Practically Classics Forum

Hi all, I've been restoring an Alvis TA14 mulliners saloon for the past year or so and thought it was about time I found a forum so I guess I ought to throw some photos up and give you some background as that seems to be the way things work around here!

I have always wanted to have a project and a classic car so when my grandfather passed away last year I thought the best way to remember him would be to spend the inheritance on doing just this as he was also very much into classic cars. I'm 21, have little previous experience doing this sort of thing and know no one who can help so it's been a pretty steep learning curve so far!

I bought the car from an elderly man who had had it sitting in his garage for the past 40 years after buying it to save it from a field it had been left in. Prior to this it had been bought for a university student by his father, he had owned it for a few years, it passed then into the hands of a couple of others and has spent it's whole life in the Bucks area.

At the time I purchased it, there was (and still is!) a significant amount of rust to the coachwork, some rotting of the timber although about 95% is usable with the odd minor repair. The interior is pretty shabby and not in a good way but it's all there. The engine didn't run but I have since managed to coax it to life and decided that maybe the head gasket has gone along with some faulty electrics (it also didn't help that the fuel pump didn't work at all).

So there's the history bit, I will soon throw some photos up on here and hopefully get up to date as a fair bit of progress has happened in a year in between uni and other things!

Matt

Hi Matt,
Well done for taking on something so different from the usual choice of first classic car for someone so young. I wish you every success with this project and am looking forward to reading of your progress on this forum.

The image didn't seem to work in your post though so, just in case the pic doesn't reappear by magic and on the basis that no amount of Alvis pics can be too many:


Ooh aye, nice!

Oh Matt, that looks fabulous! Welcome to the forum, its good to see another Alvis owner on board, and particularly refreshing to see one who's younger than me (34)!
If there's anything you need to konw, just shout, will try to help out in any way possible.
More photos please!

Hey thanks for sorting out the photo, not sure why it hasn't worked, i'll try and put a few more up and see how it goes.

I began with the engine bay as I knew once i'd seen a few things shining again i'd have the motivation to keep going!



Here's the radiator after a new coat of engine paint. I wasn't very good at taking photos of the first couple of weeks as I was so kean to get going on it so you can see that the bonnet's off and the driver door has been removed, I've also started sanding down the aluminium firewall. This has turned out to be an ongoing task as i've set about trying to get back the old mirror finish through a number of different grades of sandpaper and polishing wheels and compounds!



There are still a couple of areas on the back of the firewall where you can see the condition I received it. I've also managed to get the rocker cover looking quite nice at last!



Starting to get some of that sheen back after 5 grades of wet and dry, one metal polish and a buffing compound. With hindsight it may have been easier to remove it and do it with an orbital sander but this was early on and I hadn't realised that I would probably be completely disassembling the car.

The drivers door appears to be the one in the worst condition (hopefully this is true!). It has quite a few holes at the top and is yet to be tackled properly. Most of the timber has been useable though.



As I realised there was going to be a reasonable amount of timber to make up and replace I headed down to a friends timber yard where his boss amazingly had 4 year air dried ash in decent sizes! I had three 2 metre long 2x4's for £25 and my friend planed them down to the rough sizes I would need. As you will find I am on a tight budget and doing little things like this has become quite common to try and keep the overall cost down without skimping on quality.



My first challenge was the ash member at the bottom of the driver door, this was curved in every possible way and took around 5 hours to make. I've got no idea how they managed to churn these out and still make a profit. Maybe they didn't?



Here's the finished piece along with a few other small repairs. I must admit i've never taken any woodwork classes but from what i'd read it seemed glueing in these small repair sections wouldn't weaken the structure in any way and what with it being exterior wood glue it should create a joint that's just as good as the wood would have been. It seemed a shame to waste what was otherwise good wood anyway.

Almost a year has passed Mash, how are things going??

Ay up!

Nice, very nice. Any progress?

So it has! I'll have to post some more pictures of progress... there has been some but i'm far from finished yet

I've finally got round to adding an update, now entering the 3rd.. 4th? year of restoration it is clear the bodywork on this car was an absolute basket case and full of filler from the middle down. As a result it's taken an age to get this far and some skills I had not imagined I would ever attempt but it's coming along. I reckon i've now done about 50% of the work.

The following 6 images begin the show the extent of the rust.













The following hopefully show some progress















For some reason the photos don't seem to be appearing when I post?

Great to see you back here again! I'll put one of the photos up for you but it looks as though you've tried to link to them straight from their thumbnails in your flickR feed where in fact, you need to open the image that you want to post, then right click to select the size, then left click on "copy image location" and paste that location between a pair of the forum's [ i m g ] tags by clicking that Img box above the post, do this either by highlighting the image URL and then clicking the IMG tab or by clicking that and pasting the image link between the two IMG tabs.

Here's one, the rest are just as detailed so now you'll have to post the rest or some folk might think that they're all like that!




Ah! I see what you did. All of the links you posted are missing some of their characters. Each one should end in .jpg so the way I suggested above will work as that copies the whole address.