Woe 3

With an hour to go before we were due to leave to meet you all at the forge for the Riley BBQ I climbed into the car, admired the new hood bag and the new woodwork and the newly repaired window and I went through the start up procedure...and I went through the start up procedure...and...but as you know we never got there.

I did all the obvious things like taking the carburettor apart, checking the float level, taking the jets out...

Then I turned my attention to the valve timing...

And then I retimed the magneto... 

And then I went through the start up procedure again...

Anyway after three days of repeating all of the above my friend John Copper (who owns the club which the Multimarquers went to in Peacehaven one Tuesday evening) came over to help. To cut a long story short he said "Have you tried the starting handle?"; well I hadn't, but he did.

WEIRD, there was absolutely no compression AT ALL. So there was no suction for the petrol vapour and so nothing for the spark to ignite.

We poured some petrol into each cylinder went through the start up procedure and it worked...but you wouldn't have still been at the BBQ...

John's theory is that the tappet clearance was too small and that coupled with the Alvis's Mount Ararat moment and possibly the dehumidifier had resulted in carbon forming between the valve seat and the valves thus jamming the valves open

I was mightily relieved as in a few nano seconds my brain had computed the cost of a complete engine rebuild before Angouleme in ten days time.

But I am still stuck with getting a jet for the Solex so if you think you may be able to help, please read on.

Having reset the magneto, the Alvis goes extremely well but it fires back through the carburettor on occasion which I am told is a sign of a weak mixture. Well, the jet is a Solex 110 which is designed for skinflints and people with 9 points on their licence; what I should have is a 115 which is richer.

Somewhere in the Royal Mail infrastructure is a 120, but it's been stuck there for a week. Peter Broom has kindly offered me a 125 which could be far too rich and would obviously make the Alvis significantly faster than any Humber.

Please save Loft from this dreadful experience and see if you have a Solex 115 jet which I could beg, borrow, lease or whatever to get me to and from Angouleme. 

Woe 2

Previously I'd just finished repolishing all the woodwork after the Alvis gave its own interpretation of the Ark on Mount Ararat.

I was just refitting the twenty four pieces of beautifully polished mahogany when I noticed that the cable which winds the window up on the drivers side was frayed.

Now these window winders must be a coachbuilder's optional extra; Jim's Wolseley has them, my Alvis has them and a Gordon England bodied Austin Seven which I was looking at on the Internet the other day also had them. 

These window winders work on the same principle as a roller blind; except that roller blinds aren't really very heavy but a sheet of 4mm glass is ******heavy.

How do I know that? Well I just touched the frayed cable and there was a noise like the Guillotine as the roller spring didn't so much let go but rather did its own interpretation of a space launch in reverse - I was surprised to see that the door was still there as was the running board...and my toes. 

Obviously these "roller blinds" need some fairly significant cabling to raise the windows up; two of the windows appeared to have picture wire, one to have a scaled down version of the Titanic's mooring rope and the fourth to be a bit of waxed cotton!

Perhaps I should explain a little more about the mechanism. 

I have no idea how it works. 

But after a lot of experimentation (eg winding it the wrong way)  I did finally manage (several hours later) to work out what was going  on. 

The cable has to wrap around the roller and also to connect to the window...it's so simple but I don't understand how they did it without special equipment. Although I've put it all back together it really does need a winch to get the correct tension on the spring, but then it might break...

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The cable is held in place by a 4 ba screw so the cable has to be THIN.

Picture wire was a disaster - it just kinked. 

Stainless steel wire from Namrick the Nut and Bolt store of Portslade was promising but too inflexible. 

Green plastic garden twine was just perfect but I just couldn't imagine it lasting. 

The yacht chandlers at Brighton marina never got back to me....

But finally I found Tecni-Cable Ltd on the Internet. If you do nothing else, Save this site!

The wire is amazing; quite strong, very thin and you could tie knots in it...so I did. 

I ordered several metres of 0.75 mm which has a Maximum Breaking Load of 40kgs

Several hours later I'd just about managed to wind up the roller and with the occasional murmur of "Let them eat cake" I finally managed to get the window to go down, fairly slowly and to go up, without too much difficulty.

And that should have been that and I should have been at the Riley BBQ but...time for another Woe 3...

Woe, Woe and Thrice Woe.

If you’re old enough to have a bus pass then you will probably remember Frankie Howerd (Lurcio) speaking these lines on television in “Up Pompeii” through the early ‘70s. I have a certain empathy with that but in my case “Woe” is also known “As if it ain’t broke...parts 1, 2, 3 or 4” so without further ado...

Woe 1

You left me last month with a new hood bag but a soaking wet car having driven over the South Downs through the clouds and the sort of rain us Southerners thought only happened north of Watford. 

Two days later with the help of the dehumidifier, the car was dry but....the woodwork had taken a real hammering. Being a sort of upmarket convertible it has copious bits of wood trim. I'd previousl repolished about ten pieces around the windscreen where the rubber had disintegrated but this job was much more comprehensive; in all there were 24 pieces which I took out and a nice touch was that most of them had the body number from Carbodies who made the bodywork, written on the back in pencil. 

Repolishing them was a production line event.

Each piece needed three coats of stripper to get the old polish off; the drive over the Downs hadn't quite stripped them!

Then I cleaned them with White Spirit.

The next step was to varnish them using a pad which comprised the best soft linen or cotton I could get and in the centre of this I put either cotton wool or some other absorbent material to act as a reservoir for the polish. This ensured that there were no brush strokes.

The varnish I used was an exterior satin finish yacht varnish. 

However it was a bit trial and error as, to begin with I used a cheaper cotton cloth which just left bits of fluff behind so they all had to be redone.
Each of the four coats of varnish was left to dry for 24 hours and then rubbed down using 0000 grade wire wool and again cleaned with White Spirit. 

This was followed up with four coats of Liberon Black Bison wax. This was applied with 0000 wire wool, left for about an hour and then polished with a good quality polishing cloth. 

So with seven or eight coats of varnish and wax this now has a nice honey coloured look in addition to the mahogany itself.

It's tempting to see what happens to it if it gets wet...but I won't!

However that was not the end of it as the windows are all of the wind up variety but they work on the same principal as a roller blind but obviously with a much MUCH stronger spring....see Woe 2