Here we go again!

[Reckless Rat]

Happy days!

[Parazine]

An unwelcome visitor

Not much progress in the last week; we had a visitation from an old friend, COVID19. You might have thought that was all over but I'm just now getting over the plague enough to do a few hours in the garage.

Tom, my youngest son and co-owner, came over last week and removed the engine. The engine that was fitted to the car turns over and has some compression but is otherwise unknown, so we have decided to replace it with my spare engine. This is a "cooking" engine and only has a 1 1/8" crankshaft, with a low compression head. I ran it in my Chummy about 10 years ago for a couple or three years and it went OK, albeit rather noisily.

   


Tom has taken the head off and is removing the valves before grinding them in and de-coking. We'll take the sump off and check all is well in the bottom end before running it up on the test bed and then fitting.

   

A problem that has come to light is that the front spring is broken, a replacement will have to be found:

   

At the other end of the car, the rotten, near-side, under seat floor panel has been removed and a replacement fabricated. I hate fabrication work as I don't have the myriad of special tools necessary or the requisite experience/skills. I'm in the process of riveting the panel in before welding the join; the welding is the easy bit! I'm hoping the rot in the off-side floor can be locally patched but the panel is very thin, so we'll have to see.

   

   

Ian Tillman at Oxfordshire Sevens is making several repair sections; I'm going to adapt his RM saloon spare wheel mounting to fit the Chummy for a stronger solution. He also supplies the number plate bar brackets, which have all but corroded away.


  SWB Box Spare.jpg (Size: 45.89 KB / Downloads: 130)


  Number plate brackets.jpg (Size: 31.08 KB / Downloads: 128)

[Ivor Hawkins]

Excellent progress, especially in this weather!