I had good continuity to the rear light units, good bulbs, and nothing obviously amiss that might cause them to just not work so I was getting a bit frustrated because this didn't make any sense.  I tried turning the headlights on, which had previously made ALL the lights at the rear go out, this time the number plate light stayed on so that was an improvement.  Still no life from the rear lights.  Main beam didn't change anything either.  All of the lights at the front of the car were behaving totally normally at this point.  The only theory I had at this point was bad light units so to get around that I decided to disconnect the wires that go to them, and apply the wires directly to a bare bulb.  If the bulb illuminated when directly connected to the car's wiring, then the only thing it could be is the light units since that's the only thing after the wiring.

Here goes then.  What's going to happen when I touch the feed wire and an earth wire to this brake light bulb?

Well.  Does that mean we found the problem?  I hope so!  If you're wondering about the bare section of wire on the black and red one which is the main feed for the rear lights, that's a crude extension I made since I couldn't quite reach the bulb, normally the wire just goes straight into the light unit without the extended bit.  This also suggests that my earth point is actually perfectly fine, even if it isn't correct, since if that earth point was inadequate it wouldn't illuminate the bulb, right?  What's very confusing is when I test the light unit off the car they work perfectly fine for both functions and there's nothing to fix, it's only once they're attached to the car that they stop working, it's very odd.

I also tried putting the wire into the connector properly on my "bench" to see if perhaps the spring loaded clamp that holds the wire in place was causing an issue and got exactly the same result, so it's apparently not that either.  Back to square one again, go through everything and look for anything that might be amiss.  Whatever was causing the issue was super specific and must be something to do with how things sit when connected to the car and that was when, after a frustrating while of looking, I finally spotted what might be the problem.  Wouldn't you know it, an earth problem!  There was a little stress crack in the holder for the earth connector on the driver's side light unit and the fit was just a little bit loose.  I employed a bit of tin foil technology to take up the slop rather than trying to adjust the connector and risk breaking it and that would definitely provide me with a better earth there.

Next up was to look at how the wiring in this corner was actually connected.  I didn't have a lot to go on here, I was using best guess based on what our car was like when we got it, what little I could find online of other cars, and what made sense between what colour the wires were, lengths, connectors, and the wiring diagrams I did have.  With better education and experience with wiring I could have likely found the problem easier, as it was I was flying mostly blind.

There's a lot going on in this corner.  The main harness emerges here after running along the chassis from the front of the car and branches off to the main earth, up back into the car for the semaphores and interior light, up to the boot for the number plate light, and out to the rear light units so it's obviously going to be easy to get things wrong when you don't know what you're doing with all this.  I determined that I had three earth wires to make sense of.  The one with the ring connector screwed to the inner wing here is for the number plate light so we can ignore that one.  The others are one that feeds the interior of the car, one that comes up from the chassis, and one that feeds the rear lights.  The bare wire you see was a bullet connector when it was supplied to me but since I could make no sense of that at the time and the wiring harness came with absolutely no paper work (which is standard practice, I asked, they never provide anything), I removed it in favour of a ring connector to go on the inner wing as that seemed to make sense at the time.

So now I had the earth wires in a bunch, I started testing which ones might offer me a connection and then I found it, my rear lights finally came on.

If I touch that bare earth to the other bullet connector, nothing happens.  In fact, I didn't know what I was supposed to do with that connector since it didn't look to have a match anywhere here.  So now I knew I had the rear lights working with the sidelights on, that had always been the case.  The trouble had been when I turned the headlights on the rear lights went out except now I had this figured out at the back that no longer happened, the rear lights stayed on with the headlights like they should finally!  The mystery earth connection was actually for the rear number plate light and should connect to the inner wing so why that had a bullet connector on the end I couldn't say.  Perhaps there's supposed to be a fly lead that runs from the inner wing or chassis to a female bullet connector?  I don't know.  Anyway, let's test things.

