New member hello & APD rebuild

[Alan]

A bit like this Alan

Not like that at all it was the rear of no4 that broke.

[Goldnrust]

Wow, I didn't realise it had been nearly 2 months since an update, where does the time go! Progress on the Austin has slowed down a bit here, with the realities of life with young children kicking in a little and when I do get a free hour or two I'm less inclined to be in the shed now the spring is here and the suns out, tempting me to wake some of my other vehicles from their winter slumbers. Not that I want to sound ungrateful, I feel very fortunate to have a selection of vehicles to ride/drive! 

Anyway, let's have a bit of a round up of Austin progress  .

First, before I get distracted by the interesting engine bits, I finished off the brakes. As I believe I mentioned before, my car has a bodenex conversion fitted. I believe the original kits would have required individual front brake cable adjustment, but mine looks to have a home made equaliser/balancer fitted. It appeared to work ok, but it looked a little light duty to me and wasn't especially pretty. I also found that some of the threads on the boden cables were quite badly corroded, and I almost gave up on the system all together. After a bit of thought, instead I decided to remake the equaliser, with a different offset so that I would pick up on a different part of the cable where the threads were still in good condition. 





The cables were also full of thick old grease, melting all of that out and re-oiling with a nice light oil, has made a world of difference to how smoothly they work. Not a fun task though! Anyway, with that done the brakes now function from handbrake and pedal, so that's nice. I need to do final adjustment but that can wait for now.

Back to the engine! After the previous posts I had dropped the crank and cylinder head off at a local machine shop. Thankfully the good news is that the crank passed its crack test and has come back to me with polished bearing journals and looking lovely and clean. The cylinder head cleaned up nicely with a light skim and also looks much better.



With that little confidence boost, I have decided to risk it on the original crank, throw the pistons I have back in it and do some of the cheap/free power modifications to the engine while it's apart. If it doesn't run right I'll just have to pull it out and spend some more money, but aside from a few lost hours there's no harm in trying.

It seems I tripped over while carrying my die grinder past the cylinder block and manifold...



The valve train was all stripped and cleaned out, valves lapped and reinstalled with new single springs and new 3/4" radius cam followers fitted.



It's a good job that I don't think this engine had ran munch since it was last overhauled, as when cleaning out the tappet area I founds lots of big flakes of black paint.



As far as I can tell, a previous owner must have painted the cylinder block with the tappet cover off and simply painted right over the valve springs! It was a good number of hours with a wire brush in there getting all that mess out! I'm guessing chunks like that would easily block an oil jet!

Speaking of oil jets... one of my next tasks was to give the crank case a really good deep clean to get as much of the old oil and carbon build up out. I didn't get any pictures but it was a messy long old job. I don't think it was me, but after I'd cleaned the oil galleries I could see that the top of the oil jets were badly damaged. I presume a wire brush attachment has been run down there a bit aggressively at some point? I guess they would flow ok, but for peace of mind I fitted some new ones!



Lastly on the modifications I tapped my front cam bearing to 5/16BSF, and turned down a bolt to locate it.

[Goldnrust]

After that it was time to throw it together!



I've been a bit lax with picture taking at this stage, and I apologise for that. It kind of fell by the wayside as I focused on getting things done in the limited time I had. But I continued putting what I could together on the engine. The starting handle arrangement needs work, as do all the other ancillaries, but I was aiming towards just getting the basic block and gearbox back in the car, which would gain me a lot of space in my shed to then work on the other parts.

I thought I was ready to install the engine, but when I bolted out up to the gearbox it was quickly obvious I had no clutch. Taking it back apart I could see two issues. Firstly the clutch levers were sitting much too low and secondly they were quite uneven heights. The second issue became obvious as I stripped the clutch down further and could see that one of the friction discs was damaged, causing it to not sit flat. That was easy enough to fix. The levers sitting too low puzzled me though. After some thought, it looks to me like my pressure plate has been previously 'repaired' for wear on the fulcrum of the clutch levers.



