Period performance
With the brakes on my mate Will’s 1100 working properly and stopping the car as it should, he’s decided that it could do with more power. He has firm ideas on how his cars should look, sound and handle, and only wants to fit accessories and components that would have been available in period.
This sort of jars with my approach – my first concern is always getting the best value for money and I’ll work hard to find a cost-effective solution to any problem, although my friends assure me that this is just down to my being tight. A quick search on the classified and auction sites revealed that there are plenty of secondhand SU carbs available – most of which need reconditioning as a matter of course – but cylinder heads modified to Will’s dream spec are not. As for ADO16 manifolds and exhaust systems, forget it.
While I was browsing online, Will dropped me a line to say he’d placed orders for a Richard Longman fast road head and brand new twin 1.25 SU carbs, complete with inlet manifold, and after chatting to Maniflow, had discovered that they still had stocks of both LCB manifold and exhaust system for the car – a pattern created back in the 1960s – so a period-perfect system was also on the way.
The rot was genuinely confined to where the arch meets the floor
I’ve tried not to ask how much this little lot has come to – needless to say, it’s probably more than I’ve paid for running and driving cars recently. But you have to admit, when you lay out a selection of choice components like this before the fitting begins, it gives you a peculiar warm feeling inside.
Will’s determined to be a hands-on part of transforming the sombre little shopper – now christened ‘The Reverend’ – into something that the Downton workshop would have been proud to put its name to back in the day, so work has to fit in with his schedule. We’ve started the stripdown, and when Will next has a free weekend, we’ll go ahead and bolt all the goodies on. It’ll be interesting to see how it changes the car, and how much of a power increase we can expect to see. With less than 50bhp from the factory, I keep telling Will to think about percentage power gains, rather than worry about exactly how many (or how few) extra bhp his hard-earned pounds have bought him.
Despite spending most of my lockup time on other people’s cars, I have managed to progress work on the NSU a little. As expected, the freshly discovered pinholes on the floor turned into a bigger hole, but the rot was genuinely confined to the point where the wheelarch meets the floor, at about the depth of an inch in both. This was quickly cut out and cleaned up, templates made and fresh steel cut to shape. I had a pleasant, unrushed afternoon forming the repair plates over the bench vice, and they’re now perfect for butt welding into place. When I’ve cleared the workshop of other people’s nice shiny cars, I intend to carry out the final welding session on the car and give the underside a final coat of paint. Next job, track down a pair of rear shock absorbers – that’ll make finding a tuned exhaust for an ADO16 look like a walk in the park.