project 1951 Lanchester LD10 - Brake Switch & Mouse

[LightBulbFun]

interesting  I cant imagine you will get very far with correcting the date of first registration like that sadly, for that sort the DVLA generally want solid evidence, like a certified copy of its buff logbook or an extract of its entry from the country council vehicle registration archives it was registered with (which thankfully do still exist for Coventry)

although you are correct someone back in the day probably miss read the 1 for a 7 when computerising it back in the Mid 1970's early 80's (the date of which would of been on the 2008 V5 but they sadly dont include it on new V5s anymore)

although it is for this sort of reason that Buff logbooks did have the year of first registration also in worded form ie "nineteen hundred and fifty seven" so someone really was not paying attention!

however I would not worry about insurance, as long as you just manually tell them its a 1951 Lanchester then I dont see how it would be a problem

 

 

its a bit late for this case but for future reference, V5's never expire, as long as the vehicle shows up on the DVLA checker, and the V5 that exists today is the latest V5 for it, then its 11 digit number will work to allow you to do things with it online like an online keeper change, even if said V5 is from 1975 or something such

so when you inevitably buy another Lanchester or such like  if you get its old V5 as long as that is the last V5 issued for it (even if its from 1975 or such), then you can go online and do a keeper change just like any other vehicle as long as the vehicle just show up on the DVLA checker today

and as a bonus you can then keep the old V5 for the history files/record  something to keep in mind for future which should avoid things getting lost in the post etc  

 

41 minutes ago, vulgalour said:

It's funny because the Maestro V5 by comparison arrived so fast it was almost like they sent the new one out before the old one had got to them.

if that was done online then the DVLA do issue the new V5 immediately right away now  ie the moment you confirm the keeper change etc it automatically issues a V5 in the new keepers name, which is pretty nifty

[vulgalour]

Ah now, that's the thing, I did try to do the keeper change online and it wouldn't let me, said the VIN was too short (it's not, it's exactly the right length) hence doing it the postal way.  That and I wanted to try and correct the date error.  I'll have to see about getting the original info from Coventry council, that should tell me exactly what it was issued as.  There are some other less sensible theories for why it's registered as a 1957, the first being that it sat around unsold for 6 years in a showroom somewhere, the second that it was exported when new and reimported in '57, gaining the new date to its registration.  These suggestions seem a bit of a stretch and while not impossible seem very unlikely when put alongside a misread number.

It's probably not a problem in the grand scheme of things, I just like these things to be right, or at the very least to have an explanation for an anomoly like this.

[LightBulbFun]

27 minutes ago, vulgalour said:

Ah now, that's the thing, I did try to do the keeper change online and it wouldn't let me, said the VIN was too short (it's not, it's exactly the right length) hence doing it the postal way. 

interesting   Im curious to know what you did now to get it to prompt for a chassis number as I just checked and it looks like they still only ask for the 11 digit number!

27 minutes ago, vulgalour said:

There are some other less sensible theories for why it's registered as a 1957, the first being that it sat around unsold for 6 years in a showroom somewhere, the second that it was exported when new and reimported in '57, gaining the new date to its registration.  These suggestions seem a bit of a stretch and while not impossible seem very unlikely when put alongside a misread number.

I think its quite clearly a typo as the KKVxxx registration series was issued in period Starting May 1951, so that quite clearly points to it being registered in 1951  

27 minutes ago, vulgalour said:

I'll have to see about getting the original info from Coventry council, that should tell me exactly what it was issued as. 

you should be able to find who to contact here  https://kitheadtrust.org.uk/england-wales

27 minutes ago, vulgalour said:

It's probably not a problem in the grand scheme of things, I just like these things to be right, or at the very least to have an explanation for an anomoly like this.

yeah dont worry I am also a bit like that at times! 

the one thing  I am a bit worried about if you try and fix it is you might get some poxy "declared manufactured 1951" nonsense in the special notes of the V5 which would be a bit unfair IMHO!

although I do wonder if you JUST mention fixing the date of first registration and say nothing about the year of manufacture, would that avoid any sort of special notes nonsense 

or will it just end up like this enfield which somehow was registered 2 years before it was made according to the DVLA LOL

[vulgalour]

I'll wait and see what arrives.  I'm pretty sure when I tried to do the online thing it prompted me for the VIN and then said it was too short.  Otherwise I don't think I would've done it by post since the online method is usually pretty good.  Who knows?  The car has been off the road since '84 and effectively sat in storage since even though it changed ownership.  Just one of those weird things.  Thank you for the info.

