Allard K1
This rare Allard was rescued 40 years ago but waited until 2012 for restoration to begin, all coordinated by one resourceful owner
It hadn’t been roadworthy since 1961,’ says Chris Hendley of his rare Allard K1. ‘I bought it from an advert in Motor Sport. This was back in 1980. I fancied a restoration project but I was running my own engineering business and I didn’t find the time until much later.’
The car Chris chose was certainly a project. It was one of just 152 Allard K1s, this one built in 1948. By 1961 it had been taken off the road because of the then-owner’s ill health. It rested in his front garden in North London until 1978 when it was bought by a gentleman called Gordon Rose, the conductor of the London Palladium Orchestra. ‘By this point it was badly rotten,’ says Chris. ‘Mr Rose stripped it and painted the chassis, welding pieces into holes in the wings and the body tub. He brush-painted it cream with black wings and got it running but not roadworthy, and it was in this condition that I bought it.’
Chris held onto the car right through his working life, keeping it garaged but unable to do much more. He had four new wings made in aluminium around 2002 to replace the rotten, patched-up steel originals, but apart from a trial fitting to the scruffy body, no further progress occurred until he retired in 2012. Then, armed with his engineering experience, a camera and the support of the Allard Owners Club, Chris reached for the spanners.
Bared to the bone
If there was one advantage to the project Chris had chosen, it would be in the Allard’s relative simplicity. Sydney Allard built the cars by mating Ford mechanicals to a straightforward ladder chassis and clothing the lot in steel and aluminium panelling, with the central tub supported by an ash frame.
‘I knew it was pretty rotten,’ says Chris. ‘As I took it to bits I discovered that almost everything made in steel would need to be replaced – the floors, the nose cone and bonnet. I’d already had the wings made. The body tub was skinned in aluminium to start with but I was sure the ash frame would have some rot.’
He reduced the Allard to a bare chassis frame, taking reference photos as he went along, and found that Gordon Rose’s coat of paint had come too late to stave off corrosion in the body. Chris sent the chassis to be shotblasted, powder-coated and baked. With this sound basis back in his garage, he could begin the process of restoring the running gear and finding specialists to cope with the large mechanical items.
‘I replaced the bearings in the stub axles and had the gearbox rebuilt by a gentleman from the Allard Owners Club called Alan Brock, who used a Lincoln-zephyr gearset, a common upgrade to give ratios more suited to modern driving conditions,’ he says.
It’s only a three-speed gearbox so choosing the ratios and the final drive to match the engine specification – or rather the owner’s hopes for top speed and acceleration – is quite important. Chris found a specialist who installed a higher-ratio crownwheel and pinion set, bought second-hand from a club member. They fitted new bearings to the axle and painted it, ready for installation.
‘The leaf springs were all corroded and seized together,’ says Chris. ‘I stripped and painted them all, along with the shackles, and reassembled them with lots of grease so they could slide over each other, as they’re meant to.’
The front suspension is Allard’s version of the primitive independent design created by Leslie Ballamy in the Thirties – it’s a beam axle split in half, with each half hung on a bush near the centre line of the chassis. This allows each wheel to move up and down independently, though they’re both sprung by the same transverse leaf spring. Underneath the divided axle is a steering idler that pivots on a central bolt, and here Chris introduced a bronze bush with a grease nipple to ensure everything remained supple in years to come.
Chris’s engineering past also came to his aid when he decided to change the car’s bolt-on steel wheels for a set of wires. This involved creating a set of splined hubs to fit Jaguar-pattern wheels – no small task, and one that became a job for one of Chris’s ex-employees.
‘He started with pieces of billet steel and machined them on the lathe, forming the shape and boring them out to the correct size for the bearing fitments. I then broached the splines on the outside of the hub. This meant setting each hub up on a rotary table on a milling machine and bringing the cutting head down by hand to cut a spline. You divide the number of splines you wanted into 360 degrees and then rotate the workpiece by that amount to cut the next spline, and so on.’
The result – four new hubs with Jaguar Xk-type wheels to fit them – meant Chris had a rolling chassis.
Get ahead, get a Flathead
The Allard’s Ford ‘Flathead’ V8 needed a full rebuild, but was this the sensible thing to do? Chris gathered wisdom from fellow Allard owners and decided to seek out an American-built engine to rebuild instead of the British-built original. He presented it to Jim Turnbull of Royal Kustoms near Poole, who explains the reasoning.
