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1951 Lanchester LD10 - Rear Wing Removal


vulgalour

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2 hours ago, lesapandre said:

"I was told that if I came up behind someone, it was best not to blast past at 180mph — maybe throttle back to about 120mph. "

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/motorsport/day-jack-sears-hit-185mph-m1-motorway

That is the very report that people think led to the imposition of speed limits; but it's a myth...

'A number of car crashes during the foggy autumn of 1965 led the government to hold consultations with the police and the National Road Safety Advisory Council. They concluded the crashes were caused by vehicles travelling too fast for the conditions.

It was suggested that a speed limit be used during periods when the road was affected by fog, ice or snow, and that an overall maximum speed limit of 70 mph should be tested out. The four-month trial began at midday on 22 December 1965.'

https://www.historyhit.com/1965-introduction-of-70mph-speed-limit-in-uk/

and here's the transcript from Parliament where Barbara Castle makes the speed limit trials permanent, if you read it through there are several mentions of why the limits were introduced (weather/fog), I can't find any reference to excessive speed being the reason for the introduction.

'Would the right hon. Lady also agree that matters such as the increase of police activity due to there being a speed limit, the installation of different fog lighting, the fact that she has imposed this regulation on commercial vehicles going into the fast lane will all have affected the statistics on the motorway during the period?...'

Interestingly the limit was set at 70mph for ALL roads (outside built up areas) - but there were experiments of 60mph limits...

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1967/jul/12/roads-70-mph-speed-limit#S5CV0750P0_19670712_HOC_396

 

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Time for another instalment of Lanchester fettling.  Quite a few small jobs have been ticking over and I've been saving up the progress made until I had something to put together into a single post.  We found, and were the only bidders, on a pair of working Lucas WT29 horns, or so they were described.  Hopefully that will at least give us a look at how a working pair are supposed to go together and figure out why ours are being so recalcitrant.  Here's hoping the new horns arrive safely.  Progress on the dashboard has been continuing steadily in our free time, and the fabric stash raided to see if we had anything suitable that would suit the car without looking too out of place.  I know there was no pale coloured wool, and the dark coloured wool I did have didn't look right against the restored dashboard.  Eventually, we settled on two scraps of artificial silk leftover from sewing projects past and not enough to really do much of anything else with.  This is the first item that goes against the originality brief but we think it's allowed because it looks nice and it at least fits in with the ethos of using what you've got to keep things nice.  After stripping off the old fabric and discovering the back of the storage bins are a separately covered piece, some repairs were done and then the backing boards covered in the paler of the two fabrics in the same way they were done originally.  That is to say, messily on the side that isn't seen.  It was actually a bit surprising just how quick and lazy an approach was taken to upholstering these pieces, fabric is basically stuffed where needed, wrapped around and glued, then wedged together to fit.

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The second bit, while the first bit dried, was to line the storage bins themselves, this time by using a strip of fabric glued around the inside of the bin.  Because this artificial silk is quite thin, we also  used a bit of the cotton wadding we ordered for the door cards (the smallest quantity is far more than we need) to line all the pieces which will lend a nicer finish by hiding the fixing rivets and making the fabric feel a little plush.  The copper fabric is extremely shiny on the facing side, on the reverse it looks a lot more like shot silk so that's the side we had facing out.  Because this isn't real silk we shouldn't have issues with sun damage or the fabric rotting away, and because it's been in the fabric stash for a long time, it no longer has that new fabric smell.  Lining the boxes is easy, you roll the fabric up and start from the seam at the top centre of the box, then unroll it using pegs to hold it at the top. There's no need for any glue.  The one mistake I made was the larger box I cut the edge fabric too short and the scrap I had left wasn't long enough to redo it in one piece.  Instead of panicking, I just folded the raw edges and put another piece in to bridge the cap, If I hadn't told you, you'd think it was a design feature rather than a mistake... unless you know anything about sewing and upholstery I suppose.  Anyway, it's fine, it looks fine.