[LightBulbFun]

3 minutes ago, vulgalour said:

I'll wait and see what arrives.  I'm pretty sure when I tried to do the online thing it prompted me for the VIN and then said it was too short.  Otherwise I don't think I would've done it by post since the online method is usually pretty good.  Who knows?  The car has been off the road since '84 and effectively sat in storage since even though it changed ownership.  Just one of those weird things.  Thank you for the info.

interesting  

but yeah the Main thing is you do have a V5 coming to in your name finally it looks like and thats the most important bit!  

any-who sorry for derailing things slightly! I look forward to further updates  

[vulgalour]

V5 arrived today.  Not even a courtesy "please contact this department" note in with it so it looks like they completely ignored the extra information I put in with the application.  It's almost like they want to keep the errors on the system.  When I get chance I'll get in touch with the Coventry contact and see if we can get the original documents before making another attempt.  For now it's a sleeping dog I'll let lie.

[LightBulbFun]

20 minutes ago, vulgalour said:

V5 arrived today.  Not even a courtesy "please contact this department" note in with it so it looks like they completely ignored the extra information I put in with the application.  It's almost like they want to keep the errors on the system.  When I get chance I'll get in touch with the Coventry contact and see if we can get the original documents before making another attempt.  For now it's a sleeping dog I'll let lie.

Glad you got the V5  

im not surprised they ignored the note tho

its not that they want to keep errors on the systems, is just they are very much on their toes about changing things like date of first registration or year of manufacture these days, so a simple covering note wont do, they want to see solid evidence that it was actually registered 1951 not 1957  etc

back in the day it was much easier to change these sorts of things but as a result lots of people where taking the piss etc doing illegitimate things and so the DVLA tightened things up a bit (for example they dont want people falsely declaring that their vehicle is from 1962 etc just to get a nice ageless plate or something such)

its for the same reason they stopped RF60/VE60 logbook to V5 conversions in 1983, as too many people where forging or falsifying information/logbooks, for example to get registration marks they wanted

[PhilA]

On 5/12/2021 at 7:12 PM, vulgalour said:

I'm pretty sure when I tried to do the online thing it prompted me for the VIN and then said it was too short.  

Ah yes. Had a little bit of fun with the Pontiac because according to the computer, every and all VIN are 13 digits.

Mine is 8 digits. Ones built later in the year have 9 digits. 

Complicated... And yes, someone glanced at the old "French" style 1 at some point and didn't realize an A without the cross-bar isn't a 1. Doubt it sat about 6 years. A year or two, perhaps.

Phil

[vulgalour]

Well, it's time for another Lanchester update.  We're not worrying about the V5 date thing for now, general consensus is to leave it be until something makes us need to fix it.

This time, it's fitting a carpet, which is a fairly easy thing to do since the Lanchester is a nice simple shape.  Full write up and photos later, as usual.  For now, here's the video:

 

[vulgalour]

How to do the carpet in the Lanchester then.  The video above does illustrate this a bit better than I can do with photos and words so if you haven't, please do give that a watch for a bit more clarity on the process.  This needn't be an expensive endeavour and indeed, this carpet has cost the sum total of £0 since I already had all of the materials required in house.

Ingredients are a pack of cheap printer paper, a pen, a good pair of shears (for cutting the carpet), a good pair of scissors (for cutting the paper), some sellotape, and a spare carpet set from the Princess.  The carpet set I'm using here is temporary, eventually it will be replaced with proper brown wool, for now it's what's to hand and the bright orange doesn't actually look as bad in situ as you might expect.

If you already have a carpet in the car you're doing this job on, it's a bit easier, since then you have a template of sorts.  Unfortunately for us, there is no carpet in this car and it didn't come to us with one.  We've also been unable to find an off-the-shelf kit of any sort to hint at what shapes are required, so it's been a case of relying on photographs of other cars and clues this car has given us from what is present.

Luckily, the floor of the Lanchester is almost completely flat with the exception of the tunnel down the middle, and the fixings for the front seats.  That means you can lay down the printer paper very easily to patchwork a pattern.  It's mostly a case of lining up an edge of paper with the edge of a bit of floor, and then using a fingernail and/or pen to mark the edges before using the scissors to trim.  Offer up the paper a few times and trim as necessary until each piece is as you want it.  Then tape your next piece of paper down to the first and so on until the whole floor is covered.