For the first time the rear lights stayed on with the headlights!  Success!  The reason for one of the rear lights being brighter than the other that was my mistake, I'd put the dipped beam wire into the main beam side of the socket by mistake.  I corrected that and reinstated the rear light lenses since the safest place for those to be is on the car.  Typically, I had a further mishap when one of the fixing screws for the rear light bezel randomly sheared off without me putting any force into it or cross threading it so I had a rummage in my spares and put a random screw with the same thread in there.  These screws are still available so it will be replaced with a proper one.  I also now had a pair of ribbed rear glass lenses that matched in style, allbeit ever so slightly different reds as sometimes happens, so let's show you everything working properly that this massive update has been building towards.

[vulgalour]

With the wiring for the lights sorted, or at least the problematic bits sorted, let's turn our attention to some bodywork.

At the time of recording this I'd never removed the wings from a Lanchester.  Indeed, I'd never actually removed the wings from a car with this bodystyle, even though I've been a long time admirer of them and came very close a few times to owning a VW Beetle.  So how exactly does one go about removing the rear wings?  Part of the reason for doing this was the project creep of the woodworm issue, since so much had been dismantled it was the best time to get in and do the repairs I knew about at the back of the car.  First job, get the wheel off.  There's no way of getting into the wheel arch with the wheel fitted.  The hubcap is prised off with a blunt bar and that gives you access to the four nuts behind.

The Lanchester is sporting a set of radial tyres rather than crossplies.  The tyres the car arrived on were ancient, likely older than I am, and a real mish mash.  Thanks to someone on one of the forums (I'm sorry, I've forgotten who it was at the time of writing, do shout up if it was you) we now sport a full set of Davanti radials which seem to be a pretty universal size and type for cars of this era.  They made moving the car about an awful lot easier than the old tyres.  They are also fitted with innertubes as per original fitment.  Next, trundle the jack in to get the car off the ground.  The square tube you see sticking out from the sill is the jacking bar that the factory post jack slots into, we didn't have one of those at this point so a trolley jack is being used instead.  Shouldn't be a problem, we've jacked the car up on these before and the jacking points on the car are a mix of original and very agricultural repaired so I had no reason to think we wouldn't be fine today.

Yeah... it's not supposed to do that.  Watching the video at the top of the post you'll get to hear the rather unpleasant crunching noise as the jacking point decided it had done enough work thank you very much and would not like to spend some time in the sill instead.  Unfortunately, the sidewall of the jacking point, which is an outrigger from the chassis itself and doesn't support the body, has gone thin on the sidewall having rotted from the inside out.  It finally gave out, squashing in on itself.  I can replace this with some relevant thickness square bar like I did on the Princess, it's just a bit more involved if I need to remove the whole outrigger from the sill since, you know, the body is in the way.  For now, we'll just jack on the chassis itself which is fine.  I had heard plenty of times over the years from people with cars that have this style of jacking system that it's always best to jack on the chassis and not the factory posts and now I see why.

As far as I could see, where the spring bolts into the spring hanger part of the outrigger the steel is okay, it looks to have gone really only where the post jack arm would slot in.  Rather than worrying about this right now, it has been filed in the to do pile for later and in the meantime I'll jack only on the chassis and keep myself safe by slotting an axle stand under the chassis so I can get this wheel off and get to work on what I want to get to work on instead of finding new jobs.

There isn't a lot of space in these wheel arches, the skinny wheels of the car don't really need a lot.  With my head inside the wheel arch I had a real challenge actually seeing the fixings themselves.  I could see where the outer arch ended about halfway across the width of the wooden frame, and where the inner arch started, and if I you look very carefully you might just see the button head of one of the flat head screws that hold the wings on, along with the large penny washer.

At the bottom of the arch at the leading edge, you can see the total lack of any protection on these surfaces, some packed in mud, and plenty of rust.  The bottom of the wooden frame is missing where it dips below the floor level, this is something that will need addressing one way or another in the future and not entirely surprising.  At least access is reasonable while other repair work is happening.  Finger for scale, because without it this area is difficult to understand the size of and could look rather more alarming than it is in reality.