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With that all pegged in place, I could put the contact adhesive on the back of the first panel we covered and in the base of this panel.  There's no need to glue the copper coloured fabric because when you (carefully) push the paler backing piece in, it holds all of the raw edges out of sight and under as much tension as is required for this application.  Originally, the fabric was glued to the sides of the box, one downside of this fabric is that the glue bleeds straight through to the front and looks unsightly (test samples are a good idea for this reason) so we'll be gluing this in differently.  Since the pale piece holds one end of the copper fabric in, we'll do as Barker did and glue the other end of the fabric to the bracket faces and the edges of the box so that when the box is screwed back onto the dashboard there's no way for the fabric to escape.

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With the base piece glued in and the pegs holding the fabric, fill the boxes with whatever you can that's got some weight and fits, and leave to cure.  The box that was water damaged was repaired with a combination of leather offcuts, hessian, and contact adhesive and is now almost as strong as it was originally without altering its original dimensions.  We could have bought the materials to remake the box, but since it's not really visible and this repair is perfectly adequate, this is the option we went for.

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The original fabric was very dirty and in places moth-eaten (perhaps even literally) so replacement of some sort was likely to happen anyway.

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Speaking of moths, we got some little cedar wood blocks to dot around the car to keep the moths at bay and protect the headlining a bit.  You can re-infuse these blocks with cedar, lavender, or camphor oil to refresh them so they're a very affordable moth deterrent solution.

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Another item that was solved by chance was making use of a little velvet bag some horrendous cufflinks I ordered came in, turns out it's just the right size to put on the keys so they can't scuff up the dashboard.  Even covers up the keyring nicely.

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For some idea of how the newly recovered storage boxes look in the dashboard, here's a view of that.  You'll have to imagine the copper fabric with some more tension and a smoother finish, than it has here.  The colours compliment the wood nicely and the machine embroidery is a nice little flourish.  They also feel quite nice because of the padding.

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The driver's seat as was has now been fully repaired too.  The leather on this seat is a good bit lighter than the passenger seat so the dye does stand out a bit, it's also not been conditioned after the repair and we know from experience that will help mellow and blend in the dye a bit better.  We actually ended up swapping the drivers and passenger seats over and found that there's better knee support for the driver that way.  Even though the seats did look the same, there must be some slight variation in them that's not so obvious to the naked eye.

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The really scary job to do was the instrument cluster.  One problem with it was that the original pad-printed lettering on the back of the glass was flaking off and we didn't really know what to do about it.  That is, until Baumgartner posted a video about restoring a reverse painted oil-on-glass painting.  This would give some insight into what to expect from paint on glass and how to potentially fix it.

 

Obviously, we're neither of us professional conservators, but the age of information allows us to get a glimpse into techniques that would otherwise be unfamiliar, and adapt them to our current needs.  The first task was to actually get to the back of the glass, and that meant dismantling the unit.  We also hoped the glass would be separate to make the face of the binnacle easier to repaint, more on that shortly.  The binnacle is made of three steel pressings, the rear being bare steel painted white inside, the intermediate piece being white on the back and cream/ivory on the front, and the front pressing being painted mid-brown front and rear, with a darker brown scumble on the face.

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The unit is illuminated by just two bulbs, these go into the two round holes halfway down the unit on each side.  All of the instruments are held in with very short flat head screws, except for the clock which is missing one screw and has had the other modified in the past with a saw to make it a cross head which none of my screwdrivers actually fit.  The two riveted pieces to the top left and right are the bulb holders for the oil and ignition lights, these shine through coloured lenses that are held in with rubber tubes sandwiched between the layers of the binnacle.  The two large tabs on the side are what holds the whole binnacle to the back of the dashboard, one of the screws was missing when we removed the dashboard, presumed repurposed as one of the three screws holding the washer jet pump that a previous owner added.