The pins that have been drive/threaded in don't seem to want to come out without a fight and aren't quite thick enough to lift the levers to the sort of working heights mentioned in the, very helpful, article on the Dorset A7 club website that described the clutch parts in detail. I decided to make some little shims to pack out the fulcrum part, and tack welded them into place. I've now got a working clutch! Boy, that pedal travel is short isn't it! I've daily driven engines with light weight flywheels and unsprung  racing type clutches and the clutch on my 60s Fiat 500 is very short throw with a narrow bite point, but I can tell this is going to be a whole other level! haha.

A friend dropped our shared engine crane over, and I was all set to drop it in place... till I realised at the last moment that once of the new engine studs I'd bought didn't fit in the chassis! The car came with not engine mounting hardware, and I hadn't noticed that someone had stripped one of the front mounting stud threads out of the chassis and partially drilled it out. Luck was on my side that night though, I only had one piece of steel hex bar in ,and it just happened to be 3/4" which is exactly what I need to turn up a stepped stud. I tapped the chassis 7/16BSF and made the new stud to match. My homemade one closest to camera against the shop bought stud.



And so finally, several hours after I started that 'simple' job of lifting the engine in, I had lowered it down into place.



And that about brings us up to date. As you can see the engine is far from finished, but it's a nice moral boost to have it in there and now I have some space to dig into the ancillaries.

[Ivor Hawkins]

Well done! Those subtle engine mods should add a bit of sparkle, you are making great progress.

[Goldnrust]

Well gents, it's been a busy summer and it's only now the beginning of autumn is here and the nights are drawing in that I'm finding myself back browsing the forums.

I have not been idle though and, whilst at times I have not documented it very well with photos, I have actually made a lot of progress with the car.

Picking up roughly where we left off, the engine was in but still needed quite a bit of assembly



The cylinder head should be been a nice easy part to drop in place, but here I ran into the first of the inevitable many problems! haha. The later style head I was using had the water outlet for the radiator in a different place, and I had not realised this meant I needed to change two of the head studs for longer ones. Only now the engine was fully assembled and in the car, so no surprises that the studs were well sized in the block and not coming out without a fight and a risk of breaking them. As I was using a cheap reproduction water next, I did decided to try a bodge. I drilled out the stud holes in the neck, and turned up a couple of sleeve nuts, which would reach down through the water next and thread on to the stock head studs. All seemed to tighten up ok, no signs of leakage, so I think thats a success.



In the previous picture you can also see I solved the issue of the front axle location. After immobilising the one end of the front damper, as described previously in the thread, I had realised that this would only give me the correct lateral axle location if the damper was horizontal at ride height, as it is on a sports style dropped from axle. So for now, I made a couple of brass spacers to space the central pivot of the damper down.

I am also preparing to fit the front cover / starting handle assembly to the engine here. The ramps inside the front cover that locate the starting handle had worn down after many years of use, so I built them back up with a little weld and now the handle slots into it's resting place nicely.

The carb is also installed. It didn't look too bad inside, so I gave it just a quick once over (foreshadowing here...) before bolting it back on to the engine.

The dynamo and distributer assembly was one of the last major engine components for me to investigate.



The dynamo itself looked in fairly good condition, the commutator not too worn and fresh looking brushes in it. The rear of the dynamo runs on a bronze bush, which looked in good condition, but the front has a ball bearing. I do not know if it was as a result of the flood water or whether it was just condensation from sitting for many years, but this front bearing was rusted solid. I think it must have been more than the flood water, given the depth of corrosion and how solidly locked it was. I was a bit worried when I saw some of the usual a7 suppliers either out of stock, or not selling the bearing, fearing that it would be an unusual imperial size. But when I actually took a pair of callipers to it, I was surprised to find it metric and one of the very easy available standard sizes.

The distributer was showing some wear, especially to the centrifugal advance mechanism.



I did what I could, cleaning up and taking some slack out of the springs, but short of remaking mechanism from scratch there's little I could do to deal with the wear. In the short term it will work, but the centrifugal advance is likely to be off so at a minimum I need to time the engine with a timing light to check the max advance, rather then relying on static timing. Long term I could look into making. the parts I need, or converting to the older manual advance control. Presuming it's like my BSA, with modern high octane fuel, it's not that much of a hardship to essentially start it at one advance setting, retard it to idle smoothly, then adjust the lever to max advance when puling away and leave it there till next time you need to idle?

