Ready to go

After various false starts with the instruments, the dash is now complete. It took 8 weeks to resolve a problem with the converted rev counter though. I had bought a matching pair of early Jaguar dials - speedo and rev counter and the latter was converted to electronic operation. After fitting the newly converted dial, it wouldn't work. I tried this and that and even the services of an auto electrician, but nothing persuaded it to work. I returned it to the supplier who informed me that there was nothing wrong with it and he sent it back with a charge for checking a non-faulty unit. Anyway, back in the car it went and still it didn't work. Back on to the by now very disinterested supplier. After some strong emails he finally admitted that he had supplied a positive earth model and not the negative earth one ordered. Eureka - the returned unit worked!

The finished dash does look the part now (I think).

And so to the MOT. I checked everything and all seemed OK two days before the test was due. On the morning of the test, the dipped beam headlamps had disappeared, only main beam was working. I checked all I could in the limited time available, but couldn't trace a fault. All I could do was to take it and know it would fail. Worse was to come as during the test it appeared that when the sidelights were on the indicators wouldn't work, and neither would the stop lights. I had only checked these separately, not together.

With my  failure notice I pootled off home and got the test meter out. For some reason the original, and apparently continuous, wire from the dip switch to the fuse box was carrying no current. In went a new wire, and voila - dipped headlights. And so to the rear lights. I reasoned that this could only be a poor earth so looked for somewhere to create a new earth point - not that easy on a car with a wooden body. However, there were two bolts in the rear of the car that hold the rear body mounts and connect to the chassis. This was ideal and sure enough, the lights were restored.

I had noticed that the tyres were perished around the walls so ordered and new set and had them fitted at my local garage. On collecting the car I was advised that one tyre had a rather larger valve hole in the rim than the diameter of the valve. They duly suggested that I should purchase some now rare valve support collars to resolve the problem but didn't think I would get a problem with the tyre - it was just to be sure. A search of Ebay yielded one for £23.18.! A small piece of plastic for £23 - he had to be joking, but he wasn't. A Google trawl finally produced some at £0.10 each so four were ordered - total £7 odd with postage. Much cheaper than Ebay, but..... Anyway, the garage couldn't fit the collar immediately so I thought I'd have it done at the same time as the MOT retest.

Along came the Bank Holiday Monday (Whitsun) and Jan and I decided to go to Woburn Abbey to a Classic Car Show. After 12 miles the car started weaving about and sure enough, the nearside rear tyre (with the suspect valve hole was completely flat. Who had removed the jack, soft headed hammer and other tools in the garage to sort the wiring? Yes - me. The RAC were duly called and after an hour's wait all was sorted, but by now it was too late to reach the show so we headed home. Bit of an anticlimax.

I checked the internet for suppliers of inner tubes with the correct wide-based valve and found just one company so ordered a pair of inner tubes for next day delivery. When they arrived they were the wrong ones - they both had the narrower valves. I tried to contact the supplier but couldn't make then see any sense so used the collars previously bought. What is it with car spares? On 50% of occasions, deliveries seem to be wrong.
 
Three days later and I had the MOT pass. Now to use the car, if the weather improves that is.

I've one more job in mind and that's to move the handbrake outside the car to give more leverage with a longer handle. The present handbrake passed the MOT test but is only just doing its job because the angle of leverage is wrong to get good braking effort. Still, with the MOT in place I can take my time on that.

A dash of style

I'd searched the internet and my own books for pictures of period dashboards and found that the ones I liked most wouldn't work in my car because of the constraints of the double hump bulkhead as used in MGs before the war. This rather dictated the general positioning of instruments so I opted for the principal dials to be á la MG - rev counter in front of driver and speedo in front of passenger. Presumably this was done because in motoring competition the rev counter was the key dial, not the speedo. Anyway, having thrown away the exterior ply dash - what to use? It had to be engine turned aluminium, which, after a lengthier search that I had imagined was found at Europa Specialist Spares. Using the bulkhead as a pattern I created a cardboard pattern which I then transferred to hardboard and checked fit against the bulkhead. Next was the marking out of the instruments and switches - quite a time-consuming process but important to get right. With a degree of trepidation I set about marking out the ally and then cutting it out. This was done with a mixture of tools - the guillotine to remove larger pieces and then tin snips and the linisher to finish off. The different holes were cut with hole cutters and then, if needed, enlarged by hand with a file.