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For the illumination, the bulb's light is supposed to be directed out of the little bay through several holes.  However, in part because this isn't a superb design, and in part because the white paint isn't particularly bright any more, it doesn't work very well at all.

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So, one of the things we'll be doing to improve this is to replace all of the white painted areas you don't see when the binnacle is together, with modern chrome paint.  It shouldn't negatively affect the colour of the light, but should improve the amount of it.  We may also upgrade the bulbs to warm white LED equivalents to improve matters.  This image really is as good as it currently gets and there's nothing wrong with the lightbulbs.

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To the task at hand then, which is the numbers.  This design is supposed to give you 'floating' numbers, so far as I can work out, and when it's done well it's quite a pleasing thing to look at.  Each of the numbers is printed with a black drop shadow to emphasise the effect.  Unfortunately, while all the black remains, most of the white paint has peeled up and fallen off so the letters don't float that well.

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There are various solutions to this issue and had it not been for the Baumgartner video above, this could have proven tricky to resolve.  We didn't want to have a custom vinyl made, or transfers, since that would mean getting everything exactly aligned.  We also can't remove the glass from the face of the binnacle, it's bonded on very well and to try and separate the two risks breaking the glass so that's something we have to work around.  Instead, we had to find some way to both stabilise what was left, and replace what was missing.  Fortunately, we found a way, and the trial of it on the glass proved it to be quite effective.

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What's more, it didn't require any specialist tools to be bought.  The same paint brush and high quality acrylic paint as was used on the control knobs was used for this.  Good old Citadel paints and tiny artist brushes.

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The reason for using this particular paint is that we know it's very UV stable, not prone to shrinking or fading, and sticks really very well to just about any surface you care to apply it to.  It also behaves incredibly well, so you can predict where it's going to go and, since we both have years of experience of using it, we know just how to make it do what we want when you need to do a very controlled bit of detailed work.  One very fortunate thing with the way the original numbers are applied is that it leaves just a bit of rough surface even when the old paint has flaked off, and that works a bit like a primer.  If you dot the paint on it wants to flow only where the primer is and avoids going on the glass, so you can get it almost exactly where it used to be.  Because of the aforementioned video, we knew not to clean the old paint off, or clean the glass, and instead used the new acrylic paint to serve as a bonding agent as well as a paint in its own right, stabilising what was left of the original paint and filling in the missing areas.  It was jolly hard work to do, but the results really do speak for themselves.  The letters actually do appear to float because now they actually cast a shadow and, when the binnacle is illuminated properly they should block out the light and become more visible by contrast.

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The scumbling is very straight forward and quite affordable so some samples will be run before we commit to doing that on the instrument binnacle.  Careful masking of the glass should make for a very sharp end result.  The intermediate panel may also get repainted on the visible side because where the 20/30 is on the speedometer you can see a bit of brown staining, this is rust just coming through the very thin original paint.  It is a satin finish rather than gloss, to give it that look of a more expensive ceramic surface so it will be a case of finding a close match to the instruments themselves.  The instrument faces aren't rusting because they're painted over aluminium and are all in very good shape so we'll leave those be.

 

 

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Looking good!

Another good source of printing on glass repair techniques can be found by looking at pinball machine repairs.  The backglass on most machines is reverse screen printed and then backlit, and the printing peeling off the glass is a very common issue these days.

 

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What a good result. You mention chrome paint but I had read somewhere about varying colors used as backing and beyond a mirrored surface, a gloss bright white gave the best results. Not what I thought either, but there you go.

 

If the improvements don't do much, you might want to look at fiber optics. Is the glass fully clear, or is it green on the edge? Side-lit the numbers would glow against the backing without the backing being lit; fiber optics may be thin enough to get in and point at the edge of the glass around its periphery.

