project 1951 Lanchester LD10 - Rear Corner Inspection

[BL Bloke]

Just finished reading this from page one, what a great thread. I can't remember seeing a Lanchester LD10 before but it looks a lovely old thing. Great work so far and good to see that you'll be preserving it in ts present condition as far as possible. 

[PhilA]

That intake manifold is impressive. I thought the design of mine was bad... That'll have an interesting sound to it when it comes on cam.

I have a feeling driving around in it will be very Postman Pat's Van. Which is excellent.

Like the sidelights too. Smart little feature.

 

Phil

[anonymous user]

I wonder how many of those side lamp tell-tale have been swallowed by children thinking that it was a fruit gum.

[vulgalour]

Oh good, it wasn't just me thinking they looked delicious out of context!

[MorrisItalSLX]

On 8/9/2020 at 4:18 AM, vulgalour said:

There was another discovery made which is that the car only has one door lock, and it's on the passenger door.  When we viewed the car it wasn't really clear why this would be until the car had been cleaned and we could get a better look at things.  There's signs that the passenger door has been sprained at the hinges and, given it's a suicide door, we wonder if it flew open at some point and scared the occupant who then insisted on having a lock fitted to keep the door shut.  Given the lack of anything to keep you in the car if the front doors open, I can't say I blame them.  It's part of the car's history, so it's staying.

 

On 8/6/2020 at 5:01 AM, vulgalour said:

Catherine Jones has some useful videos too on a few general bits and pieces with these cars.  They helped give a feel of how things should look and behave before going to view this one.

 

I noticed watching the video that the LD10 featured also only has a lock on the passenger front door. Surely not a coincidence?

(Love what you are doing with yours BTW, absolutely smashing job).

[vulgalour]

The single door lock thing is apparently completely normal.  What I can't figure out is why.

[Coprolalia]

On old American trucks it was a single door lock on the side closest to the pavement, I think for some safety from burglary reason.

This may be bollocks.

[vulgalour]

Wasn't the same thing true of commerical vehicles in the UK?  I'm pretty sure someone mentioned that in one of the threads.

[Christine]

Has it got a button on the key ?  Might have remote central locking!   Have you found any fault codes from the ecu ?

[anonymous user]

The only external door lock was on the passenger side of my Bentley MkVi, perhaps it was a coachbuilder thing. 

[vulgalour]

2 hours ago, Christine said:

Has it got a button on the key ? 

The keys look almost identical to the keys for the outside padlock on our gate.  Like, you could put the keys side by side and you'd not be sure which was for the car and which for the gate.  High tech stuff!

[Christine]

Who the hell is going to nick a LD10 anyway..?

[Dan_ZTT]

Just caught up on this from the start, awesome job. 

[dozeydustman]

How I have missed this 2-week old thread of much win I don't know. Cracking car, cracking recommission work. Bob on sir.

2πr/10 where r>1 million.

[vulgalour]

Today, we had a visitor who came bearing gifts.  They arrived in a suitable vehicle.

The gifts in question were a set of near enough new Davanti DX420 radial tyres, some leather offcuts, and some valve stem collets.  Once the new innertubes arrive, we can hopefully put the flat tyre issue behind us with the Lanchester which will make moving it about a lot easier.

Other items to arrive were a rear view mirror (we'll come to that a little later), a compression tester because I don't have one and it would be nice to know that's okay on this car, and some ultrasonic cleaner solution so we can get the carburettor sorted out.

While not the worst I've ever encountered, the carburettor was definitely in need of a clean and probably in need of some new items inside, we now had all the tools in place to do that.

It's a fairly simple thing to take apart and to make sure it was a simple thing to put back together I took a lot of reference photographs so I could understand just what bits went where in what orientation and this helped massively.  The float bowl comes off with just two large bolts/screws and once removed it was immediately apparent that the old gasket was if not worn out, then certainly not in great shape.

With that and the float removed - interestingly the float is just that, there's no arm to set, it's just a hollow brass cylinder that floats, we tested it and there's no holes which is good - we could get our first look inside the bowl.  There's quite a bit of sediment and general detritus in there.  One neat feature is that the end of one of the bolts that holds the float bowl on has a square headed end to the thread, this fits the plugs in the bottom of the float which I'm sure is no coincidence since it allows you to remove those and clean out the space underneath them.  It's not often you encounter a specialised tool built in to the thing you're working on, what a sensible feature.

The diaphragm on the side of the carburettor was removed next.  This comprises two gaskets sandwiching a rubber gasket that has a brass cup which holds a spring.  The rubber gasket was stretched and seemed a little brittle while the brass cup had a large crack in it so replacing this will no doubt help.

On the back of the float bowl there's some sort of block held in place with five screws.  As far as I can understand this directs the fuel from the float bowl past the brass tang which, presumably, makes it spray in a finer mist to draw it down into the manifold easier.  The gasket here was in reasonable condition and it was fairly clean.

