For those interested in old cars.

[PhilJ W]

...just the odd electrical earthing problem?

Having once owned a Reliant Kitten van I can attest to that.

[runs as required]

Anybody recognise that fascinating central London location from the statue? There looks to be a Wren City church in the background.

And might that winter snow be 1962/63 ?

 

dh

[PatB]

A few more old mag' covers from the classic days and some ad's which i always find the most interesting bits to read, with all those period useful and more than likely useless? ad-ons. 

 2011-01-15 21.20.08.jpg

 2011-01-15 21.18.39.jpg

 2011-01-15 21.21.32.jpg

 2011-01-15 21.23.04.jpg

 2011-01-15 21.25.32.jpg

 

Well, there's a blast from the past . Way back in the late 70s I got access to a big pile of Practical Motorist mags (and a few copies of Car Mechanics, which seemed much more modern and exciting) from the 1950s and very early 60s. I actually remember that 1957 cover (and the ads, including the one with the Southern EMU). It all seemed impossibly exotic and ancient, although I'm now slightly disturbed to realise that, at the time, even the oldest (1954) was only about 25 years old which, now, doesn't seem very long at all .

 

And, yes, even at the tender age of 11 or 12 I was well aware that many (most?) of the gadgets and potions were snake oil. Mind you, that H2O Bomb thing is interesting. I remember, up until the near universal adoption of EFI systems, water injection got a regular run every few years as an anti-detonation measure for high compression ratios or turbo installations, even in the serious literature. Certainly all the old-tech carburetted engines I've sampled have always gone noticeably better in damp weather.

 

 

'Radweld' was another wonderment full of promises such as " Say good bye to leaking rads with our new, specially developed sealant ( as also used in outer space installations ) Just pour in the sachet, allow the water to circulate, rad leak cured, as simple as that.

 However, in the most likely and alarming event that it also seals up all the other waterways at the same time, then consult your nearest scrap dealer. 

 

Also we mustn't forget the 'Home tyre retread kit' where you was supplied with something that looked suspiciously like a wood carving chisel. a tissue paper wrap round pattern ( several to choose from suitable for everyday mud and Formula one ) some kind of hot iron and a mask to block out the poisonous fumes and first degree burns.

 

Oh. Did I forget the ' World leading spray your own car kit in the comfort of your garage or drive if the garage is full of other totally useless  Exchange & Mart sellouts ' ?

 

Well, it came marketed as ' Our newly developed spray gun developed especially with you, the home sprayer and perfectionist  in mind and and although at first glance you could be forgiven for confusing it with an Insect Flit Gun (which it was )  you can actually achieve a factory finish in little more than an hour ( if it doesn't rain but then there's always next Sunday )  AND ! - it even sprays emulsion something that achieves the kind of finish that Fords at Dagenham have strived for  for years and still are!' 

 

 Oh yes, the weekend motorist never had it so good - as long as he never left home

 

My mother's Morris Oxford was a regular recipient of Radweld. In the end the block, head and radiator must have been solid blocks of the ghastly stuff (I remember it being reminiscent of fossilized horse manure in its natural state). Fortunately the BMC B-Series engine is quite happy to run without coolant or circulating oil and so it remained capable of wheezing along until the rest of the car turned into a small pile of brown dust .

 

I also once bought the remains of an Austin 7 which came with a wide variety of ancient tyres, at least some of which appeared to have been retreaded by exactly the method you describe.

 

Mind you, a mate, back in the 1990s, resprayed his motorcycle using a flit-gun and, given an awful lot of effort with wet-and-dry and several cans of T-Cut, it actually looked OK. Might have been easier to borrow or rent a proper spray gun and compressor though . 

Edited March 2, 2018 by PatB

[PatB]

Anybody recognise that fascinating central London location from the statue? There looks to be a Wren City church in the background.

And might that winter snow be 1962/63 ?

 

dh

 

I don't really know London, but the building looks suspiciously like I remember Australia House looking. As for the date, there seem to be rather a lot of pre-war vehicles in the photo for it to be post-MOT introduction (1960), but I could easily be wrong.

[chriswright03]

Anybody recognise that fascinating central London location from the statue? There looks to be a Wren City church in the background.

And might that winter snow be 1962/63 ?

 

dh

I doubt the year only because wasn't that the really bad one?  I seem to recall walking to school in it and it being over the top of my wellies and I was too young for long trousers.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bT5zlj_usY

[w124bob]

And on a topical note, Leith Street, Edinburgh.

0_street_views_-_leith_street_1956_traffic_in_the_snow.jpg

Ipswich

image.jpg

Central London with another Bond MkC

gettyimages-2661616.jpg

Having searched London statues I've come up with the Gladstone Memorial in the Strand

[shortliner]

Skefco

 

I do believe they manufactured ball bearings and were located in Sundon Park, Luton where I lived for a while and fell in love with my Landlady.

 

She didn't think much of me though so I went out with the Hairdresser's daughter instead  who didn't love me either...Until I  borrowed a hundred quid from the Midland bank, Dunstable and bought a Morris 8 series E.

