Angus-sanderson Tourer
Restoring a century-old car is a tough enough task. But as Steve Cato discovered, when survivors are in single figures and you’re rebuilding one for a descendent of the company founder, it’s a personal journey
It was a barn-find that had been bought in the Sixties by a museum, driven round the block once in 1972, and since then had done nothing,’ says Tom Sanderson of the Angus-sanderson his namesake great-grandfather had built in the Twenties. ‘I’d been looking for one for ten years, but survivors are down to single figures worldwide. I tried to buy one, a good running example, four years ago in Germany. I did the deal, agreed on a price of £25,000, then suddenly the vendor changed his mind and put it up to £80,000, way out of my reach.
‘So I changed my mind about condition, ventured online, and saw an advert on Australian Gumtree for this Angus-sanderson 14hp Tourer, which featured the line “restoration project, no tyre-kickers”. It looked rough but everything I needed was there. However, the owner didn’t want it to leave Tasmania because it had lived there all its life.
‘But when I said I was the greatgrandson of the coachbuilder who co-founded the company, Thomas Charles Hamilton Sanderson – the same name as me – he agreed, as long as I kept the Tasmanian tax disc in the window.
‘I had it shipped via Hobart and Singapore, and the moment I opened the container was the first time I saw it! Thankfully everything was there – it needed new seat bases, and only part of the hood was left, but other than that it was complete.’
The 14HP was a proprietary parts car with a Tylor of London 2.3-litre sidevalve engine, a Wrigley three-speed gearbox and rear axle, Woodhead springs and Goodyear wheels. Sir William Angus, Sanderson & Co, Limited, which began by making bodies for Rolls-royce among others, built them in Birtley, County Durham, from 1919 to 1928 before going bust. Around 3000 were made, but few survive. ‘When I was 21, I went to the unveiling of a restored example and it sparked an interest that grew over time. I never used to be interested in vintage cars, but I got to an age where family history becomes more important.’
‘They weren’t particularly reliable. My grandparents were lent one for their honeymoon and had to return early because it kept breaking down. My father, also Thomas Sanderson, said his father never went into another engineering venture again after the company’s collapse. It had made a fortune during World War One building planes, so with all that relevant expertise it made sense to build this mid-sized, mid-priced car with bought-in parts; the bodywork was done in-house. But you could buy a house for the £600 it cost to buy one. Then Morris discovered mass-production techniques and brought out the Minor, which cost £100.’
Project found, it was now time for Thomas Jnr to take up the mantle. ‘Problem is, I’m a farmer, not a petrolhead. I’m good on combine harvesters and tractors, but I didn’t know where to start. Then six months ago, I bumped into restorer Steve Cato in the local pub, and he fancied a challenge…’
Lifting the floorboards
Steve’s go-to woodwork expert Dave Friswell was tasked with assessing the car’s structure and devising its repair. ‘Some floorboards were missing, others were rotten, and parts of the crossmember on the chassis frame were full of woodworm,’ he recalls. ‘There’s a little toolbox cubby in the rear passenger compartment with a lid that acts as a footrest that needed replacing, and as for the running boards – one may have been original, but one definitely wasn’t, and both needed replacing.
‘The original-looking one was fluted. I went for that design, the other had rubber matting and an aluminium edging strip. I created new flutes with an electric router, working my way across the wood. I trained as a bench joiner before moving into ash-framing, and it reminded me more of joinery than anything I’d done on a car before. I used English Larch for the running boards. They’re better from a weather perspective in that you can leave them untreated, unlike Japanese Larch, which warps. I used ash for the frame, using the rotten sections I had to replace as templates, and pine for the footboard.
‘The ash sections were painted before they went on the car. When the car was new, they would have been painted or
varnished after assembly, but it wouldn’t have lasted very long. The running boards received four coats of yacht varnish.
‘On the whole, the bodywork was actually in better shape than it appeared, although there was a twist – the body’s shorter on one side than the other! It wasn’t accident damage, just the nature of Twenties coachbuilding. It didn’t matter in terms of the way we approached the restoration of the body, but it meant lining up things like wings and running boards was challenging. You can get away with losing a bit in areas where you get a bit of suspension and chassis movement, but it made it difficult to complete the final assembly process neatly.
‘I managed to rescue some rare original bits during the stripdown. The bonnet supports were just dirty and responded nicely to a straightforward clean-up, as did the windscreen surrounds. It was a case of keeping what we could and accepting that the rest might have to be remanufactured.
Wiring windup
‘There isn’t a lot of wiring on a car of this era, but all that was left on the Angus-sanderson when it arrived were odd remains here and there,’ says Dave. ‘It took a while to rewire the old dynamo – the electricians who’d attempted to repair it before had clearly rewound it without thinking about it, so I had to pull all the old wiring out and rewind it again. The car had a Lucas switch unit – you switch it on to charge the battery – which we kept, and added a rear stoplight for safety. But where to get the right type?
‘We had the remains of one sidelight, which I took to Paul Beck, a vintage-car parts supplier in Norwich, who matched it up with a nice pair of rear lights shaped like a divers’ helmet. I found the right headlight bulbs there too, but fitting them turned into a trickier than expected task. We wanted to keep the original headlamp glass – finding replacements would be impossible, and you can’t replicate 100-year-old patina – but one of the lenses had a hairline crack all the way down it. I extricated it carefully and ended up glueing it. The bulbs are a bayonet fitting, but the bayonet lugs were the wrong shape and size for the socket, so needed carefully bending to fit.
‘Once all the new components were in, I rewired them with cotton-wrapped Pvc-coated wiring, for a historic look but with modern reliability.’