The floor of the Lanchester isn't actually symmetrical.  While the outer edges are mirrored, the front portion of the tunnel isn't, and the rails the seats sit on are also in different locations on each side, something that isn't as obvious when the carpet isn't present.  That meant that a different template would be required for each side.

To get around this you can either make two whole templates, or if you're channeling your inner Yorkshireman as I was, cut out the carpet for one side before flipping your paper template and chopping and patching it as required to make it the correct shape for the other side.  This means you use a few sheets less paper, a bit less ink, a bit less sellotape and quite a bit less time.

For the driver's side, I disconnected the balljoint from the accelerator pedal so that I could put the carpet over the pedal rather than unbolting the pedal itself.  It doesn't make sense to bolt the pedal down over the carpet in this instance, far better to cut a hole in the carpet for the pedal.

When you're repurposing existing materials some compromise is required.  The Princess carpet isn't moulded, one of the benefits of a front wheel drive car with a very flat floor, but does have a few cut-outs for various fixings so it was a case of figuring out where best the paper template fitted the carpet.  It turned out that it was best to make four separate rugs for the Lanchester, choosing to join them at the crossmember that runs the width of the floors under the front seats.  The Princess carpet was long enough in each half that a small overlap was possible too which is better than trying to make the pieces butt up to one another neatly in this instance.  Because of how much wider and longer the Princess floor is than the Lanchester floor, there was actually quite a lot of material available and before too long, I had a complete carpet set created.

It's worth noting that the paper template will fit slightly differently to the carpet, this is because of the thickness of the material.  So once you fit the carpet you'll likely have to go around the edges, particularly any radiused pieces, and just trim back until a nice fit is acquired.  Since the Princess carpet doesn't fray, there was no requirement to bind the edges and it will serve as a very good template for the nice carpet when we get to that point.

The bit I got really lucky with was that the Princess' integral heel mat actually lined up close to perfect with the Lanchester's pedals, making the orange carpet look just a bit more proper than had it been plain.  Less so was the central tunnel, something I couldn't use from the centre of the Princess' main carpet.  Instead, I built a tunnel section from the two inner sill pieces of carpet which are more flexible, the profiles were similar enough that I could use some duct tape to hold the four pieces together and to the tunnel itself, and wide enough that the main floor carpet could be put over the top of the edges to keep them in place.  It's likely the proper carpet will be glued down in one piece instead.  We will probably leave the front section of the tunnel uncarpetted (and there wasn't a suitable piece of Princess carpet left to do this part due to the strange shape involved) since there are service points that could do with being accessed and, judging by the condition of the paint, it looks like there may never have actually been a carpet there originally.  We haven't yet seen a picture of an LD10 with the original carpet intact to tell us either way what's correct here, only cars with replacement carpets which may of course be non-standard.  So we're going with what feels and looks right for this particular car, like we have with other items.

Anyway, here we are with the carpet fully fitted and looking a whole lot better than you might expect.  It also cuts down a lot of draughts from the door bottoms and generally makes the car sound, and by extension feel, a bit more refined and finished inside than it did.  When we come to doing the wiring under the dashboard this will likely be a lot more pleasant to lie on and much harder to lose the various fixings since there aren't all those little gaps around the floor boards accessible now.

All in all, an okay job really.  Once the seats were refitted, you could barely see the carpet anyway so the colour difference really isn't that noticeable.  It's also worth noting for the front seats that the brackets that hold the locking pegs in place need the carpet trimming away from the whole of the square base of them otherwise the thickness of the carpet prevents the seat from locking into place as it can't sit down low enough in the sockets.

We have what looks like a very short list of items to attend on the car now.  How short this list ends up being in practice is of course a different matter entirely:
- Fit new wiring loom
- Recondition and refit radiator
- Acquire and fit new front engine mount
- Refit water pump and fan belt
- Adjust brakes
- Fit new front and rear screen seals
- Fit pedal draught excluder rubbers
- Make and fit kick panels, and lower B pillar trim
- Replace missing/all door furflex trim
- Restore and fit Ekco radio

 

[jonathan_dyane]

I confess that looks loads better than I thought it would 

[somewhatfoolish]

Before the advent of tilt cabs, old british lorrys with flimsy tin engine cowlings in the cab sometimes had the luxury of a quilted cover to absorb a small amount of the din, heat and smell of a Gardner 6LXB working hard 6" from your knee; a quilted cover on the transmission tunnel might make longer journeys more bearable.

