Practically Classics Forum

/\/\/\ WHS

Ay up!

I wonder if the gold dash was copying the early Morris Minors (sidevalve, split screen Issigonis design) to make it look more modern?

Whatever, good on yer - a fascinating resto of a fascinating vehicle!

Indeed you are doing a lovely job, I love the pre war stuff

I haven’t been on for a while. Events at home and work took me out for the late summer and part of the Autumn, but I have managed to get back into things again.
Firstly the interior. On my last post I had refettled the dashboard and got everything working again and was starting to have thoughts about the rest of the interior. The car has a passable headlining, probably redone when the car was originally restored 15 or so years ago, but the Rexine seats were badly worn in the front and the material less worn, but hard and brittle in the rear. Taking the seats out revealed that the driver’s seat had been bodged by grafting on another base facing, attached crudely with some modern vinyl and stitching. Door cards were threadbare where the material had lost its composition facing and was down to the fabric backing and the material covering various other of the smaller trim panels was hard and cracking..
I had a think and decided that I would tackle the door cards and other small bits of lining and entrust the seats to a specialist
I took them off the Preston Car Trim, who have a small workshop that tackles everything from Custom cars to Aeroplanes, and they sorted out the seats, whilst I carefully dissected the door cards and re-covered the original ply baseboards, which were in decent condition, with vinyl to match the seats.
I ordered Hidem banding from Woollies, other materials locally and set to. The final coming together took a few weeks, but the transformation is quite remarkable, coupled with a minor tidy of the headlining here and there, and I just need to sort out carpets.



Carpets are as they came with the car, seemed okay in the early days of the project, but will now be changed. I had envisaged a lighter coloured carpet to
brighten things up a little, but I am not sure just at the moment. I will sort out some new over the next few weeks and if I go for another colour, I may change the carpet facings on the bottom of the door cards, to match.



Next in line was a maiden voyage. The car has been shuttled up and down the drive a couple of times, but apart from that, has never been properly driven any distance, and by the ‘no MOT’ deadline, still hadn’t been put back on the road. Well the absence of a need for an MOT mean’t one thing, at least I could do a quiet proving run one weekend and see if everything was in order, before carting it down to my friendly (ex) MOT garage to get their final approval.
So, after sending off for and receiving a tax disc, and then going round with the spanner one last time, we set off around the village. Amazingly, the car ran really well for something that hasn’t seen the road for eight years, and apart from the speedo, which refused to show anything at all, we seemed to be in good shape.



I’ve subsequently been over everything again, pushed the cable properly home into the back of the speedometer and adjusted the clutch, and am just waiting for a nice-ish day to hit the road again!

Merry Christmas everyone.

As a fairly new member here, I hadn't seen your topic before but have just spent a very enjoyable half hour reading from the start whilst having my breakfast !

Excellent work and you must be proud of your achievements.

Hopefully over Christmas and New year we'll get a day of sunshine and you can get on the road for a proper run - at least it has stopped raining here at the moment

Mike

It's a little depressing now - two of my favourite restos are getting so close to completion at around the same time!

The old "tub" has come along nicely and I hope to see photos of various nice country scenes with the 10M featured prominently!

Thanks for the comments.

There are still a few details to sort out yet, and so the thread will survive as a resto thread for a little while longer.
The weather has been lousy, so not much more opportunity for a drive, but I did order some new window seals for the rear window, the existing rubbers for which were extremely perished, and since they turned up a couple of days before Christmas, I spent Christmas Eve taking the old window out.
This meant a bit of careful unpicking internally, since the aperture has a wooden lining and the glass is clamped into place by various bits of shaped ply and some metal plates, all hidden by the headlining and some Hidem banding. All rather crude, came out dead easy, but, you guessed it, was a swine to refit. The window is back in now, but I am going to redo the lining locally, since it is a bit hamfisted around the window internally.

Ooooh, that's lovely that is - I'm green with envy, I'd love one of those!

Do keep the thread going, more pics the better - we're loving this!

Cheers

Thanks for the good wishes, and now....ah yes, the speedometer.
Of course although you can theoretically pass an MOT without it working, because the MOT men have no means to test it....well mine still didn't work, even after making sure that the cable was plugged in at the back and everything.... so I took it out, the actual speedo that is.
Chopped the end off an old mini cable, clamped it into the chuck of my drill, set it to reverse and inserted it into the rear of the speedo drive.
It worked, smoothly up to 45 mph and then returned meekly to zero when I cut the power.
Okay, broken cable.
Pulled out the inner through the dash.Very stiff, very dry...but not broken.
I put some grease on it, shoved it back in and crawled under the car.
The gearbox drive is by the tailshaft housing. I unscrewed it. The cable appeared far too short, not projecting beyond the sheath, in fact being about 8mm inside it. I fiddled around in the drive housing, but no receiver either with a small square hole in it to take the squared cable end.
I wondered for a moment if something was missing. There was a socket with a slot in one side, and when I twisted the prop shaft slightly, it also moved. So the drive was present and correct, it was just that the cable was completely the wrong one for the car.
So goodness knows when this car has last had a working cable. Whether its another strike for the PO....mind you, if he had never driven it, as is likely, then he probably assumed like me that since it all appeared to be there, it would work. What's even dafter, I had disconnected it from the box when I took the engine and gearbox out last year, and never noticed the lack of a proper connection.
Anyway, a new cable is on its way from Richfield, who list this as one of their standard items. Presumably they will have to make it up, but hopefully it will turn up by the weekend and that can be my next phase of the project.

After that, the fuel gauge.

Nothing like spending the winter under a Morris 10.

Hey, you're at the "snagging" stage - i.e. virtually done! Excellent work, actually I don't mind this stage of a project, as I get immense satisfaction from sorting each little issue as it crops up, and getting everything working correctly and smoothly as it should do.

Keep the updates coming, we're absolutely loving this thread, you should be VERY proud!

Cheers