Rochdale GT
Named after the Lancashire mill town, the Rochdale was an exoticlooking special designed around cast-off Ford Pop mechanicals. We find a man who has resurrected a once costly example of this mini E-Type.
This ’50s Ford-powered special proved an ideal DIY restoration.
It didn’t need welding and it didn’t need painting,” laughs Andrew Shepherd, discussing his Rochdale GT restoration. “Which is just as well, as I’m not particularly good at either of them!”
For readers unfamiliar with the Rochdale, it’s rather more mundane than its looks might lead you to believe, since underneath the racy body you’ll find nothing more fancy than the chassis and drivetrain from the 103E Ford Popular. As you can read in our side panel on the Rochdale marque, the GT was the company’s first model to sell in significant volume and was designed to make use of the large numbers of rotten Ford Pops around in the late 1950s. Indeed, so many were built on Ford chassis that the body as delivered from the Rochdale works was fitted with tubular legs allowing it to be lowered over the Pop chassis and bolted into place.
The GT was offered for home assembly as a finished bodyshell complete with windows, doors and bonnet, needing only a suitable Ford donor to build up but unlike many kit cars of the era, it was considered to be well made. The doors were created using the tops of Morris Minor doors to create proper wind-up windows and quarterlights, while the curved windscreen was also an advanced feature for this kind of car. The bodyshell itself took a week to make in the company’s former mill premises and was sensibly reinforced at suitable points.
The quality of completed Rochdales varied widely according to the effort and money put in by the original builder, plus of course the state of the Ford bits used, but the car you see here was put together with rather more care than the average.
Andrew acquired the car through a neighbour, who had been friendly with the original owner and had helped him put it together, the car then passing to his son when the original owner emigrated to Spain. Andrew was up on the roof doing some building work when he spied the car arriving on a trailer and when the shabby state of it proved too much for the neighbours to tackle, he took it on himself.
Knowing the original owner and builder is rare for a car of this type, a history file of any kind being equally rare let alone the massive folder of bills Andrew has with the GT. From this he’s discovered that the original owner spent what in the early ’60s was an absolute packet. The Ford sidevalve engine was treated to the full complement of Aquaplane performance parts which included high-compression cylinder head, twin carbs, four-branch manifold, highpressure oil pump and lightened flywheel.
An ‘export’ water pump was also fitted to allow use of a lower-profile radiator and the car was also fitted with very early Spax adjustable dampers,
sourced from Holland. Together with labour provided by a local garage Andrew estimates the cost of the original build to be somewhere around £1800, in an era when a brand new Ford Popular would have been yours for around £900, meaning that this car was far from average when it first hit the road.
By the time it arrived in Andrew’s garage though it was looking somewhat the worse for wear, with the bodyshell having suffered especially. “It was a total basket case,” remembers Andrew. “Literally – it was all in boxes and baskets and the sills had broken so the shell was flopping about.”
Luckily, fibreglass repairs don’t require a huge amount of specialist skill and equipment, so armed with the memory of building his own canoe at school, Andrew set to with the resin and fibreglass. Essentially the process was one of glueing it all back together and eventually some rigidity had been restored. That left the problem of the many cracked and crazed areas in the gel coat, which in theory can be repaired by grinding them out and then repairing them with strands of fibreglass.
As Andrew points out though, the vibration of the bodyshell in use will often tend to bring the cracks back and under a relatively brittle paint coating they will soon be visible again. The solution was an elegant one and came in the shape of vinyl wrapping.
It’s a technique used on modern custom and show cars as well as commercial and promotional vehicles, essentially involving covering the bodyshell with a film of self-adhesive vinyl which is stretched and smoothed over the contours of the bodyshell.
It’s a fiddly job to get it looking right but with patience it
can be done at home using little more than a squeegee and a knife and the results on the Rochdale show just what impressive results can be achieved.
The chosen colour was a satin black and even on the Rochdale’s curved shape Andrew reports it was very easy to apply. It’s practical in use, too and Andrew tells us he simply wipes it off then shines it up with Mr Sheen...
Elsewhere, the engine remains the original Ford unit complete with all the Aquaplane goodies which as Andrew reports, make it really quite fast for its underpinnings... which of course are still those of the old Ford Pop chassis.
Records show that the engine came from a 1957 donor car, making it some 60 years old and again, it’s a simple enough unit to strip and rebuild at home. Reassembly did throw up one unexpected problem when the bores were found to be +10 thou and the only rings available for the split-skirt pistons were +20 thou, but many hours of machining down the larger rings to achieve the correct end gap sorted it eventually. With it all back together, Andrew reports that it doesn’t smoke, although a rattling bendix has proved hard to quieten down. In fact the only issue turned out to be the 60-year old condenser, which Andrew was advised to replace owing to its age... and which promptly went back in again when the new replacement failed. The engine was paired with the original three-speed box, although a higher axle ratio was used to keep the revs down in top gear – Andrew’s been advised that frequently taking the sidevalve engine over 4500 rpm won’t do it much good.
The freshly rebuilt engine was slotted back into the same Ford Pop chassis, which back in the day had been ‘boxed’ for rigidity, a process which involved welding in stiffening plates to close up the U-section rails.
When originally built, the floor had been lowered using Dexion and wood in order to lower the seats, but Andrew improved on this rather crude arrangement by pop-riveting in some heavy gauge galvanised steel sheet for a floor and then using a pair of lower seats, the end result being a more elegant way to achieve the same thing.
With it all put back together and the entire project completed without the car ever leaving Andrew’s garage, it was ready for the road again and Andrew reports the experience was initially quite hairy. The Ford Pop chassis uses live axles at both ends with a single leaf spring at the front and it took some time to tame the handling. Lowering the front tyre pressures reduced the massive oversteer, while an attempt to better locate the rear axle involved a bracing rod. “I still wouldn’t trust too many people to drive it,” he laughs. “The rear end will come round on you so easily...”
Having said that, with a comfortably trimmed cabin including proper door cards, carpeting and headlining, the Rochdale is civilised enough for Andrew to use it regularly on the school run. Although it’s not often seen out in heavy rain, owing to the Rochdale’s habit of leaking around the front and rear screen, something for which they were well known. Although, as Andrew happily points out, most of the rain drains out again without damaging the trim.
The finished car has been surprisingly affordable to put back together, too. Having done most of the work himself and needing to buy very few items, Andrew estimates the cost at somewhere between £1600 and £1800 which seems very reasonable indeed for something which looks really pretty exotic.