‘Chris found a 1948 24-stud American engine, which was a good thing,’ says Jim, referring to the number of studs used to hold the cylinder heads in place. ‘American engines swapped to 24 studs in 1938 or ’39 for better clamping pressures, while the British-built ones stuck with 21 studs to the end of production in 1951. The point is that parts for 24-stud engines are all available new and it’s much easier to build a strong, reliable engine – rebuilding the 21-stud
Low point ‘When I first drove the car it steered like a boat. The steering box had to come off and go on again multiple times until I got the set-up spot on’ Chris Hendley
version would be trickier and more expensive for a less satisfactory result.’ Jim’s clever techniques allowed the use of cost-effective, widely available parts that bring other benefits with them. The best example is probably the choice of pistons and connecting rods.
‘I chose a set of new H-beam rods,’ he says. ‘These require a smaller big end than on Chris’s standard crankshaft, so it has to be ground down by 0.4 of an inch. But when doing this you can offset the grind to gain some extra stroke, and at the same time the new diameter allows you to use Rover/buick V8 big end bearings at £60 to £80 a set rather than £150 or more for standard Flathead items.’
Jim also bored out the cylinders by an eighth of an inch. This sounds a lot but there’s plenty of spare meat in these cylinder blocks and it permits the use of 3 5∕16in forged pistons with three rings, while still leaving enough in the block for three subsequent over-bores. Together, the increased bore and stroke bring a worthwhile capacity increase from 255ci to 289ci, or 4.2-litres to 4.7-litres in our money.
The valvegear needed a practical approach too. Both valves and seats were worn and only the last Flatheads used valve seat inserts – the seats are cut straight into the block. Re-cutting them, therefore, means the valve sinks into the block… unless you go a size up. ‘Moving from 1.5in to 1.6in valves means you cut the seats that little bit wider, which maintains the correct valve height but also helps with the Flathead’s number one problem – breathing,’ says Jim.
With the cylinder block, crank, pistons, rods and valves ready for assembly, Jim chose a custom re-ground camshaft to complete the mix. This is something he does as a matter of course, but when the engine has a special fate in store, it’s even more beneficial.
‘Chris is planning to supercharge it,’ says Jim. ‘He has an unusual Mcculloch supercharger, which blows through the carburettor rather than sucking mixture from it. This means you either need a carb that seals really well, which the old Stromberg 97s don’t, or you have to encase them in a metal box, which looks hideous.’
Chris chose a modern Holley four-choke carburettor, which can take it, along with the correct manifold to suit. Jim put the compression ratio at 7:1 and set the engine up to run un-supercharged for now. The camshaft has a little less overlap to stop the blower forcing unburned mixture down the exhaust valves but it works perfectly in a non-blown application too.
The Body Beautiful
Replacing the Allard’s entire outer skin wasn’t necessary because Chris managed to save the aluminium cladding on the body tub and doors, and most of the steel in the bulkhead. He performed his own repairs to the body tub, then having turned it over, discovered some wood rot in the ash door pillars. ‘It looked like a coracle!’ he recalls.
‘I carefully peeled back the aluminium and cut out the rotten wood,’ he says. ‘Then it was a case of making ash pieces to replace what had gone. Gentle sanding and shaping continued until the repair pieces were a snug fit, then I screwed and glued them in place and re-wrapped the aluminium.’
The steel panels that made up the rest of the body were too far gone to repair. The wings were re-made in aluminium ten years earlier by Pitney Restorations in Windsor. The firm has a long connection with Allard, going right back to 1952 when junior Allard employee John Pitney made the nose for the first Palm Beach model. John’s son Ian now runs Pitney Restorations and the approach is still highly traditional. He explains, ‘Chris’s car came back to us a couple of times. We created new flitch panels to fit under the front wings and a whole new set of front-end panels – bonnet, bonnet sides and the nose cone.’
Ian sometimes chooses to make up wooden bucks for large, complex forms, but with the Allard’s original shapes more or less intact, he managed to avoid it this time.
‘We used the old steel panels as patterns and wheeled up new versions in 1050A aluminium, at 1.5mm thick, like the old 16 gauge. They’re made in sections and welded together before finishing. Almost all the welding we do is gas rather than TIG – I still think it creates a more workable weld and it’s how the cars were built when they were new, so why change it?’