[vulgalour]

Starter motor struggles this time.

 

[Dobloseven]

There's a fellow on the next road to us, who owns 3 Lanchesters. A 30s LA10 which is pretty well immaculate and gets regular use, an LD1O Barker under restoration in his garage and a 30s Roadrider he keeps elsewhere and is planning to keep as a "rat look". Must admit my favourite is the LD10. 

[vulgalour]

Words and pictures time.  This was one of those jobs that you expect to be quick and easy and isn't.  Certainly trying to edit the video and photos down for updates demonstrated how much time actually had to go into it.  The job in question is the starter motor.  Since getting the car, the starter motor works some of the time on first start up and fairly reliably after a few tries, in between those two states it has usually needed a few taps with a stick to get it to engage properly.  Mechanically the starter operates very well, it's just getting an electrical connection that's been the issue.  Given the state of other electrical connections and wiring in the car, we had expected it to be something along the variety of cleaning contacts and so it was. First job, push the car out of the garage and get it up on a stand.

Then get yourself under the car and try and figure out how you're going to undo the three bolts holding the starter on without removing the exhaust.  I'd been advised removal of the exhaust was necessary and while it would certainly have made life easier, it turned out not to be needed.  The big problem underneath the car is that when I had the socket and ratchet on the through bolt and nut, I couldn't swing either far enough before I hit the chassis or the exhaust.  I didn't have the time to do this on the day I attempted it so packed up, put the car away, and waited until Pat was free of work when I was free of work to have another go.

The next free time we had the car was wheeled out again, put on a stand again, and Pat had a good look to see if inspiration would strike a fresh pair of eyes.  It did!  He found he could get in with the ratchet from above and get a bit more swing if I held the spanner from below.  After longer than either of us wanted, we had this one bolt out.  The other two were much easier.  As it happens, I managed to put this bolt back in from underneath the car on my own with a socket and spanner, using the spanner to turn the nut a tiny amount in the space available, while holding the bolt with the ratchet.  It took a while, but it was also less grief than pulling off the exhaust.  Our next obstacle was the bolt holding the main lead which we couldn't get any tools on.  Normally this bolt is really easy to get to by just going under the front bumper and undoing it, there's not even a need to jack the car up because of the impressive ground clearance and access.  Here's the view from the front with the starter removed.

That's right, we had to remove the starter to undo the bolt.  The reason for this was that the two wires that bolt on to the starter had been put on in such a way that the thinner wire with the crimped eyelet was acting like a locking washer and there wasn't any access to bend it out of the way.  It looks like when it was last done up, it had bent and locked onto the bolt head as it was done up.

Ah, but I'm a little out of order here.  How did we get the starter motor out without taking the exhaust off?  Well, it was a lot easier to simply disconnect the brake rod.  The brake rod is held to a bracket via a clevis pin and cotter/split pin.  Remove the two pins and the brake rod simply swings aside allowing you to finegle the starter motor out of the restrictive gap it lives in between the exhaust and the sump.  Here you can see the offending crimp, the wire it was crimped to had gone very brittle and broke off when we first attempted to undo the bolt.

It had taken us so long just to get this starter out that it was all we did that day on the car because of course we had to allow time to pack up all the tools and push the car back into the garage.

We have a minor complaint with Imperial measurements too, one which we'll likely make again in the future.  Both Pat and I grew up being educated on Imperial and Metric so we're good with feet and inches, centimetres and millimetres, the usual.  But when it comes to fractions for sizes it is the most frustrating foreign language to us.  I want to go a size up from a 3/8ths?  No idea.  A size down from a 1/4"?  Not a clue.  It will come with practice I'm sure, but right now it's just so much nonsense.  Anyway, we had the starter off and let it sit in the house for a bit while we waited to have some time free to deal with it.

As it happens, I was the first person to have any meaningful time spare and it being a mostly one person job, I got the role of starter inspector.  We could have removed the inspection covers while the starter was fitted to the car but we wouldn't have got as good a look, nor been as able to clean it, as when it's on a desk.  First job, unscrew the bolt that clamps the band around the body of the starter so we can get to see what state the commutator and brushes are in.  Normally you don't need to remove the band completely, just slide it out of the way, but since repainting was on the cards we opted to remove it fully.

