Standard trimmed – and sold!
Like many people, I have been spending a lot of time in the garage recently, so there is plenty of progress to rattle through here – my apologies to refugees from Triumph World who may already be up to speed on some of this! Starting with the 1946 Standard Eight Tourer, I have been cracking on with the interior trimming. The colour for the interior had been dictated by circumstances, as the box of bits that comprised the Standard when I got it did not include the front seats, and my attempts to buy a pair proved fruitless. I did, though, have a pair of very nice seats in Matador Red that had come out of my Herald when I fitted MX5 recliners to that. I liked the way the Herald seats fitted in the Standard, so that’s where they ended up, proving that it is always a good idea to hold onto things that may come in useful one day rather than throwing them out.
With the theme decided,
I had the rear seat covered in matching material and in a matching style by Wendy Dann, wife of Andy who had previously restored the bodywork. I now needed to finish off the rest of the interior panels. Essentially there are three panels on each side of the car – a closing panel that goes besides the rear seat and over the rear wheelarch, the door card, plus a closing panel at the side of the front footwell. In addition, the rear wheelarch itself needs a vinyl cover. By far the most difficult task was getting the vinyl to stretch over the compound curves of the wheelarches. Waiting for a sunny day to warm the metal and the material, gluing it in small sections and stretching the vinyl as much as possible over the bigger curves got there in the end, but I’m not entirely happy with the finish.
The side panels were easier. The door cards and the sections over the rear wheelarches were made of thin plywood, and the original ones came with the car. The rear sections were in good shape and could be reused, but the door cards were delaminated and turning to dust along the bottom, so I had to cut new ones out of a sheet of 4mm plywood. On all of these panels I first glued a thin foam scrim to the faces, then stretched the vinyl over this and wrapped it around the edges before fixing it down at the back with a staple gun.
There was one comedy moment when marking out the vinyl for cutting as I carefully arranged the door cards to fit on the last remaining piece of vinyl, cut this to suit and then realised I’d effectively cut out two RH panels. Because of the steeply curved tops of the doors I couldn’t adjust one of them to fit the LH door, so had to order some more vinyl. Doh!
The original panels for the front footwells were brown
millboard, a kind of hardboard with a tough and shiny but grained face. I cut similar shapes from what was left of my 4mm plywood, then covered this with red vinyl, but without the layer of foam. This was partly so that it matched more closely the original style, and partly because the panel was a very tight squeeze alongside the ends of the parcel shelf.
All the panels were secured to the wooden frames using stainless steel screws – I used slotted raised head countersunk wood screws and cup washers for a nicely period look. Incidentally, a tip for using cup washers: when pressed out of thin metal these are extremely cheap, but the thinness of the metal means that when the screw is tightened, the cup washer cuts into something soft as vinyl like a knife. In the worst cases it will cut a neat circle and leave the vinyl unsecured. Solid turned cup washers are a lot more expensive, but they have a flat side pressed against the material and are a much better choice in the long run.
That still leaves carpeting and wet weather gear to be done, but those tasks will no longer be down to me as I decided to sell the Standard as it is in order to free up time, space and funds for other projects. It was bought by Mark Denton, who promptly sorted the legalities and then drove it 25 miles to its new home, the furthest it has travelled in well over two decades. I wish him fun.
Turning now to the Acclaim, this has had a long-term problem with the indicator flashing speed being erratic – they always worked, but sometimes they would speed up as if a bulb had blown, then just as randomly they would slow back down to normal. I had checked that all the bulbs were working at both speeds and cleaned up their contacts, and I had also fitted a NOS indicator stalk for an unrelated issue. The only other thing I could think of as a cause was a faulty flasher relay.
However, I was unable to find a suitable replacement. It had to be round to fit in the socket on the fuse board, but all the three-terminal units I could find for sale had one input and then separate outputs for the dashboard tell-tale and the indicators themselves, whereas mine had input, output and earth. Eventually I ran the problem past lighting expert Gil Keene of Better Car Lighting, and he explained that flasher relays with an earth were introduced by Bosch during the late 1970s, and that usually the relay is on standby until the indicator switch completes the circuit to earth via the bulb. He went on to say that I could use a two-pin relay, because the dashboard tell-tales are clearly getting their feed from further downstream on the Acclaim.
If you’ll pardon the pun, this was a light bulb moment for me. I had been looking for a direct three-pin replacement, assuming that the earth connection was essential for the circuit rather than being used only by the relay itself.
After Gil’s advice, I rummaged through the box of old relays I keep on a shelf in the garage. Most of those were rectangular units, but amazingly I also found a round two-pin relay from, of all things, a Reliant Regal. This was a perfect fit in the Acclaim’s fuse board socket, so I plugged it in and the indicators began working steadily perhaps for the first time in my ownership.
Not for long though, as the relay failed after a few days. However, in my recent free time I had also tidied out the garage and rediscovered a complete dash from a Triumph Dolomite. Amazingly, this also had a round two-pin flasher relay on the back. I tried that in the Acclaim and, so far, all is golden. See what I mean about holding onto things and not throwing them out?