Anyway, I popped the dynamo/distributor assembly back in place and went about roughly timing it. I used the old 'finger over the spark plug hole', to feel for compression to know make sure I was putting the engine to TDC on compression stroke rather than setting the timing 180 degrees out, when I noticed something worrying... there was no compression.

After a bit of head scratching I concluded that the cam timing was way out. Whilst it's a very simple car, stripping it back down to get to the cam gear was still not a 5minute job. When I got there, I found the error. It seems I'd mistaken a dent/scratch on the crank gear for a timing mark. Looking again I found another faint mark that I think was the original timing mark ,and timing the cam based off this I now had valves moving at the right time, and I was getting compression now. It's never simple is it!

With that I could reassemble it all, put the radiator in, and run a few wires and we were getting very close to a start attempt!

---

I’ve done this enough times now, that I’m well aware that getting the car started is only the start of the journey. Full rebuilds like this inevitably have a bunch of teething problems to solve, but it is a big moral boost to hear the engine run and see it move under its own power for the first time.

So I connected up the battery, primed the fuel pump (why do more mechanical pumps not have this feature, saves a lot of cranking the engine over waiting for it to pump fuel) and pulled the starter knob. It span over nicely for a couple of seconds then started popped out of the carb. As soon as it backfired like that the penny dropped… in my haste to reassemble the engine after sorting the cam timing, I hadn’t checked which TDC I’d set the ignition timing to. As a short term fix I rearranged the plug leads and then pulled the starter again…

https://youtu.be/Q07LlkWgiWk

Success! It fired up, sounded lovely and sweet. Only it quickly stalled out, the choke slide in a little with the vibration of the engine running (one of those teething problems to solve). If you watch the video closely you’ll see that was a blessing in disguise. Some months ago, while rebuilding the engine, I’d realised I was missing one of the small bolts that cap the main oil gallery allowing access to clean the oil jets. I’d ordered the correct bolt, but never got round to fitting it. Obvious as soon as the engine made proper oil pressure the bit of tape I’d put over the hole popped off and I’d pumped around a pint of oil out onto the drive! No harm done thankfully and was fixed in a couple of seconds.

Right, so time to see if it would move, and it’s at this point I remembered that I’d never got round to hooking the prop up to the gearbox. Here I ran into a weird problem, the prop wouldn’t clear the handbrake mechanism.



After a bit of head scratching, and as usual helpful reading on one of the many Austin 7 websites I was able to see that somewhere in it’s life, my car has been fitted with a later prop shaft using universal joints instead of fabric couplings, and this can cause the UJ to hit the handbrake. The solution was to drill out the rivets holding the handbrake to the chassis, and fit smaller spacers between the handbrake bracket and the chassis, moving the mechanism those crucial few millimetres out of the way of the prop.



It’s a strange problem, I can only presume the previous owner ‘upgraded’ the drive shaft as part of the stalled restoration, but didn’t get far enough through there restoration to realise that it would interfere with the handbrake. Anyway, with that sorted I could try and see if it moved!

It didn’t, the clutch wasn’t disengaging. There is a lot more access to see what’s going on inside a 7 clutch than in most cars with the covers removed it was pretty simple to see that the clutch pedal juts needed adjusting on the cross shaft to bring the release bearing forward. A simple adjustment and now I had a clutch! I was surprised at how heavy it was, given the low power and small engine. I’ve used heavier clutches but I have to admit I was expecting something feather weight! Anyway, now I could see if it moved….

https://youtube.com/shorts/Bmv8ZWcHnBU?feature=share

And it did! That’s a passing of a test with flying colours for all the basic mechanicals. The engine was running sweetly enough, I was able to test gears 1-3 + reverse and all was ok, no nasty suspension noises, steering seemed to work and the brakes sort of did something… Excellent. Still a fair amount to do though, this was back in mid July, and it would be another 6 weeks before I could take it out of the road for real.