Inside we saw that the commutator and brushes were quite dirty.  Just moving the starter around to inspect it ended up with a lot of debris falling out of the case.  Our theory that the internals were corroded and dirty seemed to be a sound one thus far.

Next was to remove the end covers.  The smaller cover allows access to the main spindle so you can rotate and clean the commutator without removing the starter from the car, it is held in with two small screws.  The larger cover also houses half of the contact switch which is engaged by the starter knob inside the car by pulling the cable that's attached to the arm.  The larger cover is held on by two additional screws. These both came off very easily.

Once this was open another problem was apparent.  There was a contact being made between the disc and plates of the contactor switch but it looked to just be in one small spot for the most part which didn't seem ideal.

When you pull the starter knob in the car, it pushes the disc into contact with the plates on the starter motor, thus completing the circuit and allowing the starter to spin up and engage.

As you can see, while the lever does move freely, all the bits that should be clean really aren't.  After some time with contact cleaner, an old toothbrush, and cotton buds, I finally got the brushes moving freely in their sockets and got as much dirt as I possibly could off the surface of the commutator.  The commutator surface has got some scores in it but I doubt it will cause significant issues with the operation of the starter.  All of the copper components inside the starter are quite substantial and crude compared to modern equipment so I daresay the tolerances aren't particularly fine and will work perfectly well even when in quite poor condition.

With all of the copper components cleaned as best as I could, I put the loose parts of the starter in the ultrasonic cleaner to remove the grime and some of the rust.  It was quite effective.

I didn't put the main body of the starter motor in the ultrasonic cleaner in part because that seemed like a bad idea and in part because it wouldn't physically fit.  Instead, I scrubbed all of the rust I could off the body of the starter with a wire brush.  After that, it was time to paint.  I opted to hand paint everything with enamel rather than opting for faster aerosols.  I felt this would be more in keeping with the car and would save me the hassle of a lot of fiddly masking.  To make the painting of the parts easier, I used a cardboard box with holes in for the screws and starter motor, if you make the screw holes a little smaller than the screws, you can then wind the screws into the cardboard to hold them in place.

A coat of Kurust, two coats of red oxide primer, and a two coats of black enamel later and everything was looking smart if not new.  As with the water pump, this will give us both a quick visual reminder of what we've worked on as well as allowing the parts to be less than perfect and mellow out into the general look of the car.  Cared for but not restored.  Once the paint was hard enough, I reassembled everything and waited for the next opportunity to get on with fitting it to the car.

Before the starter was refitted, one item that needed to be addressed was the clamping bolt for the bowden cable.  Previously it had been this brass... thing.  I'm not sure what tool it was made to fit but it certainly wasn't any tool I own, someone had gone to a lot of effort to make sure that no spanner, socket, or screwdriver could work with it.  Quite remarkable really.  We had a rummage in the odd fixings tub and found a screw with the correct thread pitch and a good flat end to the thread that will work much better.  A hex headed bolt would have been better still, but we didn't have anything that matched the thread unfortunately so a cross head bolt will have to suffice.

My plan was then to refit the starter and use the ACF-50 I'd ordered but hadn't yet arrived once the starter was back on the car.  Typically, the ACF-50 then arrived, so I quickly removed the caps and gave the contacts a suitable coating.  I didn't use any ACF-50 on the brushes and commutator, I had a memory (hopefully accurate) that commutators should be kept free of any sort of anything.

Then it was finally ready to go back on the car.

Which it did, with not too much difficulty happily.

I did manage to get all three bolts back in without removing the exhaust and from underneath the car on my own.  It would have been easier with Pat swinging a ratchet from above, but with patience I got the awkward nut and bolt tightened.  To prevent the thinner wire's eyelet from behaving like a locking washer again, I fitted it before the thicker lead which meant everything seemed to line up and stay flat a bit better. The last thing was to reconnect the brake rod, which now moves much better than it did, and put a new split pin through the clevis pin to hold it in place.

Now, you'll notice the distinct lack of one particular item.  We haven't tested the starter.  I had one of those moments where I looked at all the parts and couldn't for the life of me remember how to use them, realising only after the car had been put away how easy it would have been to hook up power and test the starter motor.  So we're considering the fitting of the refurbished starter motor a calculated risk.  There's no reason to believe it won't work now, it was sort of working when it came off the car after all and we've improved it internally so it should now work better, in theory.  The next time we have the opportunity to do so we will test the starter motor, for now we'll just pretend it's okay.  A surprisingly mentally taxing job in the end, probably because it was the first time doing this job on this particular car.  We're looking forward to tackling either the radiator or the wiring next most probably, as time permits.