A fair bit of jiggling was necessary to get the dash to sit at the right height relative to the steering column and the bulkhead itself. The dash is held in place with some chrome bumper bolts that I managed to find, but which were too big so I ground them down and then painted the heads with a steel coloured paint.

So - which instruments to use? I wanted period style instruments and spent hours looking on Ebay. The odd 5" diameter speedo and rev counter would appear, but rarely a matching pair. If a matching pair did show up then invariably the price was far too high to consider. Eventually, a matching pair of dials appeared - according to the seller, of unknown heritage. A quick Google showed that they came from a Mark VII Jag of late 40's or early 50s vintage. These would be fine I thought so bid on them and won. When they arrived I found that the instruments sat behind the dash rather than held in place by a bezel to the outer face of the dash. In order for them to fit I mounted three machine screws from the dash front, held in place by nuts behind the dash, that would match the fixing brackets on the dials. A piece of duct tape on the inner dash face acts as a gasket between dial and dash to stop water getting in.

OK - so now I have a 6 cylinder cable driven rev counter and a much higher geared speedo than is suitable for the Brookvale Special. A check on Google quickly found a company in Yorkshire that would convert the rev counter to an electronic one for 4 cylinder operation so the rev counter was despatched by post for conversion. I had spoken to Speedy Cables about recalibrating the speedo but surprisingly, despite several emails, I never received a reply about costs. What did surprise me was that the Herald speedo cable fitted the Jag speedo, although it was too short for the revised position. I thought I'd try Speedograph Richfield in Nottingham (another Google find) and emailed them asking if I could order a standard Herald cable but 20 cm longer. Within an hour and a half I had received a reply saying the cable was made. How about that for service! I was then in no doubt where the speedo would go recalibration.

Recalibration - that's a game. Mark a rear wheel and a make a corresponding mark on the body. Make up a flag and connect it to the end of the speedo cable (speedo end) and push the car for 6 revolutions whilst recording the number of turns of the speedo cable. SWMBO was enrolled for this task as I did the grunting and panting (pushing). Together with the result of the above, the speedo was sent of to Nottingham and returned in 2 weeks looking like new, with zeroised oddometer and a new trip reset arm (missing when purchased). I can't praise Speeodgraph Richfield highly enough for a superb service.

Together with other older style instruments and switches I set about rebuilding my new dash.

In my desire for a period feel, I had bought a Lucas style ignition switch and an older style dash light switch. These older style switches use screw connections rather than the Lucar type which does give a bit of grief as they tend to increase the diameter of the switch because the wires stick out at 90 degrees to the switch. Not only that but they are not easy to get a chunky cable (or two twisted together) to fit. Still, after much perseverance and a degree of swearing, the dash was built up.

A bit of metal bashing

I have always wanted to be able to shape metal, particularly aluminium. However, I've never had the opportunity or the tools to do so. All I have at my disposal is a metal guillotine, a sheet metal folder, and various hand cutters, snips, etc. So having decided that the central ply transmission tunnel had to go, the obvious replacement would be made in aluminium.

Ply transmission tunnel

 

The tunnel from the rear of the car to the gear change area was  relatively easy as it was single plane curve with lips at 90 degrees to fix to the floor. With the new extended remote I wanted to enclose the whole of the gear mechanism so I would have to join the small rear tunnel to a larger one covering the gear change. I sometimes think I make life very difficult for myself!

With a suitably sized sheet of aluminium ordered I drafted out the shape I wanted to achieve. It seemed relatively straightforward (stupid boy!).