That's the place , and yes, they did manufacture ball bearings - we did a lot of work in and around Luton, and, whilst dismantling a hat-factory, we managed to very successfully black out all the shops in the middle of town one Christmas Eve when the Drott digger ran over a cable that the leccy board had supposedly cut off, and blew up a power transformer! Talk about popular!

[Guest]

Having searched London statues I've come up with the Gladstone Memorial in the Strand

gladstone1.jpg

 

If you search for the original image on Getty, it leads to a larger image with the caption...

"Snow-covered cars parked near Aldwych and the Strand, London"

...and it's dated 1st January 1955.

 

Edit: I couldn't dispute the date, it certainly looked earlier than the 1960s to me.

Edited March 2, 2018 by Pete 75C

[runs as required]

What an enjoyable site RMweb is to sneak off upstairs and click on to.

Thank you so much for follow-ups on those excellent snow scenes. Of course you were right Austin Tens and Bond Minicars had disappeared by that bad winter of early '63.

We had a couple of epic rides up to mum in Law's gaunt cold house in Buxton from St Pancras (via Millers Dale) on Friday afternoons during that snowy Jan - nothing seemed to stop stalwart Jubillees ploughing through those snowy Miidlands landscapes

 

Incidentally (OT for this thread) that Edinburgh Daimler bus has more than a look of Brum about its bodywork - I thought at first it might have been Coventry.

dh

Edited March 2, 2018 by runs as required

[allan downes]

That's the place , and yes, they did manufacture ball bearings - we did a lot of work in and around Luton, and, whilst dismantling a hat-factory, we managed to very successfully black out all the shops in the middle of town one Christmas Eve when the Drott digger ran over a cable that the leccy board had supposedly cut off, and blew up a power transformer! Talk about popular!

 

Incidentally. did you know of Hubbards factory bottom end of castle hill ?

 

Well I rented a large area of that place back in the late 50's to run a fleet of these in a car hire business venture. Same colour as well.

 

[alastairq]

In the Edinburgh photo, I note the Ford Consul [?] on the right....fitted with what I presume would be Firestone Town & Country tyres?  [Would the piccy be too early for Dunlop Weathermasters?]....Proper wellies for wintery conditions!

 

Just imagine trying to fit such mud monsters to one's 2 year old BMW these days?  Or, even, thinking about it?

 

CArs were proper cars in those days.....

[allan downes]

Well, there's a blast from the past . Way back in the late 70s I got access to a big pile of Practical Motorist mags (and a few copies of Car Mechanics, which seemed much more modern and exciting) from the 1950s and very early 60s. I actually remember that 1957 cover (and the ads, including the one with the Southern EMU). It all seemed impossibly exotic and ancient, although I'm now slightly disturbed to realise that, at the time, even the oldest (1954) was only about 25 years old which, now, doesn't seem very long at all .

 

And, yes, even at the tender age of 11 or 12 I was well aware that many (most?) of the gadgets and potions were snake oil. Mind you, that H2O Bomb thing is interesting. I remember, up until the near universal adoption of EFI systems, water injection got a regular run every few years as an anti-detonation measure for high compression ratios or turbo installations, even in the serious literature. Certainly all the old-tech carburetted engines I've sampled have always gone noticeably better in damp weather.

 

 

My mother's Morris Oxford was a regular recipient of Radweld. In the end the block, head and radiator must have been solid blocks of the ghastly stuff (I remember it being reminiscent of fossilized horse manure in its natural state). Fortunately the BMC B-Series engine is quite happy to run without coolant or circulating oil and so it remained capable of wheezing along until the rest of the car turned into a small pile of brown dust .

 

I also once bought the remains of an Austin 7 which came with a wide variety of ancient tyres, at least some of which appeared to have been retreaded by exactly the method you describe.

 

Mind you, a mate, back in the 1990s, resprayed his motorcycle using a flit-gun and, given an awful lot of effort with wet-and-dry and several cans of T-Cut, it actually looked OK. Might have been easier to borrow or rent a proper spray gun and compressor though . 

 

They were certainly wonderful days alright where if you owned a car, any car, you became more involved with it than we do today where the Exchange & Mart and all its advanced technology regarding car repairs ensured that come the Weekend, more car bonnets stayed open than stayed closed as you wore out spanner after spanner in one turn from your 1,000 piece socket set with free screwdriver thrown in.

 

A set of car ramps (with instructions showing a car tipped on its side with a large red cross  drawn through it )  guaranteed many hours of misery as each collapsed like a  deck of card under the weight of anything heavier than  one corner of the car but since there wasn't many cars that could make the climb from a standing start most home mechanics used a bottle jack that was designed to go either straight  through the sills, sump or diff casing - or simply just refused to lift at all.

 

Of course, we're talking of an era when Power-Bumps were all the rage which, for the most part, were manufactured in the garden shed from spent bean cans riveted onto the bonnet. If you didn't have a rivet gun - as most didn't - then E&M came to the rescue with many enticing offers such as the triple multi-purpose rivet gun, invisible power-bump adhesive - that, for the technically minded, being double  sided tape with the option of the economy pack which was only sticky on one side and, more  often than not, not sticky on the other side either - or, if you could afford it, the complete power-bump kit which included all the above  with all the same results. A hideous hump on your bonnet that did absolutely nothing other than block your foreward view, make other boy racers turn green with envy and devalue your car in one fell swoop.