On the trailing edge, remarkably the original splash guard is still in place and this obscures the fixings on this side aside from a couple of nuts and bolts that hold the splash guard in place.

Eventually I did manage to see the fixings I needed to undo.  The camera showed them up better than I could see in person, even with a torch, since all the surfaces basically looked the same.  Once I knew what corroded shape I was trying to find I could then douse them all in penetrating fluid in the incredibly vain hope that any of them would come undone at all.  I always try, resorting to rotary violence as a last resort in situations like this.

On trying to remove the splash guard absolutely none of the fixings came undone, unsurprisingly, so an angle grinder was deployed to remove that.  Absolutely no sign of any rust protection at all on any of this with only the barest hint that there might have once been paint, it looks like the factory approach was to just paint it and hope for the best so it's a wonder any of it survives even with the thickness of the steel on this car.  I had entertained thoughts of repairing this splash guard at the time of recording since it is just steel and could theoretically be welded back together, more on that in a future update.

It was now easier to see what the extent of the repair was that I needed to make on this side of the car.  This was by far the worst rust on the whole car so it makes sense to start here.  Fortunately this car is built in such a way that it can't really hide rust, what you see is very much what you get and I like that about it.  I get the impression that the splash guard was perhaps not offering quite as much protection as it should have for this corner to end up this bad.

Next up was locating the various fixings for the wing.  Happily, there aren't as many as there could be given the propensity of the builders to throw six bolts in when two would do elsewhere on the car, they're just all in terrible condition.

Predictably, my efforts with the penetrating fluid were essentially futile so the angry disc had to come out.  I had planned to use the flapwheel to gently smooth off the top of the bolts and reduce the amount of damage caused.  Unfortunately there simply isn't the space to put the angle grinder in that way around and at the time of recording I didn't own a finger sander or a die grinder which would likely have made this job considerably more pleasant.  It was good to see the rear wing starting to come off as I removed the bolt heads, and revealing the repairs needed to the rear wing that I was already aware of.  This shouldn't be too onerous a task to put right again, the real challenge will be keeping the wear and tear on the rest of the wing and blending the repair in nicely.

Astonishingly, one of the fixings actually did come undone and it was one that I really hadn't expected to cooperate at all.  I'll take what wins I can with this job!

With all the fixings I could find now removed I could gently pry the wing from the place it's likely been since it was fitted in 1951 and get my first proper look at what lies beneath.

It's actually not that bad.  I was genuinely surprised at how good all of this is because what you see here you could see with everything bolted together and that's quite unusual in my experience of poking rust over the years.  Between the wing and the bodywork is a wing bead, which is a sort of weather stripping to try and prevent water from getting trapped between the panels and rotting out.  It will need replacing as its gone quite brittle now, and is another part you can buy new by the meter in various different materials and colours.  Another thing  that it might help with is the fact that the body is aluminium here (except for the sill which is steel) and the wing is steel and this beading will keep those seperate.

Mission accomplished at any rate, and everything ready to be repaired and put back together.  It's nice when you find about as much work as you're expecting and not a massive new pile of jobs to tackle so for once I was actually excited to get into some rust repair rather than dreading it.

[vulgalour]

Moving on to some repair work now we have that rear wing off.  As usual, the video covering the work is available here:

First task was to get the panel cleaned up.  The car has, to the best of our knowledge, been in dry storage since it came off the road in 1984 which probably explains in part why it's in pretty good shape.  The rear inner wing panel doesn't have any underseal to contend with, very little dried mud, and barely any paint so I decided to go in light with the sander and see if it was going to be enough to get things cleaned back to a good surface.

The reason I was taking a lighter approach with this is that I wasn't entirely certain what to expect.  I'm used to working on things like 90s Citroens and 80s British Leyland offerings where the metal thickness and corrosion landscape is rather more treacherous than this old boat.  Fair enough, since the sander isn't doing much of anything, let's step things up a bit and get some eye protection and a wire wheel out.

