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.

What have I bought?

A test drive was going to give me a fair idea of just what needed doing to the car, so a quick blat up the road gave the answer - gear change bloody awful; brakes barely effective, and handbrake position was obscure to say the least. Other than that, it seemed to make the right noises but could hardly be called "racey"! But I didn't buy it to try and beat every other car on the road.

A plan of action was drawn up - firstly, the brakes needed urgent attention, then the gear change needed looking at, and less important the modification of the handbrake, and a re-design of the gear change.

Brakes - I've always given brakes the priority over anything else so I started by stripping the front - calipers, brake discs and hoses. One caliper was seized completely, and the other partially seized; the pads seemed OK, but the hoses had seen better days and the discs were quite worn. I turned my attention to the master cylinder which looked a little careworn. The locating bracket was rusted and the cylinder itself contained not just brake fluid, but water! Never seen that before. I cleaned up the fixing bracket and ordered a new master cylinder, set of discs, pads, new calipers and flexible hoses. Fitting these is a doddle so it wasn't long before the front end was now newly braked. My thoughts turned to the rear. Might as well sort the back end while I'm at it, but an irritating squeak had started to be heard - UJs perhaps. Best sort them out too. And while I'm at it, the dreaded Herald wheel tuck under could be eliminated by the later "swing spring" as used on Spitfires from 1974 onwards. A sizeable order was placed for the swing spring, various suspension bushes, rear brake shoes, rear wheel cylinders, and sundries.

Contrary to the ease of the front brake installation, the rear presented rather more problems. The removal of the old spring was straightforward, but much fettling had to be done to the new spring to get it to locate in the diff recess, and to give clearance for the fixing studs into the diff casing. Eventually, the swing was fitted, and the rest of the suspension refitted too. The new UJs were there usual pigging selves causing much blue air as needle rollers slipped and displaced at regular and irregular intervals. All came good in the end though but the handbrake cable proved to be difficult because it appeared that the rear hubs were now a little further away from the diff than previously.

When the car was lowered from the axle stands it was obvious that there was more positive camber than previously. That mystery still remains but unless the new spring is slightly longer than the old, the only other explanation is that the suspension needs to settle a little. One other possibility comes to mind and that is the suspension was tightened without being loaded. I'll try jacking up each rear wheel having first loosened the suspension nuts/bolts and the tighten them up under load.