[Goldnrust]

So clearly there were a lot of other bits of car still to go back together! I started by finishing off the bodywork. You’ll have seen I put the wings on earlier, but they were only loosely attached as I knew I’d need to line them up with the running boards. The car came with a set of either homemade or poor reproduction running boards . They were held in place with just a couple of small pop rivets and weren’t a great fit. I fiddled about for a while, but clearly things weren’t going otherwise line up right without an angle grinder and a welder. Once I’d extended the boards around an inch, and taken a little out of the depth at the rear, then they were fitting up nicely to the wings and I could tighten it all down.

That left the bonnet. I really like the patina on the bonnet and it kind of makes me wish the rest of the body still looked the same, presuming the bonnet is actually the original, we’ll come to that in a moment. The bonnet support that came with the car was clearly wrong, it’s about 2-3” too long, maybe it’s for a Ruby? Still, nothing that can’t be fixed with that same angle grinder and welder. A few minutes later I could mount the bonnet properly for the first time, and it’s starting to look like a car!





Back to paint, you’ll see in the picture of the bonnet stay that there is some dark green showing through on the grill surround. I can also see, through paint chips and the underside of panels, the same dark green on all 4 wings, the body and the gearbox cover panels. I’m aware that these 2 seat tourers were known sometimes as ‘military tourers’ and many were sold to the army, but mine is lacking any of the other details (the wheels with lifting points, holes for where the rifle mount would go, etc) that make look as if it had been owned by the military. Maybe it was painted as a replica at some point? Maybe some of the bolt on parts were taken from a military tourer at some point in the past? Who knows! Interesting though.

So maybe the body wouldn’t have had the red with a nice patina, maybe it was green before the restoration was started? I’m not a big military aficionado, so I’m quite happy with it red and civilian looking whatever it’s history.

Next on the steps towards roadworthiness, was lighting. I had a set of original headlights with it. I’ve seen some models like mine with wing mounted side lights, otherwise without. My wings are drilled for them, but the headlights have sidelights built into them? So for now I just wired up the headlights.



The picture was taken with the original style 35w tungsten bulbs in place. Having driven recently on 35w bulbs in my 1965 Fiat 500, I was confident that these would not be bright enough to deal with modern traffic. I bought a pair of LED bulbs, similar to those I’d used successfully on my BSA to sign the brightness up to modern standards whilst also taking a bit of load off the dynamo.

On the rear lighting, the car came with nothing. I could see nothing for sale on the usual websites and looking at pictures online, it looked like the original numberplate and light panel was pretty simple, so I knocked one up out of some steel I had in the shed. I also got some cheap reproduction rear lights.



As you can see, I’ve got indicators there. I’m presuming this car would have had trafficators? On modern roads I’d like a nice big flashing indicator please! It was easy enough to wire the original steering wheel switch through a flasher relay and into the indicators.

I bought a set of 4 new tyres and tubes. The  3 of the tyres it came on didn’t look ‘too bad’, but the date code was a 3 digit, so they were 25 years old at minimum, the 4th was ways older than that and hard as plastic, so new rubber was clearly the right choice.

The door handles that came with the car were a mix of 1934 original parts, some locking handles which I think are probably from a Ruby? And some bits missing. I spent a couple of nights on the lathe making up some spacers and bits and bobs to make the parts I have vaguely work together. They work nicely enough, though currently only work from the outside. With no side windows or roof, it’s not a problem to reach outside to open the door, but I will need to revisit them in the future. I also now realise I’ve got the handles in back to front, though push down to open seemed more natural to me? Another job for the future.

Which only really left the interior to sort out. As mentioned back in the first post, the car didn’t come with much, and what was there was soaked in flood water. I had 2 seats and some bare plywood door cards. The dooryards had immediately started going some strange white mould, so went in the bin. The seats I left to dry, knowing that one day I would have to deal with them!

When the day came,  I decided my best option with the seats was to carefully unpick the covers, which were stapled and pinned in place, from the seats with the intention of washing them and reusing them, as they were in overall pretty good condition. It was a bit tricky but I managed it. The amount of brown that came out of the covers was truly concerning, but after half an hour of scrubbing and rinsing the water in the bucket was finally starting to stay clear!

Under the covers I found a mixture of, what I presume was original, horse hair and cotton wadding and some random chunks of seat foam that had clearly been cut from another car seat. All of it was mouldy and no use to anyone. So I stripped that all off, painted the metal parts of the seat pans and treated the wood frames with a mould killer. I had some upholstery foam left from a previous restoration so layered that up before stapling the covers back on.