Riddled
Steve Cato took on the task of restoring the bodywork. He explains, ‘It was basically complete, but not in nice condition. The wings weren’t rusted through, but were split and needed welding. The apron panels were thin, pitted, and riddled with holes. I could’ve used filler on them but that wouldn’t have been right.
‘I lifted the body off the chassis. Thankfully the frame underneath was solid, with not even much surface rust, and finished in a strange yellow etch-primer. I pressure-washed it, soaked it in detergent, sanded it down and repainted it in black. However, when we were stripping it down, we found areas of green paint on the back of the rear differential housing – that’s how the running gear must originally have been finished. We stripped the body tub to bare metal to attend to the rust, but as we removed the leatherwork we found the same green paint. I took a colour-chip sample and matched it to the other fragment, then we knew exactly what colour the bodywork would be.
‘Of the apron panels, the centre sections were OK but the rust had attacked the edges, and they were just too far gone. I remade them using two steel panels on the slip roller. ‘The bonnet was in nice condition, and was fairly straight, but it had been painted. On the German car Tom had tried to buy, the bonnet was attractively nickel-plated, so we sent this one over to Wyatt’s in Thetford to do the same. It took three months to complete, and ended up being the final piece we ended up waiting for in order to complete the restoration.
Which is right?
‘When Tom picked the car up, it had four extra wheels with it,’ says Steve. ‘Looking at the wheels on the car, we realised that they were three different sizes. Thankfully, the four spares were the same size.
‘However, we had no tyres for any of them. There’s a very limited choice in terms of places you can get beaded-edge tyres. Dougal Cawley at Longstone sent five different types down, with tubes, and we tried to physically stretch them onto the rims. In the end we gave up, called Dougal and asked him if it was a job we could trust a local tyre fitter with. “No!” came the reply, so I took them up to Doncaster, and Dougal took 45 minutes per wheel to fit them on a special rig. You have to inflate the tubes to 60psi – it’s the pressure that physically pushes the tube into the wheel as well as maintaining the shape. We really don’t want a puncture!’
Bottoms up!
The trim was in terrible condition. ‘We only had one-third of the hood,’ says Steve. ‘It was all folded up when it arrived, but as we unfolded it, it came apart. We took it to Reuben Brockwell in Kings Lynn, who also skilfully retrimmed the seats, retaining some of the original material, repurposing the old seat trim as side trim, and using new leather for the centres.
‘We found the clock, oil pressure gauge, bonnet catches and horn in the locker at the rear of the car, as well as aluminium pieces to fit around the door latches, the old rear lights – too far gone to re-use – and a glass rear wind deflector with clamps. Oh, and some branded plastic wine glasses from a Hobart Summer Festival!’ The radiator grille is a particular claim to fame for Angussanderson, being designed by Cecil Kimber before he founded MG, but this one was in need of careful work. ‘A bit of the blue enamel had broken off the bottom of the Angussanderson badge,’ says Steve. ‘You can’t get replacements, so this would require careful restoration. I entrusted it to Johnny Lee, a jeweller who makes cufflinks, and who is great with enamel detail. I ended up giving him the whole radiator to work on – the badge is soldered on and doesn’t come off.
Running dry
Steve continues, ‘Amazingly, the engine actually started when we got the car, but there wasn’t any coolant in it and it only ran for 30 seconds. But we were amazed – Tom came down to see it, and we thought we’d fill it with antifreeze and see if we could get it going again. But it was reluctant to start again. We took the cylinder head off – basically a big chunk of scalloped iron – and found one of the spark plugs was wet. Cylinder head gasket failure.
‘But obviously you can’t just go out and buy a cylinder head gasket for a 2.3-litre Tylor of
London Sidevalve engine! So Dave took a pattern from the failed one – plus the inlet manifold gasket too – and made replacements.
‘Otherwise, it needed its magnetos, carburettor and fuel lines cleaning – and then the lines and carb’ cleaning again after a quick run around the yard dislodged a lot of sludge in the tank. There is a fuel filter, but with a gravity-feed fuel system, pressurised cleaning is not good for a carburettor of this era.
‘Another quirk of the car’s age is the thermosiphon system for cooling, which relies on the engine to warm the water, the radiator to cool it, and the temperature difference to move it all about. Transmission-wise, the flywheel has a large cone going into it, the clutch has another cone with a strong spring on it, and the friction between the two engages drive, but it’s crude – the snatch of the clutch through the pedal actually broke the previous owner’s leg!’
Missing piece
Despite appearances, there is still one missing piece to this Angussanderson, which is how Classic Cars found out about it in the first place, after Steve made a phone call to ask if there was anything in our library about Tylor engine ancillaries. ‘We’re starting it on the crank handle at the moment because we’re still trying to find out what type of starter motor it’s supposed to have!’ says Steve. ‘By the time this car was built, Angus-sanderson had actually bought Tylor, so it may have come with the engine, but as all the electrics on the car are from Joseph Lucas, it’s likely to be from them.’
Tom chips in with a potential source, ‘Beaulieu Autojumble!’
Sandersons reunited
‘I’m going to keep the car, look after it, and use it for pub trips and children of friends’ weddings,’ says Thomas Sanderson. ‘For me it’s a no-brainer. My great-grandfather built it, I found one that could be completely restored, and it’s a great piece of British history that should be preserved. When I look at it, I feel like I’m looking directly at my great-grandfather. ‘It’s a family heirloom now. I don’t expect to drive it in bad weather – if it had been British-based, I don’t expect that it would have survived all these years at all. I need to look after it like the 100-year-old car it is.’