Training wheels
One task stumped me when rebuilding the carburettors – replacing the choke cable, which had broken just behind the dash slider. It’s completely enclosed and I couldn’t get to any of the retainers for the dash panels and glovebox that surround it. So when three undergraduate engineers – son Fraser, his girlfriend Georgia and best mate Ben – offered an afternoon’s free help, that was their first job. It was Georgia who achieved it; lying in the footwell, she managed to get her small hands up above the glovebox to undo its retainers – and even more important, to replace them after we’d fitted a new cable – brilliant! Fraser and Ben fitted a new servo from SNG Barratt, and the new master cylinder that came with the car.
Meanwhile, my wife Helena has spent many hours with a pot of cellulose thinners, cleaning off as much as possible of the black paint that had been applied to the beige leather seats and other trim; she found that some of it had been painted white previously! We’ll keep as much as possible of the original interior and recolour it back to beige; in some places she has had to stitch in new material and repair splits; Furniture Clinic supplied a brilliant kit, with sub-patch material, glue and filler to disguise the repairs. I found it tricky to get the sub-patch to stick under the surface, but Helena soon had it sussed, using several layers of material rather than one as I had.
I concurrently built up the cooling system – a new purpose-built aluminium radiator came with the car, but a lot of other parts were missing. I added a Gano coolant filter (cmengines.co.uk) in the top hose because I didn’t want that new filter clogged with sludge that was bound to get stirred up inside the engine after two decades standing idle. I also rebuilt the front brake calipers (horribly gunged with solidified brake fluid inside, but salvageable with new seals) and made up new Kunifer brake pipes to connect the dual circuit master cylinder and servo.
Several friends had mocked my claim the car would be on the road by the end of the month; to prove a point, at 6pm on the 31st I fired the engine up again and, having established that there were no leaks from the rebuilt carbs and that the brakes were working, drove it out of the garage and up my steep driveway. Point proven, though the car had to roll back into the garage because reverse wouldn’t engage!