 

Phil

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There's no gap to be able to edge light the glass, even with fibreoptics, it's a very snug fit to the steel, it also appears to be fully clear rather than green tinted.  We'd assumed chrome would work better than pure white on the basis that it's what you do (and we've both done in the past) with rear light clusters.  A good gloss white is better than a silver, I know that from doing lampshades, but a good chrome seems to be better than both again from the same experiments.  We'll paint it in the chrome and put it together without folding the tabs down that hold it all together and see how it looks, if it doesn't work well enough, we'll go for a brilliant white instead and see if that improves it.

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I've found that using a specular finish in settings like this can result in really blotchy light output.  Using a solid white finish helps prevent that.

The other possible way I can think to improve the lighting might be to put some LED tape in the top or bottom of the housing  itself.  Probably massive overkill at full output but would be possible to dial it back with an inline resistor once you've seen how well it works.

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I love what you are doing with this car, this is a great and very informative thread, I am really enjoying following progress and learning. Thank you for sharing as I am learning a lot from you. This is not the sort of car that usually interests me but your approach to preservation rather than restoration is great and probably not what I would normally do. Cars which are well maintained but wear their history well like this are more interesting than something over restored, I like cars restored to as new also but what you are doing with this is brilliant and just right for the car. Keep up the good work, I look forward to seeing the car back on the road, and hope to see it at a meeting one day.

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I have been following this thread and your work is very impressive. I expect the panel lamps will be 2.2 watts. The holes look like they will take the larger glass size of a 5 watt bulb, which I have used before and make a considerable difference.

 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/MES-12V-5W-Screw-In-bulb-E10-New/131815315935?hash=item1eb0ce19df:g:zwAAAOSwwZtaaQYQ

 

Independent control of the panel lights, whether by a dimmer or simple on/off switch is a great feature and the idea is to switch them off when travelling along dark unlit roads to avoid glare and distraction. Old cars are great in this respect, you can actually concentrate solely on the road.

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5 hours ago, busmansholiday said:

IFRC, the 60 limit was introduced in 1973 due to the oil crisis.

1973, the national limit (all roads) went from 70mph to 50mph. After the oil crisis(?) the limits were revised in 1974 to 50, 60 dual carriageways and 70 on motorways only. Why do I remember? - learning to drive in 1974!   Present day limits since 1977.

 

 

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53 minutes ago, Asimo said:

After the oil crisis(?) the limits were revised in 1974 to 50, 60 dual carriageways and 70 on motorways only

If you're driving a van those may be correct, but single carriageway roads are 60 and dual carriageway and motorways 70 (unless otherwise indicated).

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1 hour ago, busmansholiday said:

If you're driving a van those may be correct, but single carriageway roads are 60 and dual carriageway and motorways 70 (unless otherwise indicated).

But Asimo did then say "present day limits since 1977" without specifying that they are in fact the figures you've given.

Anyway, I'm loving the updates on the Lanchester!

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Work on the Lanchester continues apace.  The new entertainment system arrived and having taken it apart already, it's proven pretty much ideal as an upgradable unit for what we intend to do.  It's nice that it doesn't really need any restoration work to fit in and even the wood on it is a very close match to the wood in the car.  The dials are sticking up like that because they're not actually attached at the moment.

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The other job was to redo the hessian backing for the underside of the seat base.  The existing one exhibited signs of rodent and moth damage, along with many years of use.  First was to unpick the very crude running stitch holding the hessian in place which was done with what was basically string and appears to be completely original as it matches the similarly crude stitching holding the fabric to the frame.  With the hessian removed, you can get to the black felt that sits between it and the springs, and then to the springs themselves.  The internals of the seat are in exceptionally good condition with no rusting or pest damage evident.

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With the backing removed we could lay it out on some new hessian ready for recovering.  The new hessian is from Woolies and cost just £7 for a piece that's larger than we need.

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After some discussion, we decided to keep the original hessian and cover over it.  Rather than sewing it back on, we used contact adhesive.  With the old hessian as a folding guide, we simply folded the new hessian over and glued it in place, holding it all together with pegs while it dried.