I was using a couple of different wire wheels to accomodate the shapes and get the best action and then very quickly ended up with a new problem, which was super dry rust dust blowing into my face and just generally being very unpleasant!

One positive side of the lockdowns that we'd been through at around this time was that I'd got plenty of face masks needing to be used.  I didn't have a 'proper' mask and didn't want to pack everything away to go out and try and get some so this was an adequate solution and at least meant my beard and the inside of my face didn't taste entirely of iron oxide for the next week.

Now I had a feel for the lay of the land with the job I decided to risk stepping up the tool again.  The wire wheel was fine, it would have done the whole thing, but a flapwheel would be quicker still, especially on that big mostly flat panel that makes up the inner arch.

It all cleaned up really very well.  It does look incredibly brown on camera, far more than it did in person, which is a lot of the rust dust still stuck to the surface.  There was nothing of any real note uncovered beyond what I already knew about.  One little hole in a random spot, with finger for scale.

The bit at the bottom of the leading edge of the wing was about what I expected, not so obvious in the last update was the rust on the lower edge where it meets the floor of the car, much clearer now the rust has been knocked back a bit.

The trailing edge had a few more smaller areas to share, nothing too serious, and all of the shapes here are incredibly simple ones which is always nice.  The most complicated bit really is the bump out for the fuel filler neck to pass through and even that is about as simple as it gets and should be able to be fabricated nicely even with my limited tools and ability.  The remains of the bolts you can see on what's left of the return are the fixings for the splashguard which had completely rusted together so those will all get replaced once this is repaired.

After a good clean down of everything to get as much of the rust dust off the surface and explore the pinholes I could see I did find a little bit more work.  Nothing major.  The steel on this car is quite thick so areas that are pitted to a degree I'd be replacing on something more modern just isn't an issue here because there's still so much material left.

I also trimmed out some of the rotten areas so I could make a start on the repairs.  The trailing edge was still just a little bit daunting to me so I did the leading edge instead which looks immensely better with a nice clean cut and all the detritus cleared out of the cavity.  It's a very simple curve that you can make pretty much by bending the metal held in your hand and the steel thickness is going to make this a much less stressful repair than I'm used to.

The scary bit is right where I want to weld is the dry antique wooden frame of the car.  The other structural elements you see here are mostly body frame that everything attaches to and is steel.

With everything getting cleaned up ready for repairs, one thing I could understand is how the wings are really bolted to the frame.  It seemed slightly off to me that there would only be a screw through the wing and straight into the wooden frame and it turns out that's not exactly the case.  Instead, there's a notch taken out of the frame so that a steel plate can be screwed in with two screws.  The centre of this steel plate has a threaded hole to accept the machine screw that holds the rear wing on, spreading the point of contact out with the wood and presumably reducing stress here.  Obviously the machine screws I had to take the heads off are all seized into the metal plate, and the screws holding the metal plate to the wood are likewise not looking too cooperative here.

After discovering this I went back to cleaning all the surfaces up as best I could before liberally dosing the whole panel with rust converter.  It's really the most sensible course of action here given my means and while there are a myriad options for dealing with this sort of rust this one will be perfectly adequate for what we're doing here.  You can see the section I'm planning to cut out later hasn't been treated.  I wasn't sure how long I had to get all of this sorted and since I have to put the Lanchester back in the garage every day to keep it out of the weather I can't leave things half done in the usual way and have to spend a bit more time faffing about because of my working conditions.

While that does its thing, I decided to have a go removing the nubbin on screw from the wing fixing plate.  I can't employ heat with them in situ, so it's WD40 (I know, not its intended purpose, but it does work sometimes) and a pair of mole grips to see if I could wiggle it free and happily with this first one, I could!

In the process I'd removed the wing seal bead thing, and I was lucky with a couple more of the screw studs before my luck ran out.  So I fought with the screws holding the wing fixing plates on so I could get them out and put them in the vice where I could apply some heat.

