Full Metal Jacket
‘CFB’ has revealed more crumbliness, but team PC and the RM Club have it covered
The white heat of endeavor at the PC workshop has been… white hot! Three of us have been hard at work on Riley ‘CFB’ as we work towards its appearance on the Live Stage at the NEC in November. And, as you might expect, there have been numerous issues thrown up along the way. First I wanted to sort out the underside properly. My daughter Emma had scraped off the rust from the front of the chassis and some of the tub but the rest needed wire brushing, cleaning, converting and then painting. So a filthy day was spent with Matt and Clive getting rid of years of mud and rust. We then carefully removed the remnants of the rod braking system. This era of RM featured a combination of hydraulic and mechanical brakes. The master cylinder acts directly on the front brakes and via a mechanical linkage to the rear drums. These links needed to be deconstructed and examined for play. The clevis pins all appeared to be within adjustable tolerances, so once the underbody gloop was added they were refitted.
Once we had bare metal we then spent another day in with Rustbuster products - treating the chassis with FE 123 converter followed by Epoxy Mastic 121. The floor was then rust converted, sprayed with Epoxy Mastic and coated with Techshield underbody wax… this car will not rust for many, many years.
As the underbody was finished we also took the opportunity to sort out the front and rear suspension. Deconstructing it and assessing what I needed to collect from the RM Club spares operation. With a shopping list in hand, I went off to Buntingford to meet Steve and Karen Pettyfer
‘A filthy day was spent getting rid of years of scuzz…’
who run the club’s excellent spare parts warehouse. They had everything we needed on the list in stock, and because they run the outfit with such well-organised rigour, it was all picked and on the counter within 15 minutes. The RM Club is excellent in every possible way, but this spare parts service (available only to members) pushes into the territory of genius. The fact that the RM enjoys such an excellent survival rate must be down to the club and its services. Steve and Karen sorted the rubbers for me along with assorted bolts, nuts and pins, all with traceable provenance and, where possible, commissioned by the club and made in Britain. It’s astounding.
Screen savers
Back in the workshop it was time to sort the screen surround. I had known that there were issues. Lifting of the rubber shroud had revealed disgraceful unpleasantness along the bottom edge of the aperture and no matter how many