Fleet management
gone unrestored for so long.
I have been doing some investigation into its history; it has had several owners in the UK and I managed to trace one of the previous owners. The car actually came from a Colorado scrapyard, (explaining the many missing parts) and languished in a barn in Cornwall for the best part of 30 years, before sadly sitting outside in the rain for three years after storage was lost. Apparently it was full of sand, which there are still traces of, meaning that when it was left in the rain the floor rusted quickly. It moved to Wales for a while before I bought it.
I was lucky that one previous owner, who lived just 10 miles away, actually had most of the was a bit rustier than hoped, being almost completely devoid of any chassis legs, floor or rear spring hangers. Having said that the rest of the car is pretty rust-free and the usual difficult rust spots, such as the inner wings, wing flanges and door bottoms just need cleaning up and repainting.
As you can buy all of these panels, replacing the rusty bits shouldn’t be too difficult and I’ve done all of them before. There is no welding or underseal anywhere covering horrible bodges, which is a real contrast to my other project, which was full of nasty surprises. You can see what needs doing... quite a lot really! I can see why it has ust as the Lowlight looks like a Morris again, there’s another addition to my Minor collection. Looking back through my old articles it seems that there’s a recurring theme. Namely, having too many cars and continually buying ‘another project’. I’m going to have yet another cull of the fleet: four Morris Minors is way too many and means that my time and money is too thinly stretched.
In reality I need at most, one all-weather daily driver and one summer Sunday car, but the need for rationalisation will mean making some difficult decisions. Watch this space!
The latest addition has now arrived, a 1950 Morris Minor Tourer from the USA. As ever it J
missing body panels, which I duly bought from him. With these and the old boot lid off the first Lowlight, the car is looking much more complete and the only major parts I’m really missing now are a rear bumper and the convertible side screens. I’ve got a few leads to follow up and am reasonably confident I can source these bits.
Meanwhile on the current project I’ve started the laborious process of flatting back the fresh paint, in order to remove some of the minor imperfections as well as some patches of orange peel. It’s not bad by any means and I am sure many would leave the paint as is but some gentle wet flatting with 1500 grade paper, before G3 and then G10 rubbing compound, this really lifts the paint and the whole look of the car. Rather annoyingly, because of an underlying imperfection there have been one or two places that I have rubbed through, I should’ve really picked these up when priming. I’ll send the car back round to the paint shop to get these touched up before reassembly.
It’s a little bit daunting starting this process and it’s hard to know where to start as there are just so many jobs that need doing and parts which need refurbishing. My current thought is to make a start on the running gear, before working my way upwards. Although in reality I’m sure I will end up deviating from this, it’s important to have a strategy for finishing a car and breaking jobs down into manageable parts.
The latest addition has now arrived, a 1950 Morris Minor Tourer from the USA. As ever it was a bit rustier than hoped...