There’s a bit of a gap between the seat base and the back, it’s almost like the seat base is a bit short? Possibly another sign of parts mix and match? You don’t feel it when sat in the seat though, and they’ve come out pretty comfy.

The rest of the interior can stay as bare metal for the rest of the autumn. I don’t plan on taking this out in the salt, so there will come a time to wrap it up for winter and at that point a bit of light interior work, ,making some door cards and bits and bobs will probably be quite pleasant.

Before the first real drive, I thought the old girl deserved a quick wash.

[Goldnrust]

And with that, I was all ready to load some tools up in the back and hit the road for a first tentative test run. A nice late night trundle around town in the last couple of days of August. It feels a bit of an odd choice to head out into the night in an unknown classic car but it was the time I had available and also the real positive is how quiet the roads are. Much easier for me to be getting used to a car like this with no-one around to point and laugh at my mistakes! Haha.





I didn’t get far that night. Once I got going more than a low speed trundle up the access road behind my house, it was clear that the carb wasn’t happy, it would stall out quite a bit and anything much over half throttle had it bogging. It was also clear that the dynamo wasn’t charging right. Still I managed a few laps of the town and got the engine properly up to temp and gave it a reasonable shake down.

Driving it was much as I imagined, a bit of a learning curve with how it responded. This is all coming from being used to a 1960s micro car, not comparing it to a modern. It’s raw and noisy and engaging the whole time. The gearshift action with the big long bent shifter is great, though the synchros are not so great, haha. Thankfully I’m used to a crash box, so I tend to double de-clutch and rev match the downshifts without thinking. The whole thing feels pretty eager and nippy though gears 1-3 but there’s a big gap from 3-4 and with the engine not running right on that first run that was even more apparent as I couldn’t rev 3rd out high enough really to get into the power of 4th.

The brakes took some acclimatisation, but again thanks to being used to classic motorbike cable drums they didn’t come as that much of a shock. A few drives in and I wasn’t really thinking about it any more.

The steering is very quick ratio, and coupled with a very lively chassis that I can feel moving about with the road constantly makes for a fun drive at town speed and something rather intense at higher speeds. Along with the carb and dynamo I also identified that the rear dampers were way underdamped as the rear was bouncing all over the place. No different to anything I’ve seen on many 7s in videos online, but I would still rather it was a little more controlled!

With lots to think about I headed home and tucked the car back up for the night. Just as I was pulling up near home the headlights went out, but came back when I switched them off and on again, possibly something tripping an internal safety on the LEDs? Another thing for the list.

A few days later I was ready to start working through the snagging list. The first thing on the list was the carb. I pull it off and went through it again more thoroughly. I did find a little gunk, but nothing that seemed that drastic. I did wonder though, as these carbs don’t have a gasket between the bowl and the main carb body, whether the metal to metal join was not as well sealed after 90 years as it would have been from new? So I reassembled it with a light smear of RTV. I fired it up on the drive and the difference was immediately obvious. Out for a test drive it was pulling better, but I still felt maybe a bit flat towards the top of the rev range.

The dynamo took a bit more working out. I spent a fair amount of time investigating the cut out and other wiring, only to convince myself that it was working as it should. Finally while reading up on the dynamos late one night I found the problem. I had no idea the 3rd brush was adjustable. You simply remove the cover and push the brush with your hand, which slides backwards and forwards. I had no idea about this, so when I’d rebuilt the dynamo I’d clearly managed to push it all the way to the lowest charging setting by accident. One quick prod later and it was charging, over charging in fact! I left the cover off and stopping a few times to tweak it backwards and forwards I’ve now got a nice 3-4 amp charge with all the lights running.



