Delage receives a corking fix
OH DEAR. Pride goeth before a fall, as they say, but at least in this case it was only a trip and not a tumble. Having recently vaunted the 1926 Delage’s simplicity of maintenance, it inevitably decided to prove me wrong.
The other weekend I decided to fire it up a&er a few weeks’ enforced idleness while I put this year’s edition of Aston, the journal of the Aston Martin Heritage Trust, to bed. Spun fast by the big dynastart that drives direct onto the nose of the cranksha&, the engine started within seconds, but died a&er a minute or so.
I took the top off the float chamber of the SU carburettor that Dr Bob Ewen had fitted in the 1940s in place of the original triple-jet Zenith: the float chamber was dry. Petrol wasn’t being supplied via the exhausteur – a French take on the Autovac, patented by pioneer aviator Charles Terres Weymann, inventor of the eponymous lightweight fabric bodywork – which brings petrol from the rear-mounted tank to a small feeder tank on the firewall by using the depression in the inlet manifold. Clearly the exhausteur had lost its power of suction.
Fortunately, Delage Register president Peter Jacobs not only understands the ailments of the exhausteur, but has a test rig that can diagnose them. So the offending item was duly posted to Peter, who found that, when it was connected to his rig, it refused to operate and only reluctantly delivered a trickle of petrol.
Nor would it recycle. Suspecting that its internal linkage was awry, even though the unit seemed original and unmolested, Peter dismantled it and found that, apart from anything else, its original petrol-proofed cork float had at some stage been replaced with a brass float from a carburettor, which was far less buoyant. That was probably one of Bob Ewen’s 1940s modifications, made a&er he had been invalided out of the RAF. He convalesced by rebuilding the Delage in order to adapt it for use as his daily transport as a busy doctor.
Peter fitted a replacement cork float to the exhausteur, reassembled the linkage, and full suctional health on the rig was restored.
It was probably the first time that the exhausteur had been looked at in seven decades. It’s sobering to realise that I’ve owned the car for more than one-third of that time and that I’m the longest-term custodian in its 90-year existence.