Only when I had received the aluminium did I realise that it wouldn't be enough as the height was greater than my pathetic calculations had forecast. Never mind. I doubt that I could have made it in one piece anyway and I wanted an easily removable access panel to be able to reach the clutch slave cylinder and the gear box filler plug. Using the few tools I had and ably aided by a 5 litre can of Dulux emulsion and a handy log I managed to achieve the desired shape.

 New transmission tunnel

I cut out some ribbed rubber for mats in the passenger and driver's side floor and then turned my attention to the dashboard - a relatively 'orrible fabrication made largely out of exterior ply and housing the original Herald speedometer and switches. Something more period in style was called for....... 

The gear change that wouldn't

Although the Herald can suffer from significant wear in the gear change linkage, I've never experienced a gear change as awful as that on this car. There appeared to be two reasons for this. Firstly, the gear linkage bushes were shot, but also, due to the design of the car, the seats were further back than in the Herald. This meant that the standard gear lever is too far forward to reach easily (like the handbrake) and so a modified gear lever had been made. This was in a very flat "s" shape and I found it difficult to get from third to second in particular. You can just see the gear lever to the left of the picture below.

Ideally I wanted the gear lever to be much nearer as I hated the one I had. I thought about making a custom remote gear change and drafted out plans for such a thing. However, a chance discussion with a friend resulted in a suggestion which I followed through - thanks Steve. He suggested I get another remote extension and weld the two together. What a clever fellow. Once again, Ebay to the rescue. I managed to get two remote castings and internals for less than the price of just one other that was being advertised. I bought two because I reckoned that if the project failed I still wanted one working remote!

What I hadn't realised was that the remote castings were not parallel but had a slight taper so choosing a place to cut them wasn't as easy as I had imagined. After a bit of jiggling and measuring I choose the best point on each and cut the front off one and the back off the other. A local firm welded the aluminium castings together and I then had to work out the length of the internal actuating rod I need to fabricate to ensure I could select all gears. I cut the two rods and found a suitable piece of tubing to use as a sleeve and had one end welded. I then estimated the length and used a self-tapper to locate the other end. My friendly welder attached the other end. I used the new bushes I had bought, and in theory, all was done, so I removed the old gear change and fitted the new. Marvellous - the gear lever was to hand and each gear could be easily selected.

The new extended remote gear change

 

I then inspected the old remote I had removed and found that the gate that stops reverse being selected without downward pressure on the gear lever had almost disappeared and that when changing down from third to second it was virtually certain that the reverse gear position would be selected.

A not very handy handbrake

I guess there's always a temptation to "make do and mend" when home-building a car, but usually the "mend" bit gets forgotten. One such area is the handbrake on the Brookvale Special. The Herald has the handbrake mounted centrally on the transmission tunnel, and it falls easily to hand as it should. Because the floorpan and steel transmission tunnel is removed in the build of the car, another location has to be found for the handbrake. In the case of my car, this was on the floor in the passenger footwell. To reach the handbrake involved stretching forward as far as possible - not ideal in busy road conditions. The handbrake had to move! And so developed one of those seemingly endless engineering jobs once a suitable location had been decided upon.

Anywhere in the passenger area was out, and the new transmission tunnel wouldn't be strong enough to support the handbrake. Besides, there would be no obvious access to the handbrake cables running to the rear wheels. How about outside the car? Well, not really as the opening driver's door would certainly get in the way. It had to be somewhere inside the car in the drivers area. I finally chose to locate it to the right of the driver adjacent to the panel in front of the door, and beneath the dash. All I had to do was to link the handbrake to the rear cable loop under the car - sounded easy.....

First I had to choose a suitable handbrake as the Herald one was clearly no good. The "new" handbrake had to be mounted in an upright position and the lower part be under the floor. After some research (Ebay) I found an MG Midget handbrake would appear do the job. I bid on the item I had found and won it for just a few pounds - a good start!