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To reattach this to the seat base we again opted for contact adhesive.  This isn't original in approach but does mean we're not trying to re-use the original stitching holes, or putting extra holes into the material and putting it under any undue stress.  It also makes this entirely reversible should we need to in the future.  The felt has shrunk a little so it was given a few stitches through the middle to catch it to the hessian and hold it in place so it didn't crumple up as it had in the past.  The two vent holes were also cut into the new hessian, these should help displace the air without putting stress on the fabric when someone sits in the seat, a small detail but an important one that the seat base has had from new.  Also of note is the small rough-sewn hessian bag tacked to the underside, this contains some cedar blocks to deter moths from having a nibble on the wool felt.

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The front seats and rear seat base were then plonked back in the car, a job of mere moments.  We swapped the two front seats from how it came to us originally so that the one with the heavier repairs is the driver's seat.  The camera has been quite unkind about the colour difference of the dye, it seems to be set to some sort of high contrast mode that makes everything look a little strange.

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In other news, we have a new video to enjoy now that we've acquired a new camcorder.

 

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Super stuff. The leather will all fade down to a similar colour in time I am sure and the repairs be rendered invisible. Amusing that where it didn't matter Barker's trim department were happy to do such a rough and ready job. Do you know where the car was manufactured - engine and chassis were in Coventry - were these then shipped to the Barker works in London - by rail I'm assuming? Unless it was the other way round - bodies in component form shipped to the Radford factory in Coventry. I think at this point Daimler were using the Radford plant which had been heavily bombed in WWII but repaired.

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Re wiper linkage. Would maybe reaming out the holes in the linkage and press fitting a top hat bronze bush with an internal diameter the same as the spindle eliminate a lot of the slop?

something like https://www.georgelodgedirect.co.uk/ProductGrp/oilite-imperial-flanged/

or a miniature ballrace bearing

https://www.georgelodgedirect.co.uk/Products/zz-shielded-flanged-stainless-miniature-bearings/SFR3ZZ/

I can imagine something as well made as the Lanchester would have had a bushing or similar in the linkages when new.

The wiper motor is probably a simple DC motor with dry or worn bearings, again probably similar to the above.

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2 hours ago, dozeydustman said:

Re wiper linkage. Would maybe reaming out the holes in the linkage and press fitting a top hat bronze bush with an internal diameter the same as the spindle eliminate a lot of the slop?

something like https://www.georgelodgedirect.co.uk/ProductGrp/oilite-imperial-flanged/

or a miniature ballrace bearing

https://www.georgelodgedirect.co.uk/Products/zz-shielded-flanged-stainless-miniature-bearings/SFR3ZZ/

I can imagine something as well made as the Lanchester would have had a bushing or similar in the linkages when new.

The wiper motor is probably a simple DC motor with dry or worn bearings, again probably similar to the above.

 

You want plain bushings with provision to grease.

1) sealed or otherwise ball bearings tend to leak and with the limited use and relatively short sweep would tend to get dirty and bind quickly

2) plain bushes can be grease packed which keeps dirt and water out, coupled with having good support in two axis of force applied. 

If it's electric then I'm surprised- the Oldsmobile patents hadn't expired by '51. If it is though, expect chunky field windings that may be short and a burned and pitted commutator with need for new brushes.

 

Phil

 

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Today's update begins with a mishap.  I'd put the back portion and the intermediate panel of the instrument binnacle in the paint stripper pot while we went out to get supplies, it was in there for about 2 hours which was enough time for the slow stripper to remove the very thin layer of paint.  Unfortunately, what I hadn't done was remove the rubber and plastic telltales themselves when I did this so they too spend a couple of hours in paint stripper.  This was particularly galling as these items were pristine.  Fortunately, a good rinse off to neutralise the paint stripper and then leaving them telltale down on the tiled mantlepiece meant the plastic cured back to close to flat again.  The rubber seemed totally unaffected, it just came out clean thankfully, but the plastic is now less than perfect which is a shame.  Still perfectly legible and once reinstalled you can't really tell there was an issue but still, an annoying and stupid mistake especially given that I usually take so much care.

