project 1951 Lanchester LD10 - Rear Corner Inspection

[vulgalour]

Today's update began with us getting the car ready to have new tyres fitted.  Obviously, everywhere is shut today so the tyres can't be done until tomorrow, and our schedules don't align tomorrow so we opted to take the wheels off the car today and leave the car outside overnight  until the new tyres are fitted.  Not a perfect solution, especially if it rains, but we have a solution for that too.  Then I discovered I only actually have 2 axle stands, not the four I was sure I had, so we improvised at the front with the ramps a neighbour gave us and they work just fine as an impromptu solution.

The first issue we encountered was one wheel nut taking the stud out with it.  We don't know why this stud is so much shorter than all the others or why the nut is stuck on it, or even if it's from this car.  It does hold the wheel on so it's probably perfectly fine.

Something to sort out another day that one, it can stay as is for now.  With the wheels and tyres loaded up for tomorrow, it was time to clean out the arches which, as it happens, really weren't that bad.  Surprisingly at the back the steel splash guards are still intact and in pretty good shape.  Here's a before and after to show how that all scrubbed up.  We plan to get some rust converter, black paint, and underseal in here to keep things solid.

At the front, much the same story.  Before and after of opposite sides due to a lack of forward planning, each side of the car was much the same and it was surprising just how clean it really was under here.  There's a little more red oxide on some of the edges on the passenger side, which is also the side with the newer looking wing so this is probably due to some old repair work, probably nothing serious since there's no sign of crumpled metal or panel beating so more likely just damaged paint and fixings from whatever damaged the wing.

With that done, attention turned to more paintwork polishing and stripping the paint off the hubcaps.  The oxidisation was really very heavy on the boot lid and roof area so it was slow going on that.  Still, we've got most of the rear end done now, just the driver's side wing to finish off really.

On the driver's side we still have to do both doors, most of the rear wing, and the roof.  It is coming together well all the same and I may have time to do a bit more tomorrow weather permitting.

With the paint stripped off the hubcaps we realised there wasn't much difference to them painted.  The key difference is that they match the rest of the brightwork more closely now and they catch the light a bit better rather than looking perpetually dirty.  Whatever they were painted in was pretty tough to remove and they're one of those items that looks better in person than in photographs.

The trouble with the hub caps is age, more than anything.  Much of the chrome is pitted and thin, there's some corrosion and one of the hubcaps has been dented with enough force to crack it, which has then been messily (and unsuccessfully) soldered from the back.  The pressing on all four hubcaps is very poor too, either because the tooling was worn out, or they've just been polished that much over the years it's worn through on the outside.  On the reverse of the hubcap the pressing is very clear.  The row of four hubcaps shows the painted two on the left, and the paint-stripped two on the right.

On this painted hubcap you can see just how worn down the Lanchester detailing is in the centre.  Some of this is due to how thick the paint is.

Once stripped of paint, you get a clearer idea of how poor/worn the pressing actually is.

To make the best of the hubcaps we opted not to repaint them silver. Instead, we spent a while with Autosol polish, very fine wire wool, and polishing cloths.  Once we'd got them as smooth as possible and polished up as much of the remaining chrome as we could, I was tasked with painting in the Lanchester pressing details.  We're pretty sure originally the hubcaps would have just been chrome with no paint on them, it just seemed right to highlight what there was of the old pressing and freehand what was missing to make them look a little better without taking away from their worn appearance.  They were then finished with a coat of clear lacquer.  The rear of them will be rust treated and painted black to keep the rust at bay as much as possible.  It's a lot of work for not a lot of gain on its own.  It's one of those items that, when combined with all the other little bits like the paint polishing and interior refurbishing, will add up to a nicely aged looking old car.

Then it was time to put the car's new hat on  because it was getting dark and we'll come back to this tomorrow.

Trust me, it's a lot more stable and less sketchy than it looks in that last picture.

[vulgalour]

We made a discovery today that made a lot more sense of that single front door lock than our initial assumption.  Totally by accident we found out where the other door locks are when I knocked a rear door handle down into the lock position while in the car, and then tried to open the door from outside and couldn't.  That means all the doors can be locked only from inside the car, except for the passenger door that can only be locked from outside the car using the key.  The theory, we think, is that the driver locks all the doors and then slides across into the passenger seat and out to lock the passenger door from the safety of the pavement.  Of course, you can also pre-lock the doors without keyholes and shut them.  It was nice to discover there was some security on the car after all.

