Here we go again!

[Reckless Rat]

Happy days!

[Parazine]

An unwelcome visitor

Not much progress in the last week; we had a visitation from an old friend, COVID19. You might have thought that was all over but I'm just now getting over the plague enough to do a few hours in the garage.

Tom, my youngest son and co-owner, came over last week and removed the engine. The engine that was fitted to the car turns over and has some compression but is otherwise unknown, so we have decided to replace it with my spare engine. This is a "cooking" engine and only has a 1 1/8" crankshaft, with a low compression head. I ran it in my Chummy about 10 years ago for a couple or three years and it went OK, albeit rather noisily.

   


Tom has taken the head off and is removing the valves before grinding them in and de-coking. We'll take the sump off and check all is well in the bottom end before running it up on the test bed and then fitting.

   

A problem that has come to light is that the front spring is broken, a replacement will have to be found:

   

At the other end of the car, the rotten, near-side, under seat floor panel has been removed and a replacement fabricated. I hate fabrication work as I don't have the myriad of special tools necessary or the requisite experience/skills. I'm in the process of riveting the panel in before welding the join; the welding is the easy bit! I'm hoping the rot in the off-side floor can be locally patched but the panel is very thin, so we'll have to see.

   

   

Ian Tillman at Oxfordshire Sevens is making several repair sections; I'm going to adapt his RM saloon spare wheel mounting to fit the Chummy for a stronger solution. He also supplies the number plate bar brackets, which have all but corroded away.


  SWB Box Spare.jpg (Size: 45.89 KB / Downloads: 294)


  Number plate brackets.jpg (Size: 31.08 KB / Downloads: 291)

[Ivor Hawkins]

Excellent progress, especially in this weather!

[Parazine]

Quick update on this project:

Rear floor sections were replaced with 18SWG and holes in the rest of the floor were patched as necessary. The rear wood rail was remade and replaced by my friend Bob, as the original was rotten and wood-worm eaten.

   

Front spring was replaced with a correct, 5 leaf item from BA7C spares shed, along with axle bushes etc.

Engine was installed with my normal Lucas SR4 Magneto. Petrol tank was washed out and the engine ran late in the summer.

Christmas day was a good opportunity for a quick road test, with quiet roads; the engine ran well but we soon stopped with fuel starvation:

   

Fortunately, it wasn't far to push the car back to the garage!

   

Time to rethink the petrol feed pipe; I think the fuel filter is vapour locking with a 22FZ carb fitted. Tom will be back next weekend and I've promised to have it sorted so we can do a more meaningful road test. 
Meanwhile, I've got the box of armoured cable out from the attic to start thinking about wiring the car properly. It would be good to have it on the road by early spring, as that's about the time we acquired it last year.