There was one stubborn plate left on the car and I couldn't get the screw heads to cooperate so had to leave that one for now.  The stubs that came out show that once again it's a very fine thread to hold this together, a common theme on this car, and there was also the remains of a wood screw that was holding the end of the wing to the car which may or may not have been original.  The trouble with this car is due to its age and construction when I find a wood screw I don't know if that's supposed to be there or a later bodge.

It was early March when I was working on this so the weather was incredibly changable and that lead to some odd decisions in my process because I wouldn't know if I'd be able to work on the car the following day or in a couple of weeks because of the weather.  That's why when the rust treater was cured I went over the splash guard - which at this point I was still intending to repair, more on that in a future update - and the inner arch with some top coat in all the places I knew I wasn't going to be doing repair work.  Far from ideal, I would have preferred to finish all the repair work and do the painting at the end, but that's not how things go when you're working outside and having to get the car in and out of a single garage every day.

I was pretty happy with what I'd achieved on that day all the same.  This felt like good progress on the worst area of the bodywork and everything after this would be, in theory, less involved and easier to repair.  I'm trying not to think about how I'm going to fabricate the swooping curves of the sill ends as I type this.

[Angrydicky]

This is bringing back memories of doing the inner rear wings on my Hampshire, they look almost identical apart from you've got the added complication of all that flammable old wood to contend with. You're doing a great job and I think people who only work on modern cars can't comprehend just how difficult and time consuming the stripping is on ancient stuff with seized up flat head screws everywhere, especially countersunk or dome headed where there's no chance of getting molegrips onto them. I feel your pain. It's coming along nicely though.

[vulgalour]

Last time I cleaned up and prepared the rear corner of the Lanchester for repairs.  This time I repair it.

I was doing this in tandem with the woodworm job so for the sake of continuity concerns, that's why the car looks like it's in pieces again.  First job, after clearing all the stuff out of the boot, was to remove the fuel tank.  Fortunately it's not too difficult a job on the Lanchester.  The main reason for removing the tank is the proximity to the area I need to be welding and the fact that the fuel that remains in it is actually fresh enough that the car runs on it, so it could be a risk.  The secondary reason is that the tank can get cleaned up while it's off the car and repainted before putting it back on.  I'll probably also do some cleaning and painting underneath the car while the tank is out too since everything will be accessible.  Normally there's a smaller plywood hatch you can unscrew from the main plywood intermediary floor, our floor is removed here due to the woodworm repairs documented recently in the thread.  With that hatch (or the whole floor in our case) removed, you can then get access to the cover plates for the fuel tank filler neck and electrical connections for the sender.  The plates are held on with about half a dozen screws and simply lift out.

That gives you access to the one wire that goes to the fuel sender which is held in place with a nut on a stud that points towards the front of the car.  After that you can unscrew the fuel line from the outlet that's on top of the tank towards the back of the car, for which I used a 3/8ths BS spanner.  Our car has had the original copper lines replaced with what looks like nylon lines.  Fortunately the donor car we'd get a while after this footage was recorded still had its original copper lines in place so we'll be reinstated those and the reserve lever mechanism, which is why we suspect our car has nylon lines; someone needed to bypass the original reserve tank mechanism.

I have a few old Snail brand spanners, and I like them, the little snail on them is cute.

Going underneath the car, behind the fuel tank is a cross tube that runs from one chassis rail to the other with a single hole in the middle through which a nut and bolt goes through a bracket on the back of the fuel tank, undo that.

At the front edge of the tank there is another cross tube that has two holes drilled in it.  A little difficult to show you because of the way things are so hopefully this gives you an idea of what to look for.  On the driver's side you'll have to remove the exhaust hanger bolt too so that you can get access to the fuel tank bolt and to give you some room to drop the exhaust a little bit so you can wiggle the fuel tank out in a bit.