Our schedules being what they are today, other half sorted out the tyres in the morning in the gap between him finishing work and me getting up.  We then fitted the newly shod wheels on the car in the gap between then and me going to work.  We did learn that one of the wheels (the worst looking one) is slightly buckled and while the tyre place could and did balance it we'll use this as our spare until we can get a non-buckled wheel.  We'll keep an eye out for a replacement, though it's unlikely to be much of an issue unless we're doing motorway speeds, which seems unlikely.

Then it was off to work for me until our next schedule line up when we took some time out to have a meal and finish the rest of the hubcaps.  It's a subtle difference, the refinishing on the hubcaps, and they're basically polished and lacquered steel for how little chrome is left on any of them, but they look more correct to the rest of the car than they did in silver paint and really help the car look old and worn, rather than old and neglected.

This was the worst of the hubcaps, the one that was almost entirely mottled in rust.  There was barely any chrome at all and the Lanchester pressing was the best of all the hub caps.

This one is the worst of the hubcaps, so we put it on the worst of the wheels as a good visual reminder that this will become the spare.  The spare isn't a very high priority at the moment since the goal was just to get new tyres on to replace the ruined old ones, but we will sort it soon.

There were other benefits to these new tyres too, even fully inflated the old ones were making it so that it was a two person job to push the car, with these new tyres one of us can push the car fairly easily now and that's much more convenient.  It's also made the car sit higher and more level so that too has benefits for working on and around it... except for me being too short to reach the middle of the roof without a chair.

The donor carburettor is on the way and we got a brief visit from our neighbour on his Norton Dominator to check up on progress, so that was pretty neat too.  Feels as good a time as any to update the list.

 

Service and Mechanical

• Change oil and filter
• Flush and replace coolant
• Adjust brakes
• Grease all grease points
• Tool roll (original if possible, equivalent if not)
• Spare key set cut
• Key cut, or replacement lock barrel, for boot handle
• Underseal arches

Electrical

• Inspect starter motor
• Replace wiring loom - ordered new
• Acquire battery clamp
• Indicator/sidelight combination LED bulbs for front (hidden item)
• Indicator/high level brake light combination LED for rear (hidden item)
• Replace bulbs where necessary
• Figure out inoperative brake lights
• Repair/replace horns
• Inspect wiper motor
• Inspect clock

Cosmetic

• Door handle gaskets
• Sidelight gaskets
• Headlights gaskets
• Door and boot seals
• Front and rear screen seals
• Pedal rubber seals
• Handbrake draught excluder seal
• Fresh air vent seal
• Window winder escutcheon (driver's side front door)
• Carpet set
• Polish and wax bodywork to preserve
• Repair seat leather
• Revarnish interior wood
• Re-scumble instrument cluster

[lesapandre]

Are you draining the pre-select g/b? Car looks great btw - getting it to shine shows up the subtler aspects of the Barker body shape. Very nice.

[Mr Laurence]

Can I just say that this is looking absolutely spectacular! Everything about it looks just right. Well done vulg, this is quickly becoming one of my all time favourite threads

[vulgalour]

14 minutes ago, lesapandre said:

Are you draining the pre-select g/b?

The advice has been not to and instead to keep it topped up.

[SiC]

2 hours ago, vulgalour said:

Totally by accident we found out where the other door locks are when I knocked a rear door handle down into the lock position while in the car, and then tried to open the door from outside and couldn't. 

Same as my 1100. I didn't discover this on the front doors until I pulled the mechanism out to figure why it didn't work properly! Except it did. 

On that, rear handles stay up when locked but front handles reset themselves. 

[PhilA]

It's the little things- of the work you've done to get the car looking presentable, the thing that says "Someone cares" is a set of wheels with new balance weights on.

Good job, it's coming along fast.

[paulplom]

I wonder why they put the wheel weights on the outside. You'll have to paint them black.

About 7 years ago, I had some tyres put on a metro advantage. The one with the white lattice wheels. They put the weights on the outside. I went totally nuts. They redid them and put sticky weights inside the rim. 

Bear in mind they were immaculate.

[paulplom]

Haha. I must have been typing when you posted that. They must stand out then.

Top fettling btw.

[Vantman]

Looking really good now (apart from the wheel balance weights on the outside?),hats off to you both.

