Me and My Resto
Shaun Henry is on a mission to prove you don’t need bags of cash to have fun with classics
Shaun Henry’s Renault 10 revival.
I’m a Renault 5 enthusiast and parts hoarder. I have an early Super 5 MKII (my first car) and also own an early MKI TL, the culmination of an eight-year search for my dream car. They provide the stimulation that keeps me sane, but with the MKI off the road for some attention last year, I needed another classic to keep me going – this Renault 10 was just right.
It’s a 1968 car, imported from Rhodesia in 1980, and its tax finally expired in 1986. I bought the car as a project in July 2018 and set myself the goal of recommissioning it in time to drive to the PC Restoration Show in March 2019.
A motivated mission
The project became the backbone of my engineering blog (you can find me on Youtube, Instagram and Facebook by searching for @shaunhenry_engineering). My aim is to demonstrate that you can repair things rather than replace them, without having a massive budget or special tools.
It’s something I have been practising it since I was old enough to wield a screwdriver.
I also owe special thanks to my friend Paul Cunningham at Renault Repairs in Worthing who provided lots of technical support and supplied a few rare parts for the 10.
The project was trailered from Lincoln to my home in Essex by fellow Renault Owners Club committee member Al Worsley, and the engine was filled with diesel for a whole month to clean and lubricate it internally. What I didn’t realise at this stage was that this is actually an engine from a Renault 12! I got it running with a temporary gravityfed fuel system. It was firing on all four cylinders, so I was happy to return to it for refinement later.
At this stage I didn’t have a garage, so I focused on the basics and started on the brakes, discovering that both front calipers were missing. The hunt for parts was on.
As soon as the garage was up I started stripping the interior, removing the wings and giving the car a full electrical assessment. Although I later had to strip it, the wiper motor at this point was found to work, along with all the lights. The dynamo was seized, but I found I could replace it with an old Renault 5 alternator from my spares pile, as the alternator bracket from my
Super 5 bolted straight in.
By the end of the year I’d sourced new calipers and stripped the wheelarches, and a few weeks into 2019 I had finished all the required welding (teaching myself to weld as I went along), refitted the wings and coated the underside and new metal with primer and stone-chip paint. Unfortunately I never drove it to the show as the engine needed a little more than mere ‘refinement’, but with help from friends, the 10 was rolled onto the ROC stand early on the Sunday morning.
Tim Shaw from Car S.O.S even came and made a little video featuring it.
Thanks to a Dacia distributor that I managed to rebuild and recalibrate – plus the kind donation of a replacement carb – I eventually managed to get the engine running properly. In June the car finally passed its MOT with no advisories, in time for Bromley Pageant… almost. All was going well until it decided to overheat! I flushed the coolant with no luck, and managed to rig it up with a R5 radiator and a bespoke bracket to mount it in place, but the overheating continued. I later discovered the crank had been pressurised and the engine had suffered internal damage, but it continued to run.
Lots more work on the brakes came next, including freeing a sticking caliper and then rebuilding the brake pedal rod that had started seizing. At the same time I fitted a coolant temperature sender and gauge, and on my next test drive everything was behaving well. The only other issues involved dirt from the original petrol tank clogging up the carburettor and in-line filter, and a misbehaving clutch fork spacer, but it was nevertheless capable of racking up some miles. When I finally attended Ohsoretro classic car show in September 2019, nobody could have guessed that it was the car’s longest run in 33 years!