 

[busmansholiday]

On 6/8/2021 at 5:27 PM, vulgalour said:

We're not worrying about the V5 date thing for now, general consensus is to leave it be until something makes us need to fix it.

I've just had a look at Coventry Corporation Buses registered in the 50's and for the ones with KV in the reg, then JKV was issued in 1951 whilst 1956 saw buses with SKV registrations. Somebody clearly misread the old reg document as KKV is clearly a 51/2 reg.

[Minimad5]

What a fine old thing.

[Angrydicky]

Here's a useful Whitworth chart which should help you. 3/16" is one down from 1/4" and 5/16" is the next size up from 1/4". Those will be the three most common sizes you'll encounter, along with 2BA cap head screws holding smaller things on, such as the dynamo regulator. You can get a bag of these on ebay and just cut them down to suit, if you need to replace any. We've got loads at work so I just nick them from there when I need any.

https://www.samstagsales.com/whitworth_table.htm

[vulgalour]

A little bonus Lanchester update for you all today.  Pat and I had a long weekend that coincided for once and, unfortunately, the weather conspired against us making use of it on the Lanchester.  Instead, our time was spent together in the garden where rain wouldn't be so much of an issue and that's now looking much better for the attention.

However, today the weather cleared for a short while, quite unexpectedly, while Pat was at work.  So I decided to ignore my aching joints (when I say gardening, it was lots of clearing, fence building, digging holes, moving rubble... not just sticking some pansies in a nice flower bed while enjoying a glass of lemonade and the sunshine) and haul the Lanchester out of the garage so I could take a look at the wiring loom.

An hour later, I was still none the wiser.  I think I've figured out which bit goes to the back of the instrument cluster since that's the only bit with the specific sort of bulb holders it takes, and which bit goes behind the dashboard itself since that's got a lot of connectors and branches compared to the rest.  That still leaves me with several sections of loom that I don't actually know the location for.  None of the loom is labelled, and it came with no instructions or diagram and while the Lanchester is very simple and the wiring for the most part original and unmolested, it's still quite a job to figure it out.

Anyway, all this is to say I decided to start unpicking the wiring that is in the car so I could compare it to the new loom and work out what goes where.  First task, start disconnecting items from the bulkhead.

This took a while because I made myself a little diagram as I worked, marking the location and direction of the wires running to and from the voltage regulator/fuse bank and the white connector block below.  About half of the wires go into the cabin, the other half seem to go down the outside of the steering column and out into the generator, starter motor, and front lights.  After painstakingly unpicking and noting things I got to this point.

Let me tell you, I was glad of the carpet in the car, it was so much nicer to lay on than the boards and made it much easier to see what I was actually doing since I had a nice uniform colour background behind the work.  Doing the carpet before the wiring might have seemed an odd choice, but I reaped the benefits of it today.  The branch of wiring I removed went to the instrument cluster, across the bulkhead and out to the oil pressure switch and the coil negative.  Some of it is original, some the new wiring a previous owner installed.  All of the old wiring is quite brittle, the coating is quite fragile, and where new wire joins old the fittings generally fell off so it's less than ideal to leave it in place.

That left things looking like this.

It took a lot longer to dismantle than expected for the small amount of wiring removed.  This is mostly because I'm taking care to label and record everything as it comes out, and to label anything that has to stay in the car for future reference.  It's a slow job and my first foray into this.  I've read other build threads and watched videos which has helped me keep things organised and lend some confidence.  The other items that came out where the wiper motor and heater box, both of which can now be refurbished much easier.  I couldn't tell where the wires were going for the wiper motor and heater box, they disappeared behind both and without removing them I hadn't realised I could have disconnected the wiring without removing either item.  However, we were expecting to have to pull these items anyway for servicing and repair so it's not an issue.  It also gives a bit more room under the dashboard to get to where the wiring needs to live.