The float needle (I assume, it sits above the float and seems activated by the float pushing against it) showed signs that it may have been replaced before, little nicks all over it.  The top is also ever so slightly mushroomed over, you can just feel it with a finger nail, so this is also due a replacement I'd say.

After stripping everything else down that needed it, namely the parts I could replace with the service kit, I spend the rest of the day feeding the various parts through my small ultrasonic cleaner.  I must say thank you to @Zelandeth for his tip about putting a larger plastic container in the cleaner, this really helped for the float bowl which was quite dirty and benefitted from full submersion.  The water shown here is one of the cleaner runs, when we did the main body of the carburettor the water was impossible to see through.

It took a while to do everything since it had to be done in batches and alongside my work commitments, eventually everything had been run through for about 20 minutes total and it was all as clean as it seemed to want to go.  I did notice the cleaner not only removed dirt, it also removed some of the surface rust on the steel components, I imagine with a few more passes I could have removed the rust completely, it just didn't seem that necessary since what's there doesn't affect the operation of the carburettor in any way.  Reassembly time next.

It was mostly a case of just looking at the photographs I'd taken, matching the parts from the kit with the parts I'd removed, and putting the whole thing back together again.  It was really very easy.

That is, until we got to the float bowl and I had to improvise a little.  In the kit are four tiny brass blind rivets and I had no idea what they'd be for initially.  They appear to be used to hold the float bowl gasket in place.  I had a suspicion someone had been in and worked on this carburettor before, hardly surprising given how old it is, and there was some proof of it here since two of the blind rivets had the heads sheared off.  When I tried to remove the other two, one of them sheared off and one came out fine.  I couldn't then get suitable purchase to drill the others out and even though I did fit one new rivet, I ended up pulling it out again and going a different route.  The reason for this is that all these little rivets seem to be there for is to keep the gasket held in place to aid alignment.  These days we'd just use RTV or similar to stick the gasket in place.  You'll note that when I remove the float bowl the old rivets weren't holding the gasket anyway since the gasket came away with the float bowl instead of staying on the carburettor chassis.  Suffice to say, I used a couple of smears of sealant to hold the gasket in place while everything was put back together and that worked just fine.

Another interesting find was the fuel filter.  There's a small gauze filter in the base of the float bowl, there's also a hidden filter which I thought was a brilliant bit of design.  The banjo bolt that goes from the fuel inlet to the float bowl hides a delicate brass mesh which serves as a fuel filter.  Ignore the little blind rivet there, not sure how that snuck into shot.  The banjo bolt can only go on one way too since the hole one side is larger than the other and this seems to be to help keep the brass filter in place, presumably to stop it being accidentally crushed when you tighten everything up.

Before very long I had the entire carburettor reassembled and looking much better.  That's when I spotted something I hadn't when it was dirty which is that the float bowl doesn't line up properly with the chassis.  I was told on some of these 'pedestal' type carburettors that the main chassis can warp and move the float bowl away from sealing and that, in turn, can cause running problems by letting air in.  What I can't remember is who told me, if there's a fix, and how bad the gap has to be before it's a problem.  I did a check online for similar designed carburettors and there's quite a few out there with this very same gap problem, though information on why it's there and how to fix it seems sparse.

I'm not going to worry about it right away.  If I need to address this later on I'll find some way to do that.  Perhaps some sort of gasket in this area would help, there doesn't seem to be one as standard and there wasn't one on this car or in the kit.  The good thing is the carb looks much nicer now, has all the bits renewed that were worn out, and is far more pleasant to handle than it was.

By the time I got chance to fit it to the car it was of course dark and my garage doesn't have any lights or any power of any sort yet.  I don't like having things like this sat around off the car if I can help it and I knew it was easy to reinstall so I just set to and did it with a torch.

Another nice bit of design, and which would have helped if I'd seen and understood it when taking the carburettor off, is the releasable balljoint for the throttle mechanism.  There's two little wings that you flick back to release tension on the balljoint socket and can then pull the arm free, to refit you pop the socket on the ball and simply flip the little wings back over and it locks.  Brilliant bit of design really.

I also found that if I hung my torch off the bonnet latch it was exactly the right place to illuminate the engine bay.  Might have to get myself one of those rocket-ship styled period work lights now, I bet they fit in just the same way and give out an even better pool of light to see by.

It's so nice to work on a car where someone has actually given thought to being able to work on it.  The other item, and the last one this post will cover, is the rear view mirror that arrived today.  This is another one of those things that we got lucky on because shortly after putting it on the watch list (I had several I had my eye on, pending measuring the existing holes in the car), the seller of this one offered it at half price just after I'd measured the holes in the car to see if they matched the mirror.  Rear visibility acquired for merely five pounds, not to be sniffed at. It's not a fancy mirror, it's just an old Stadium item which I believe is 1960s or very early 70s in date, it looked very close to ideal in the photographs.