[vulgalour]

Balance weights on the outside is normally an annoyance.  On this car, not so much, it's where they were before after all.  Some scruffy 16" beauty rings would sort them out.

[cort1977]

Looking good Vulg.

I have had this argument with tyre places before when they start twatting balance weights on the outside of newly painted alloys.  Surely the time taken to stick the hidden ones on is less than the clip on ones and they are more central to the wheel's centre of mass and therefore you need less of them?  I just don't get it.

[PhilA]

Personally I think it matches the ethos of the car, them being there.

[Tadhg Tiogar]

14 hours ago, vulgalour said:

.....

• Indicator/high level brake light combination LED for rear (hidden item)

Something like this?

[lesapandre]

It's kind of 'period correct'. I can remember them banged on my '54 A30 wheels in the 1970's.

On the missing paintwork - I use Humbrol enamel model paints on my cars. Try converting the rust and then touching in the missing bits with a  matching gloss black building up the paint in a few sessions to the existing paint edge - knock the shine off later when it is really hard with some superfine glass paper. Surprisingly effective for smallish patches - £2 a tin.

[Fumbler]

Or, do the Mustie1 method and rub in toilet gasket wax everywhere. Seals it up great.

I suppose the challenge is to find wax toilet rings in the UK. I suppose standard beeswax or candlewax would do the exact same thing.

[PhilA]

It's just a soft paraffin wax. Easy to get hold of.

[dollywobbler]

Passenger external lock might be because surely a gentleman would open the door for his female passenger before entering the vehicle himself? She could then unlock his door from the inside in return. Or maybe the driver's door did have an external lock but it got swapped out at some point...

[lesapandre]

Or even in '51 materials were in rationed short supply - it could be an 'austerity' or supply thing. Additionally with 'suicide' doors getting in or out on the kerbside would be sensible. With the pre-select and no transmission tunnel this would have been easy - they could even have had a bench seat...but probably avoided such a vulgar Americanism!

[PhilA]

1 hour ago, lesapandre said:

Or even in '51 materials were in rationed short supply - it could be an 'austerity' or supply thing. Additionally with 'suicide' doors getting in or out on the kerbside would be sensible. With the pre-select and no transmission tunnel this would have been easy - they could even have had a bench seat...but probably avoided such a vulgar Americanism!

This is a particularly interesting thing for me- making comparisons between what was being given to car buyers here versus there at the time. My car is made from massively thick steel, with very little expense spared in terms of creature comforts. New things like clear plastics, high tech electronics and all the little fiddle-faddle items like a light in the ash tray and lock pins, locking glove box, dash illumination dimmer and a myriad other oddments that were considered a nice thing to have even before the war. A lot of the trim is stainless steel, the rest of the shiny stuff is chrome, and then they had the audacity to offer paint in more than burgundy or black...

Oddly, there's very little aluminum used on the vehicle; there's a bit of pot metal used for castings and emblems but that's about it.

It's a world apart, little wonder there was a fair bit of animosity towards the States at the time.

 

[vulgalour]

Makes you wonder what the actual equivalent would be in the States, that would really highlight just how different things were.  I'd expect, socially speaking in their respective countries, the Lanchester and Pontiac aren't at the same level.  The Lanchester is a somewhat aspirational vehicle, something for the comfortably upper middle classes of a conservative bent, while the Pontiac is more of an everyman car, accessible to pretty much everyone rather than being aspirational.  I suspect in America, the Lanchester's equivalent would be something like a Packard, a car with a long history of luxury that is now nearing the end and the standards it stood for is coming to a close.  Perhaps something like a Packard Patrician.

[PhilA]

No, I would say they are about level pegging in terms of hierarchy. 

This wasn't a technologically spartan car, by any means. Even if you were to specify the base model, it still came with a big six, synchromesh three speed, full hydraulic brakes with mechanical emergency system, adjustable bench seat and rear view mirror. The rest of it had to be requested, and you could dress it up significantly.

[egg]

I think in two cars you see why the Marshall Plan was needed, and how the war almost bankrupted Britain. Well, left us with a huge debt.

[vulgalour]

Opinions on this will vary, even mine do when I think about this.  In general this is how I'd think of the companies stacking up on a roughly equivalent scale.