Ian’s team hand-formed louvres in both the bonnet sides and the bonnet itself to aid the Flathead V8’s efforts to stay cool, and with the tub back on the chassis and the all the panels assembled, Ian took the opportunity to perfect the door clearances and body lines before the car went away to be painted.
Chris found a team of painters close to his home in Essex and decided to entrust them with the work of finishing the Allard’s body. This had to be done in stages because of the way the car fits together – it’s not a continuous painted surface and the wings and body come together with a beaded trim between them. This suited the painters, who could tackle sections at a time without having a semi-naked Allard taking up space.
‘I saw a Delahaye for sale some years ago and loved the colour. From memory, and with the help of paint company in Harlow, we arrived at a match I was delighted with.’
The fun part
For Chris, the delight of reassembling the painted body on the chassis meant he was entering the final stretch, though there was still plenty left to do. He explains, ‘I had a new fuel tank made by Lloyd Allard of Allard Aluminium Products in Gloucester. Lloyd is Sidney Allard’s grandson and he made a superb job of it. I’m pleased to have been able to fit something new to the car that was genuinely Allard-made!’
Chris confesses to a weak point in his skill set – wiring. ‘I was lucky to be able to call on the help of a good friend and neighbour, Chris Benton. He understands car wiring and he managed to fit a loom that I ordered from Auto Sparks.’ This came in three sections and was intended to cover all Allard models, leaving quite a lot of trimming and adjustment to the customer. Chris Benton eventually shortened it by around 18 inches to fit the two-seater K1.
‘We also changed it from positive to negative earth,’ says Chris. ‘I wanted to run an alternator for better charging.’
More patience was expended on finishing and setting new floors, but once that was done, Chris was able to virtually finish off the interior work by himself.
‘The original seats, floors and trim had all gone – just rotted away,’ he says. ‘I found somewhere that offered aftermarket bucket seats of an appropriate type to suit the car and the company would trim them as required, so I chose grey leather. I then unearthed a job-lot
High point ‘There were about six of us present for the first start up. After churning round for ages it finally fired and the noise – with no exhausts – was ear-splitting!’ Chris Hendley
of grey carpet and cut it to fit the shape of the cabin.’
Chris had the new carpet pieces edge-bound and fitted pull handles inside the doors. He polished up the gearbox cover, a handsome functional feature of the interior, and re-fitted the dashboard. ‘Chris Benton had taken the dash away but I had no idea he had handed it over to another friend and neighbour, Matthew Clark. Matthew French-polished it to a beautiful state but as a wind-up, they gave me another dash to un-wrap that they’d cut out of chip-board… just to see my face!
‘Some of the original Allard-badged instruments survived with a spruce-up and I sent the others away for repair. The windscreen and frame needed nothing more than a good clean.’ Chris was finally able to re-fit the car’s Brooklands steering wheel. Years before, he’d found a kit for sale on the internet and restored it, filing out the cracks in the Bakelite rim, filling them, sanding it perfectly smooth and re-lacquering everything, setting it together with new screws. The last lap?
‘Friends arranged a trailer to take the car to a local show before it was painted in 2017,’ says Chris. ‘They said I had to drive it there the following year, and with a lovely hand-made exhaust fitted about two days beforehand, I did. On the first of July 2018, the car was on the road for the first time since 1961. It even won two prizes – Best Restoration and Engineering Excellence.’
Since then, many other little jobs have been ticked off – a re-cored radiator leaked and has been replaced by a new aluminium item and the de-bugging process has moved forward when lockdown restrictions allow. Jim Turnbull has been able to set the engine up to his ideal standard.
‘It’s pretty nippy,’ says Chris. ‘It’ll spin the back wheels with of all that Flathead V8 torque. It stops well thanks to rebuilt mastercylinders, and it even steers and rides surprisingly nicely. It does have some idiosyncrasies like the close proximity of the steering wheel to the dashboard and windscreen, meaning you can easily bash your knuckles. But on the whole it’s been terrific, and when it’s run in I should have a 100mph Allard.’ Allard built cars for the individual and very few of them were truly alike, so a highly personal restoration like this seems in exactly the right spirit for the marque – respectful of tradition but never shy of squeezing a bit more excitement out of life. And thanks to Chris Hendley, this K1 is now back on the scene after 60 years.