My theory was then to lift the tank up a little and forwards so that I could drop the rear of the tank through the gap between the cross tubes and the chassis rails, with the limitation up top being the location of the filler neck in relation to the boot floor.  Another item of note is that you will need to disconnect the rubber section of the filler neck from the steel filler neck that's part of the fuel tank which is disconnected on our car from when I was working on the wing previously.  In practice, you need to lift the tank up and forwards, then drop the rear of the tank through the cap so the bracket clears the rear cross tube and then rotate it as you drop it so that the filler neck clears the hole in the floor and the exhaust, about to the angle shown below.  Leaning on the exhaust (if fitted) to push it towards the sill edge of the car will also help you get a bit more clearance for everything to rather smoothly drop out.

With that put safely out of the way I could get my tools out, including an old Maestro wing that I'm scavenging good steel from and some craft supplies in the form of coloured cardstock and masking tape for making new templates for the repairs.  You do not need to make these things expensive or complicated when you're just doing repairs, good enough is good enough.

Then I could make a start mocking up what shapes I actually needed to make to recreate the rotten bits and get myself a template for steel.  Happily, all of these shapes are incredibly simple ones with no complicated stampings and each individual layer is really straightforward and easy to unpick.  There's been virtually no bodgery on the bodywork of this car beyond some tiny bits of filler and some hand painted touch ups so for once I don't have to unpick someone else's work to put this right which is something of a luxury!

The bigger issue for me on the fire safety front was that I could not get the screws for the boot hinge to come undone at all, as previously mentioned this is incredibly common because of how exposed the back of the fixings are in the inner wing.  I would have to find an alternative solution to this problem.  I'd also removed the rear arch trim from inside the boot, a very easy task to just lift it off and move it aside.

The other thing of note is that once I cleaned everything out, including the old seam sealer, a couple of the spot welds holding the inner wing to the boot floor failed and opened up a gap that I'd need to address as I repaired things.  The gap here is actually quite large anyway so I don't imagine the factory were too worried about it, having loaded it with quite a bit of (now quite hard) seam sealer to correct the issue.

With my card template sorted, I put some masking tape on to the Maestro wing and then smoothed the card template out over it so that I could trace around it slightly oversized.  I then corrected the card template to match the car so I had a reference for shaping the section of wing once I cut it out and offered it up to the car to check fit.  My making it slightly oversized I could compensate for the curved section causing some shrinking, and ensure I could perfectly match the shape cut out of the car before welding it all together.

Unusually for me, I opted to overlap weld this repair where normally I would butt weld and I opted to do this because of the variation in steel thickness here would make it a bit easier.  Since this is all hidden, and non structural (because it's a separate chassis on this car) I was more confident of getting a strong repair this way.  As it happens, the steel on this car in general is some of the nicest I've ever had to weld, a far cry from some of the newer stuff I've worked on that's for sure.  I opted to put this repair in from the outside as it would be easier to make that smoother and nicer than on the inside, and the inside of the panel is hidden by trims.  A couple of errant whiskers where I missed and poked the welding wire straight through the repair, but otherwise not bad and ready for trimming back.

As I like to do, that's the most complicated part of the repair out of the way so now the other repairs should be easier.  Next up is the bigger section that needs replacing for the rear inner wing and the first thing I did for that was to mark the panel with some masking tape so I had a guide line to cut along.

It is quite a large piece I'm taking out there, more than the rust you can see.  I wanted to take it back to the thickest section of steel without pulling all the pitted steel out.  The steel is so thick on this car that some pitting is perfectly fine in an area like this and won't really compromise anything to a significant degree.  When I started cutting I thought I could go straight through the whole panel and have an easy time of it and then found it was just a little bit harder to cut than it should be.  I checked on the other side and realised that I was trying to go through the frame for the intermediary boot floor, so had to change direction just a little bit to accomodate that.

With the rusty bit out all I had to do was make a template and cut a big section out of some leftover Maestro.  No shaping at all in this panel, it's literally a big flat sheet, so this took no time to set up.  I did a little bit of grinding and catching of pinholes and trimming back the excess steel on the first patch I put in so that's ready for sealing up and the boot floor return lip repaired where it was damaged too which again is done slightly oversized so I can trim it down when it's all welded up properly.