I found two suitable screws that fit the holes already drilled in the car which lined up nicely with the slots in the mirror and in no time at all had it fitted.  The mirror itself frames just a little more than the rear window of the car and is height adjustable to a degree due to having a double balljoint arrangement for the bracket.  The mirror is slightly tarnished around the edges while not being so degraded you can't see anything and now it looks like the mirror has always been there, just like the auxilliary lights.

No attempt at a start tonight, the garage is a bit dangerous in the dark and it's a bit late to be firing up a car with a badly blowing exhaust.  A lot closer now at least, just need to set the ignition time back to standard and then we can see if the car will actually idle now the carburettor has been cleaned up.

 

 

[Fumbler]

Excellent progress. I can see this running smooth very soon!

[LightBulbFun]

very cool stuff  

always quite satisfying to see a nice carburettor rebuild/cleanup 

hopefully it allows the ol girl to run and finally move under her own power  

 

[somewhatfoolish]

7 hours ago, Christine said:

Who the hell is going to nick a LD10 anyway..?

Those wrong'uns on the dark wob obvs.  

[Angrydicky]

Excellent, good old taxi tyres. I have them on my Somerset and they improve roadholding and handling considerably. You do know @barrett will hate you now right?

On that subject, having recently got back on the road after a long period dormant, from one oily rag porridgy British 50s saloon to another, XEV 323 sends greetings to KKV 222 ?

[ETCHY]

Superb.

Two things really strike me.

1. I'm amazed that you're able to still get bits like the little lamp medallions, that's just incredible I'd have thought many bits would just be made of  unobtanium.

2. The utter quality of the build of that car in the first place and that this fact is really assisting in helping it come back to life again.

You're doing a really great job on this !

 

[lesapandre]

16 hours ago, Christine said:

Who the hell is going to nick a LD10 anyway..?

All kinds of nasty toe-rags alas for a variety of reasons. Having had my '83 Landcruiser stolen (I got it back) I now use a lot of physical deterrents. Locking bar on the steering, chain through one of the wheels and another very thick long chain I run through the chassis and lock to some fixed object. I'm going to put a battery cut off on it next time I tinker. Possible to get round these but it does need an angle grinder (I know we used one to trim the chain - it took about a minute). 

My experience says for the Lanchester get one of those locking things that fits over the whole steering wheel if poss' , a battery cut off and keep some chain in the boot to place strategically when parking up. 

Alarms and trackers I am sure are ok - but that is all very 'after the event'.

I had another of those 'do you want to sell it's' on it today. There are greedy crazy eyes everywhere. Beware. Bit depressing but better safe than sorry.

This continues to be a great post. Beautifully written. ????

[wuvvum]

I would imagine your average thieving pikey scum type would be completely baffled when faced with a pre-selector 'box.  Therefore if anyone were ever to attempt to nick it it'd more likely be a tow away job, where battery cutouts and steering wheel locks etc would be of limited use.  Maybe a wheel clamp?

[lesapandre]

Yes that is a good idea too, I think my Landcruiser was lifted one end so it's again not perfect . The chains are my answer together with using a variety of means. Nothing is perfect - but it is a deterrent.

[wuvvum]

True, a chain round the rear axle can be quite effective.

 

[Tadhg Tiogar]

1 hour ago, lesapandre said:

All kinds of nasty toe-rags alas for a variety of reasons. Having had my '83 Landcruiser stolen (I got it back) I now use a lot of physical deterrents. Locking bar on the steering, chain through one of the wheels and another very thick long chain I run through the chassis and lock to some fixed object. I'm going to put a battery cut off on it next time I tinker. Possible to get round these but it does need an angle grinder (I know we used one to trim the chain - it took about a minute).....

Alternatively, you might want to connect the car up to some sort of live high voltage/high amperage source whilst it's parked.

I've often fantasised about plumbing in some sort of poison gas cylinder - cyanide seems quite effective, and suitably Agatha Christie - to be activated once the thief is inside the car.....

[vulgalour]

While we're on the subject of fantasy security, how about a smoke generator which sets off if you don't disable it before moving the car.  Criminal then thinks the old banger has caught fire and legs it.

[Tadhg Tiogar]

9 minutes ago, vulgalour said:

While we're on the subject of fantasy security, how about a smoke generator which sets off if you don't disable it before moving the car.  ....

A Citroen heater fan will create a lot of smoke anyway.

[spartacus]

I'm sure you could buy a smoke generating theft deterrent in the '90's. It went under the seat. I'm going to guess it was made by 'Toad'.

[Tadhg Tiogar]

4 minutes ago, spartacus said:

I'm sure you could buy a smoke generating theft deterrent in the '90's. It went under the seat. I'm going to guess it was made by 'Toad'.

The Sith Effricans had a better system: flamethrowers under the floorpan. Seems this was a deterrent to would-be carjackers.

This type of thing:

 

[puddlethumper]

Really getting on with this little beauty Mr V. Excellent stuff.