• Cadillac
• Packard, Hudson, Kaiser
• Pontiac, Buick, Oldsmobile, Lincoln
• Nash, Studebaker, Dodge, Mercury
• Ford, Chevrolet, Plymouth
• Crosley

 

• Rolls Royce, Bentley
• Jaguar, Rover, Armstrong Siddeley, Lanchester, Wolseley
• Triumph, Riley,  MG, Humber
• Ford, Vauxhall, Austin, Hillman
• Morris, Standard
• Bond

It seems a busy and muddy period of automotive history really, in the UK especially a lot of very old companies disappeared as the demand from the upper parts of society simply didn't need the supply of tens of different companies.  In America, the death of those older luxury companies seems more to do with how disposable the car was becoming, in part because of how necessary to modern life.  The companies I can think of, at any rate, seem to have a heavier bias towards the more middle class in America, and a heavier bias to the upper classes in the UK, the former was very sustainable, the latter very much not.

[PhilA]

I think that list does rather sum up nicely.

[sloth]

looking great vulg.  that hubcap thats dented looks at home on that wheel, like it happened at the same time as the scrape. 

 

if your neighbour pops past on his domi again could you take a snap. do love a classic bike

[Skut]

You have a lovely car. An American equivalent it reminds me of is an interwar Willys-Overland. Both 4 cylinder equipped cars. Admittedly the Willys has 2.2 litre Go Devil but then it is a little bigger. 

[vulgalour]

With our list to hand, we've been keeping an eye out for anything useful for the Lanchester that's not too pricey and will allow us to get it a bit more weathertight than it is.  Tonight we ordered several rubbery things from eBay which should be here in a few days.  We were going to wait a bit longer for the windscreen seal until we saw that it leaked when it rained really heavily and noticed on the last cleaning round that the old seal is splitting at the corners.  We've ordered a new rear screen seal too, even though the rear screen doesn't appear to leak, because the rear screen seal has gone all weird looking and it's only a matter of time until it fails.  The big grommets that go in the holes under the headlights have been ordered, as have the smaller ones that seal the floor up around the brake and 'clutch' pedals.  We even managed to get a replacement handbrake cable sleeve seal thing, the one on the car looks like rhino skin so it's only a matter of time until that gives up.

Door and boot seals have to wait a bit longer, in part because we've not yet measured how much we need or taken templates of the existing seals.   They're going to be a fairly standard quarter circle profile glue on seal looking at them, and we'll need quite a lot to do all the apertures.  Fiddly job glueing seals on and can be quite messy too, we need a good amount of time and decent weather to do it right.  We know the boot seal leaks at the top, and it's surprising the door seals don't seem to leak considering you can see daylight through the B-pillar gaps.

Carburettor is due to arrive in time for weekend tinker time so we should be up and running again very soon and, once we've managed to get it up to temperature, we can look at doing the engine oil change and coolant flush, this will also allow us to seal the exhaust paste when we put the new bandage on.  It's a bit strange to us that the oil filter is one you wash out in petrol, rather than replacing, but since replacement elements are around the £30 mark, a bit of petrol seems the better option.

The biggest hold up at the moment is waiting on the wiring loom, we can't really trust the existing wiring so driving to the exhaust shop, etc. isn't really an option, especially since our brake lights don't actually work at the moment, which is down to either a switch, a connector, or wiring since the bulbs themselves are perfectly fine.  Knowing the car runs and drives and works and not being able to go out in it is perhaps the most frustrating part of ownership at the moment.  Actually getting it running and driving with so little effort is perhaps the most rewarding aspect, and the most surprising.

We are keeping an eye open for a set of battered 16" beauty rings/rim embellishers too, just in case.  You can buy new ones, in plastic and in metal, but new is going to look a bit stupid on this car and since we only really want them to hide the wheel weights (which we could just as easily paint) and add a little bit of period bling, battered is best.

[PhilA]

Those oil filters are prime to go in the ultrasonic bath, in a sealed plastic jar (peanut butter, mayonnaise etc) in a bit of clean fuel.

Hedge a bet on the brake lights being the switch. Moving parts likely to fail first. You can probably pull it apart though- is it a plunger on the pedal or some sort of spring-pull-for-on arrangement?

Phil

[lesapandre]

I used this to wrap a hole on the exhaust of my  '95 Trafic:

https://www.toolstation.com/fiberfix-heat-wrap/p17590

Worked well. Additionally clamped a sleeve over it - but seemed ok without.

Avoid any of the Holts comedy rubbish - complete waste of money but it has been on the market 40 years...who knows how.