Rear suspension bounciness was next on the list. I read on one of the Austin 7 club websites about fitting a secondary spring to the rear friction damper assembly to up the clamping force. A rummage about in my shed dug out a spare pair of Fiat 500 inner valve springs that were about the right size for the job. With the adjustment bolts tightened all the way up it’s certainly more damped than it was. Pushing down on the rear suspesnino previously resulted in in springing back up, down, up then down to rest. Whereas now it just returns up to its rest position. Out of the road it’s taken some of the wildness out of the backend, a good improvement. I do wonder if it’s going to be a good long term solution or not. I wonder if there’s a better friction material option instead of wooden discs? My BSA uses a ring of materials more akin to clutch or brake pad for its friction damper assembly on the forks. Maybe something like that would require less extreme spring pressure? The front damper is fine with its wood discs, clearly the sort of big star washers that hold it together can apply a lot more force than the rear springs do. Another alternative might be to see if I can use those on the rear dampers also?



With some of these problems solved I did some more test runs. I decided to weld a bung into the exhaust so that I can run my wideband lambda sensor to check on the carb. It’s 21st century gauge looks a bit out of place in the 7, but it is only temporary while I setup the carb!



Early results show that the car is actually petty good now. It’s a touch rich at idle, 12;1 AFR, which doesn’t seem to want to tune out with the idle mixture screw, but running a nice mid 14:1 in cursing and 13.5:! At full throttle. So could be a fraction richer at full throttle, but nothing that’s going other than cause the engine to feel flat / down on power. I wonder if that flat feeling at the top end is because my engine mods want a bit more breathing than the standard carb can supply? I’’ll happily swap it out for an HS2 SU, but I’d like to get a bit more driving in before the weather turns so I’ll save that for winter time. For now I do at leats know the original carb is giving me ball park correct air fuel ratios and I’m not about to melt a piston or anything if I keep my foot to the floor!

The main problem I’m still facing before I can put many more miles on the car is the headlights going out randomly. They mostly come back on if I switch them off and on again, and if I run them with the engine off for a while they stay on more happily. For that reason I’m wondering if it’s an EMF issue from the ignition system. I’m currently grounding them to the bodywork at the front of the car, so next time I’m out working on the car I think I’ll try running a ground all the way back to battery to see if that helps. I could always go back to incandescent bulbs, but I’m using these same bulbs in my bikes with no issue so I’d rather perseveer and see if I can solve the issue.

I’m hoping, if the weather is ok, to take the 7 on the 40 mile trip down to Prescott for the last round of the VSCC hillclimb championship in a couple of weekends time. Fingers crossed I have got through the teething problems by then! I’ve not made it more than 5 miles from home yet! Haha.

[Mike Costigan]

BKD is a Buckinghamshire registration, so it's unlikely your car was a military version (not all military models came with the special wheels or special Army features such as the rifle mount you mention - many were issued for other services - RAF and Navy, Civil Defence and Auxiliary Fire Service, but they all would have the contract details on a brass plate on the dashboard, and would not have been painted Army khaki. APDs like yours would have had separate sidelights on the front wings, and box trafficators mounted on the scuttle.

[Howard Wright]

Hi Goldenrust

May I congratulate you on the superb progress reports and progress that you have made. Where do you find the time? Well done

Howard

[John Cornforth]

Hi

I continue to be impressed by your fabrication and problem solving skills, I envy those with lathes and welders who know how to use them. Most folks take many years to undo the accumulated bodges of decades of previous ownership !

Bowdenex conversions were once very popular. All they really do is eliminate the "anti-servo" effect of front axle twist which otherwise detracts from braking when going forwards (and assists braking when in reverse, not very useful). Incidentally "Bowdenex" was the trade name for a superior type of Bowden cable that used square section wire for the outer sheath, this being less compressible than round wire.

The DK4 was the first design of auto-advance distributor by Lucas. The mechanism is quite ingenious, but rather sensitive to small amounts of wear. The main effect is for the idle timing to become a bit sloppy, so best to set up at higher RPM. These engines will never pink on modern fuel, but can get harsh if too much advance is used.

With regard to the LED headlights, it would not surprise me if conducted interference from the standard unsupressed ignition system is upsetting them. Resistor plug caps would be worth a try, but they look a bit non-period. Resistor type spark plugs seem to work just as well, so maybe you could try some to prove a point, the A7 isn't that fussy on plug choice in the short term. I use NGK BR6HIX iridium types, which work really well and give a rock steady idle, however they are expensive so not for everyone. When buying plugs beware fakes which are very prevalent.