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A generic chrome aerosol paint was used on the inside of the binnacle (with the instruments etc. removed), and on the back of the intermediate panel.  Tests showed much better light distribution so we've opted to go for this rather than the pure white.  It also shows just how varied the colour of the dials is.

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Our first attempt to match the colour for the face of the intermediate panel didn't go as well as we'd hoped, the colour matches the lid of the paint bought really well, it just looked far too bright against the dials once everything was mocked up.

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The face of the binnacle was scraped clean of the old scumbled paint and then sanded as carefully as possible so the glass doesn't get damaged.  It was then masked off and given a dose of red primer.  You can see even more clearly here just how much too bright that first colour guess was.

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Armed with technology, we used the colour scanning app on the other half's phone to find out a best guess for the RAL code for both the intermediate panel and the base coat of the scumbled panel, and then placed an order for some paints.  We had to make a best guess on the dials because the colour actually varied a lot, presumably because it's faded over the years.  Eventually we ended up with RAL7032 for the intermediate panel, and RAL8025 for the base coat of the scumbled panel.  Rustoleum (RAL7032/Pebble Grey) we've used before, it's proven sound long term and would give us the finish we were after.  The brown from Evolution (RAL 8025/Pale Brown) is one we've not used before, it goes on very heavily and takes a bit longer to dry but does level out to quite a nice finish and was a very close match to the original brown on the back of the panel.  The scumble paint is from Polyvide and is Walnut, again the closest we could find to what was on the panel originally.

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As you can see, the Pebble Grey is a much better match for the dials, not perfect, but close enough.  It's mellowed down a bit more than in these photographs and in person the difference isn't so obvious as it is on camera, it looks very similar to how it did originally.  The pale brown would be sufficient on its own against the dashboard too, it's really not that out of place in just plain gloss.

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Once that had all dried, the new Scumble tool arrived, it's a soft rubber triangle with a comb on each side that has different thickness teeth.  Of the various tools on the market, this one made most sense since the original finish was just straight lines, no fake knots or anything of that sort, so a simple comb style tool seemed most appropriate.  A few samples were run over the Pale Brown on some cardboard to get a feel for how much Scumble to use, and how to get the look we wanted.  It's tricky stuff to work with, the tutorial videos make it seem much easier than it is.  The paint has a very long open time, with a 24 hour drying period.  This long open time is good for getting the look you want since you can play about with the finish quite a bit.  After a few passes with the comb and a brush, we eventually got something approximating the original look.  Depending how this dries, I may go back with a fine brush and add some extra variation to the strip thicknesses just to make it match the dashboard a bit better.  Of all the items on the dashboard, this one thing has been the most difficult to do.  I'm also left with a lot of scumble material and nothing to scumble (currently) because even the smallest quantities I could acquire were far more than was needed.  Given just how far the materials go it's very easy to see why this was such a widely used finish, it's fairly quick to apply and I expect with practice and slightly differently shaped tools, an even more convincing wood grain could be achieved.

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So there you go, my first attempt at scumble work.  Apologies for the quality of the photos in this update too, my camera has really not wanted to play nice lately.

 

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Excellent work, that scumble looks really rather good. I'm looking forward to seeing it in situ.

It's interesting how much scumble was used in domestic properties back in the day. I recall my mother saying how her father had quite a lot of woodwork done that way in his house back in the 1950's & indeed I can remember some  areas of woodwork being finished that way in my parents house. It seemed to be very long lasting as at my parents house it had been done in the 1960's (before they moved in) but was still perfectly serviceable when the painted it white in the  early 1980's !

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