MANY MEMORIES

Ifeel it necessary to write and congratulate you for the nostalgia generated in recent issues of the magazine.

These days, my wife allows me to slide the mag into the grocery trolley. It gets paid for then out of housekeeping rather than my ‘allowance’.

Over recent issues, I have enjoyed articles on the Austin Seven Ruby, my first car, sold to me when [I was] an apprentice by my boss at Allenton Motors for $15.

We had the sub-agency to sell Daimlers and Prince Gloria cars and also serviced a number of Jaguars as well from around mid Canterbury, and recent articles about those marques have been read with great interest.

What a mission it was to remove the instruments and dashboard from the Daimlers (and Jags), which suffered from sun damage, to be replaced with reconditioned units — dozens of screws, and a fair bit of time.

The Prince Gloria (later to become Datsun) was a special car, as it was one of the very early Japanese models to come on sale in New Zealand and was startlingly different to the British vehicles of the time.

I remember taking a dash out of one for the first time: four wing nuts, unclip the speedo cable, and unplug the single electrical connection to the printed circuit in the dash unit. Easy-peasy.

And on to the magazine with the Ford 100E on the front cover [Issue No. 343]: my second car, not particularly memorable but a large stone’s throw on from the Ruby. My late father was a Lancaster pilot

late in WWII, so of course I enjoyed the article about the Rolls-royce Merlin.

My father spoke little about the war, preferring to put it behind him, but one thing

I did hear him speak about enthusiastically was the Merlins roaring along and getting the team home again.

At Allenton Motors, we also sold a very small number of gorgeous NSU Ro 80 cars and some of the rotary industrial motors for farm/contractor equipment.

These air-cooled motors were about 8hp [6kw], if my memory serves me correctly, and had a clutch and reduction gearbox attached to bring the revs down to a useful level. I remember that we mounted a display at a motor show and I was able to start the engine, give it plenty of revs, and still be able to pick the whole thing up with fingers under a lip on the fuel tank. A real crowdpleaser and something impossible with the Briggs and Stratton and Wisconsin engines of similar output. It is always enjoyable to read Donn Anderson’s wellresearched and written articles along with those of the rest of your team.

Keep those articles coming. Ron Daly