For the wiper motor, two nuts need to be undone behind the dashboard inside the car, or in the case of our car just the one nut since one was missing and will need to be replaced.  Happily the rubber shaped washers are both present and in good shape so we won't need to try and find those.  The heater comes out by disconnecting the heater hoses at the bulkhead and then undoing three nuts on the engine side of the bulkhead.  There's then one wire to disconnect before you can remove it from the car.  We'd be interested to know what the markings refer to on the heater, simply out of curiosity.

 

The core on the heater leaks, and looks to have been doing so for some time.  Pat and I have been warned that these heater boxes are sensitive to pressure, too much and they burst, so perhaps that's what happened here?

What came out of the heater wasn't too nice.  It smelled like overheated coolant and had a slightly greasy feel, like mayonnaise, while also being a decidedly unpleasant colour.  We're hoping we can get this flushed and repaired since it seems to be original to the car.  We know more modern heaters exist, and this one could probably be retrofitted with something of that sort, but it would be nice to retain this one if we can for the novelty of it if nothing else.

Pat got home from work just as I was packing up and we had just enough time to get the Lanchester put away before it started raining again.  The wiring feels a little less daunting now.  I couldn't find any wiring underneath the car aside from the main battery cable and I also couldn't see a route it was taking from front to back so I'm hoping as I unpick more of the old wiring the path it actually takes will become clear, right now it's not very obvious.

[JeeExEll]

All interesting stuff Vulg.

[Minimad5]

Is there no way you can buy a small shed and remove everything else from the garage, thus making garage a dry place to work on the car ?

I only suggest this as I know the feeling all too well, drag tools out to car and start tinkering away. Hhmm rain. Come up with a desperate attempt to stop everything getting wet, yes I've successfully got piss wet in the process. Drag tools back into garage. Ooh look its now stopped raining 🤦‍♂️ & repeat that cycle a good few times during the week 😅.

[captain_70s]

As I recall the garage is so narrow that even just containing the car and nothing else it's too small to really work on it.

[vulgalour]

Yeah, the garage is annoyingly proportioned.  If it were an extra two feet wider and we had a shed to put all the stuff in then it would be just about big enough.  The garage is quite literally big enough for a car to live in and that's it.  It would be ideal for working on a motorbike, you'd have a nice comfortable amount of space for that, but not a car.  Shed plans are afoot, we've just been battling with the expense of the ever-collapsing border fence (now 50% replaced with new) eating up all our spare cash, as well as the collapsing garage roof from earlier in the year which was an unwanted sudden expense.  Carport plans and even garage plans are in the pipeline, but we also need to fork out for new driveway concrete and all sorts of other stuff.

So yeah.  The faff with the Lanchester will have to continue for a bit longer yet.

 

[vulgalour]

Today the last of the engine bay wiring was removed.  The repair work done in the past has muddied things a lot, we need to go through and work out what's actually been done so we can understand it a bit better.  The best news is we've finally found the route the wiring takes to the back of the car.  The reason we couldn't find the wiring before is that it is quite well hidden unless you know where you're looking.  With all the new stuff out of the engine bay we could actually see where the original wiring disappears into a boxed section of the chassis and could then find it underneath the car where it reappears in an open section of the chassis and runs to the back of the car.  This probably means the wiring branches off at the B pillar on the driver's side for the semaphore, goes up to the interior light (which has never worked while we've had the car) and down to the other semaphore.  In theory, we should be able to attach string or similar to the passenger side semaphore wiring and the interior light wiring to pull the old wires through and then feed the new wires back in without disturbing the headlining at all.

We've also found more and more problems with the old wiring as we've removed it from the car.  It really does seem like it's the failing wiring that took the car off the road more than anything else, clearly someone has gone to a lot of effort to keep things going, it just wasn't enough as the old wiring continued to disintegrate.

[vulgalour]

Got the wiring all laid out.  This gives you some idea of what we're dealing with.  The black bits are the original wiring, all the colourful bits are what's been put in.  I'll be making another diagram to understand this a bit easier, looking at it, the wiring diagram, and the new harness I can't really make this match up with what it's supposed to do yet.  Some of the confusing bits make sense where new wire has been spliced in, but not all of it.  Everything is labelled at least, and having it out of the car will make it easier to decypher.  The wiring for the generator and starter motor are still in the engine bay, they weren't part of the loom and instead were two newer wires that were connected separately so it was easier to leave those in the car for now and we can remove them when the new harness goes in. Same for the wiring that goes up the column, that had been split at the steering box so it was easier to disconnect the bullet connectors, label it, and leave it in place for now.  What's really confusing matters is the wiring from the voltage regulator to the white connector block that was attached to the bulkhead, that seems to have muddled up some of the connections so while everything did work (bar the brake lights on the pedal and the interior light) it doesn't seem to have been wired as per the original to achieve that.