With everything now ready for the big patch to go on, I hit it all with some weld through primer which always makes everything look nice and fresh, and prepared myself for the next big plod along of welding.  With the main part seam welded I turned the return lip to get it ready for the next stage.

My next challenge was welding next to the wooden frame of the car on the trailing edge of this big repair panel.  I couldn't do that on the outside because there simply wasn't any steel to weld to on this side.  However, on the inside of the car there is enough of the original steel left for me to weld to.  The only problem is I'm right on top of the old wood which is very dry and the welder which is very hot is likely to cause some issues here.  The bottom of the big patch is just tacked to the new boot floor edge to hold it in place because it's actually quite difficult to keep this panel located at this point as there's nothing to really clamp or magnet to otherwise.

My thought was to use a squirty bottle of water and douse the wood.  Should anything catch, I can throw the contents of the spray bottle at it and stop it being a bigger problem.. in theory.

The system worked.  It actually gave me a really good early warning too, because if it was a bit too hot the water would instantly steam off and let me know the panel needed some cool down time.  Once I had it as securely tacked as I could, I doused the whole thing with water and kept an eagle eye on things to make sure nothing was going to start smouldering when I wasn't there to extinguish it.

Perhaps I was being a little bit overly cautious here and I could have got a lot more heavy to get things together.  I'd rather be more cautious and save myself a bigger job.  You can also see the really fat welds to the right of the above image joining the floor to the inner sill because while I did get that gap to close up a bit it looks like it was always quite a large gap there from the factory.  If I didn't have to contend with the wooden frame I would definitely have put more welding in here.  To get the wood out of the way it's incredibly involved, you have to unpick the aluminium outer panels and strip them from the wooden frame, and strip the steel panels to repair them off the car, then rebuild it all and hope you got everything in the right place and shape, as well as hoping the aluminium body panels go back on too.  That level of restoration is beyond my ability, and the car simply isn't valuable enough to warrant it, not to mention project creep.  So we're doing what's practical here and modern sealants will help keep all of this tidy and weatherproof.  With that now out of the way, time to do some spot welding and patch panel patterns... a little something like this.  You can also see the new hole I've drilled in the big panel so that the wiring for the brake lights can go through as it was originally, and that hole will get a grommet fitted later.

The patches needed are nice simple shapes and on the leading edge of the inner wing I found a little bonus in that the return lip was actually still really solid so I could slot my new patch behind it which would act as a heatshield to some degree when welding over where the wooden frame is.  The little arrows showing me the up direction is a sewing habit to show me the direction of the fabric, not something that actually matters here since steel doesn't have a directional grain like fabric does.

And there it was, done.

As these sorts of jobs go this really wasn't anywhere near as bad as I'd feared it was going to be and that's now the worst part of the bodywork on the whole car sorted out.  With the exception of the complicated sill ends, this was the one bit of the car that could take something like this from project to donor car because of how scary it looks at first.  I feel like it's now been pushed into restoration territory instead.  No wood caught fire.  The sill end will have to wait for another day, that's a separate project that we're not venturing into until this corner is sorted out. I put a few more thick welds into the big gap between the boot floor and the inner wing so I wouldn't need quite as much sealant as they used in the factory, here you can see how the repair looks and how it looks on the untouched side of the car.

Once I was happy I had enough welds everywhere and had flattened out what needed it I was on a bit of a time crunch to get done before the light went.  Seam sealer everywhere as needed it to protect the welds and seams, and then some lovely black paint.  In a future episode this whole boot area will be getting cleaned up so don't worry about the surface rust for now.

It actually felt slightly strange not seeing outside through the wing when the boot was open now.  Good strange.  I could get the car put away without worrying about the next stage, knowing that we should be good with these repairs for quite a few years to come and slightly annoyed that apart from you reading this, or watching the video, nobody would even know how many hours had been spent sorting all of this out because it's all hidden when the car is back together.