Now, the linkage - what would that look like? I would need a transverse shaft across the offside of the car, probably located to the rear to pick up the "Y" cable to the handbrake. This was currently routed to the nearside, but a quick reversal of its supporting metal strap and it was now pointing where I wanted it. Just the linkage to make then. Yes, well, sounds simple doesn't it? However, nothing was square to anything else and the transverse shaft would need to operate freely which necessitated a reasonably accurate  shaft alignment. Oh well, crack on. The shaft was made and supporting brackets shaped and welded. I opted for using tube as bearings (well packed with grease) and had drop c ranks welded to either end. One end of the shaft was attached to the inner chassis rail, and the other end ran through the outer lateral outrigger. I used a length of threaded studding to link the cranks on the shaft to the crank on the bottom of the handbrake as this would give maximum adjustment options in the future.

 The complete assembly on the bench

Once the assembly had been painted and fitted to the chassis rails I made up a plate to cover the hole in the floor, and used a piece of rubber to act as a "draught excluder". Would it work and hold the car? Well, the answer would appear to be "yes"!

The finished handbrake installation

Given the position of the mechanism I've made up a plate to deflect water from the bottom of the handbrake lever, and thoroughly greased all the movable parts.

Dust everywhere

I've always enjoyed trimming car panels, but I've previously had pre-formed door cards, and other pre-formed panels to work from. All I had now were the grotty bits of carpet with all the rigidity of damp lettuce. To make a decent job of the trimming I need hardboard formers that would be screwed to the doors and other interior surfaces. I guess in the end it didn't go too badly but it did involve a lot of planing and filing to get the hardboard into the right shape. After I'd done the door cards and the rear luggage area I became aware of a film of hardboard dust over pretty much everything in the garage. Hmmmm - best separate the workshop area from the car. A large piece of Visqueen, left over from the house build, did the job, and allowed me to benefit from the small fan heater I keep for cold days as it reduced the area being heated. Progress was fair over the next week or so as panel after panel was covered with leathercloth. 

It had been fairly typical to build a transmission from ply in these cars, and my car was no exception having a rather crude ply structure running from bulkhead to luggage space. This had to go, and it didn't take much to remove it. In its place I formed an aluminium tunnel that ran forwards from behind the seats to the gearchange. It was also my plan to build a transmission tunnel over the gear remote change, but more of that later.

I had to fiddle around with the door locks as the slightly greater thickness of the trim panels stopped them shutting fully. However, I was pleased with the end result. Now to move on to other things....

Creature comforts first

Although the car is based on a 1965 Triumph Herald I was determined to make it look as "period" as possible. Apart from the use of Allen headed button bolts on the wing supports and crosshead screws holding the outer panels in place, the obvious starting point was the interior. Both dash and seats had to go - the former a piece of exterior ply supporting the original Herald switchgear and instruments, and the seats being more suited to a 1960s boy racer (black velour bucket seats). The other thing that grated was the use of foam backed cord carpet to cover the floor, doors, and other inner panels. Over the course of many years and several soakings from rain, the carpet had become, how shall we say, dank! And it had stuck to the floor and other wooden parts that it covered.

What should I do with the seating? There were two options really. Either a pair of period individual seats, or as used in the MGs and Morgans of the time (1930s), separate seat bases but a single full-width backrest. A photo of a suitably equipped MG was the decider - two seat squabs and a single back rest it was. 

I consulted my local car upholsterer and he suggested that if I made up some formers, he would trim them to match the photo of the MG seats. A piece of exterior ply was duly sourced and a couple of days later I delivered the three pieces (two seat bases and a back), now varnished, to the trimmer. A six week delivery timescale was promised - an optimistic  view I felt given past experience of the man, who, although very good, was prone to rather extended timescales. I asked him to get enough of the light green leathercloth I had requested to cover the seats and allow me to trim the interior of the car.

I set about stripping out the old carpet and cleaned up the ply floor. With  time on my hands I decided to tackle the engine bay which had become very dirty over the years with some components rusting in the process. The tin of MG engine enamel (maroon) that I had used for the A40 came in very handy, and items such as the dynamo and starter were taken off, derusted and painted.

 Amazingly, and contrary to past experience, the trimmer was as good as his word and the seats were ready as promised. They looked exactly as I had hoped. With the remainder of the leathercloth as well as the seats, I set of home. Now the fun would begin.