[Squire_Dawson]

You’re massively overthinking this. Throw that spaghetti away along with everything else that wasn’t fitted at the factory and forget all about it. Assuming you got the new loom from Autosparks and it is definitely the correct version, all you need is the correct Lucas wiring diagram. Wires are colour coded for good reason. If not already done, tin any bare wire ends. 
 

Start in the engine bay by feeding the panel branch through the bulkhead, then loosely fit it up in the engine bay. The wire run will be easy to see as there will be flexible tabs to hold it in place. Once the entire loom has been loosely fitted to the car having been threaded through and behind what it needs to, start making the connections starting at the control box.

Fit new bullet connector sleeves wherever you encounter them (also shown on the wiring diagram usually with their location).

[Mally]

55 minutes ago, Squire_Dawson said:

You’re massively overthinking this. Throw that spaghetti away along with everything else that wasn’t fitted at the factory and forget all about it. Assuming you got the new loom from Autosparks and it is definitely the correct version, all you need is the correct Lucas wiring diagram. Wires are colour coded for good reason. If not already done, tin any bare wire ends. 
 

Start in the engine bay by feeding the panel branch through the bulkhead, then loosely fit it up in the engine bay. The wire run will be easy to see as there will be flexible tabs to hold it in place. Once the entire loom has been loosely fitted to the car having been threaded through and behind what it needs to, start making the connections starting at the control box.

Fit new bullet connector sleeves wherever you encounter them (also shown on the wiring diagram usually with their location).

I'll give you a shout when my Yaris Autograss loom needs installing. 😀

[vulgalour]

I don't disagree.  This is all an educational exercise.  The more Pat and I do, the clearer it is becoming to both of us and we want to understand what was done before us so if we encounter this sort of thing in the future, we'll be slightly better prepared to figure it out.  Might seem a little bit strange unpicking non-original work this way, but we're regarding it as an educational opportunity.  The more we understand as we put theory into practice, the more we can see how simple a job this is and the more confident we're getting.  When it's all done we should be able to look back on it and know just how to pull it all out and chuck the new harness in.

Bear with us while we plod along, I know it's probably frustrating reading/viewing for folks that know what they're doing, this is just where we're starting as absolute beginners and trying to learn as much as possible about the way the car was maintained before us.  Sort of like how you study paintings to understand an artist's technique, but with bodges instead of brush strokes.

[Angrydicky]

12 hours ago, Squire_Dawson said:

You’re massively overthinking this. Throw that spaghetti away along with everything else that wasn’t fitted at the factory and forget all about it. Assuming you got the new loom from Autosparks and it is definitely the correct version, all you need is the correct Lucas wiring diagram. Wires are colour coded for good reason. If not already done, tin any bare wire ends. 
 

Start in the engine bay by feeding the panel branch through the bulkhead, then loosely fit it up in the engine bay. The wire run will be easy to see as there will be flexible tabs to hold it in place. Once the entire loom has been loosely fitted to the car having been threaded through and behind what it needs to, start making the connections starting at the control box.

Fit new bullet connector sleeves wherever you encounter them (also shown on the wiring diagram usually with their location).

This is great advice. I've bought a nice new Autosparks loom for my A55 Cambridge about seven years ago, which I promptly installed on the back seat because fitting it looked too daunting.  The wiring on that car is an absolute deathtrap of completely knackered original, and previous owner additions, with loads of scotchlocks. This post has encouraged me to have a go, so thanks for that.

My only concern is that the car has a turn-key ignition switch retrofitted in place of the original ignition/light switch, with the lights being on a toggle switch. It has a non-standard starter solenoid too. So the wiring isn't going to match up there at all.

[Momentary Lapse Of Reason]

On 7/7/2021 at 11:02 PM, busmansholiday said:

I've just had a look at Coventry Corporation Buses registered in the 50's and for the ones with KV in the reg, then JKV was issued in 1951 whilst 1956 saw buses with SKV registrations. Somebody clearly misread the old reg document as KKV is clearly a 51/2 reg.

From Glass's Index of Registration Numbers 1929 - 1965

KKVnnn  : Coventry; May 51 to June 51