 

"Ground Effects" in my day were fashioned out of corrugated cardboard, stuck on with cellutope and came off at the first hint of rain ( or a bump ) Today of course, things have advanced to such a stage where full, all round ground effects treatment could easily cost you ten times what your car is worth and still fall off.

 

So. What do you say ? Let's bring the fun back in owning a car and watch it depriciate  as fast as a new three piece suit !

Edited March 2, 2018 by allan downes

[shortliner]

Incidentally. did you know of Hubbards factory bottom end of castle hill ?

 

Well I rented a large area of that place back in the late 50's to run a fleet of these in a car hire business venture. Same colour as well.

 

I don't remember it Allan, but It is an awful long time ago I do remember taking a large house down on Castle Hill - where one of the lads did the famous cartoon trick of sawing a beam off a dormer window that he was sitting on at the time - we had some "right ones" working for us back then! - There is a little more to the original story though. The initial "pop" simply blacked out everywhere - and the leccy board installed a new fuse or whatever in the substation transformer - this was a couple of days earlier All was working again and they sent a man to do the job they thought they had done previously and cut off the wiggly amps. Workman  - complete with flat cap and a tab permanently attached to his lower lip, arrived on his bike with an old army knapsack full of tools, put on his overalls and lifted a slab in the pavement, dug down about two feet and proceeded to find the cable and sever it..  He then disappeared into a basement cellar with a Hacksaw saying he'd remove the cables inside the buildings. A certain amount of discombobulation from our lads 'cos "cables" were our perk and paid for our breakfasts.. However he went to work and about 5 minutes later there was a huge BANG, and a flash and a cloud of smoke from the cellar, and all the shop lights surrounding the site went out , and the transformer sat and smoked. Workman came staggering out of basement with no cap, a fringe of burned hair around his head wher his capband had been, and clutching a wooden hacksaw handle  in his hand. Unbeknownst to  him, (and apparently to the leccy board either), about 2 feet below the AC cable he had found and cut, there was another cable - This time DC - to power the removed machinery from the hat factory - and that was what he had found! The hard way! - they took him to hospital and he was fine -  We all went home and worked at different sites for a couple of weeks while the leccy board got the juice cut off properly!

[johnlambert]

Facel Vega.

 

A guy once towed on of these into our garage asking us if we'd like it as he needed the room.

 

It was in need of some serious spanner work, never did get get it and we scrapped it a few months later.

 

 

 

Oh dear, who thought that bodywork was a good idea?

[Horsetan]

Oh dear, who thought that bodywork was a good idea?

That one seems to have been substantially modified, especially the headlamp arrangement.

[runs as required]

Stirling Moss (at one time an enthusiastic FV owner) was not frightened of having stylistic changes made to his cars

dh

[Rugd1022]

That one seems to have been substantially modified, especially the headlamp arrangement.

 

It's a Zagato job, not their finest effort it has to be said!

[runs as required]

Interesting to read Allan's post about having a fleet of these as hire cars.

I can remember Luton being universally trashed in the British automobile press for the first Victor's styling as 'the car with the built in shunt'.

And GM did quite early on eliminate that curved vertical groove in the rear door panel.

Looking back those Brit car magazine pontificaters were impossibly po-faced with their string-backed gloves and early 2.4 Jag saloons.

 

Looking back now you realise it was a really clever piece of Detroit positioning (like the French Ford Vedette fastback that enabled their drivers to imagine themselves as JP Belmondo film noir hoods).

The advert is brilliant with tiny people enjoying the spacious front bench seat.

All those Vauxhalls were strong cars - ideal as 'leave cars' for folk like me who had 'long leaves' back in the UK ever few years and needing cheap family transportation they could scrap on the way back to Heathrow..

 

dh

[Horsetan]

It's a Zagato job, not their finest effort it has to be said!

Not a genuine Zagato. It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.

[Rugd1022]

London, 1966, an off the cuff shot taken during a magazine photo shoot, under all those stripes is an early 997cc Morris Cooper...

 

 

Looks like I'll be holding off on the Rover P5B Coupe I was looking into, the owner is still not sure if he wants to let it go and my Jap Mini auto is now pretty much in dry dock for the foreseeable as the gearbox is still kaput and the MOT has run out. Will have to think about my options with the wee green beastie, whatever happens I'll need to throw some money at it to get it fixed and saleable, or just keep it and treat it as a long term project.

 

Bloody cars!

 

 

[Rugd1022]

Room for one more... George and Ringo arrive at Abbey Road for an evening session in November or December 1966 with George's Radford Cooper S parked up...

 

Edited March 3, 2018 by Rugd1022

[keefr2]

Bloody cars!

 

Couldn't agree more! Looks like  the option of throwing money at a Mini to be able to sell it is going to be our only option. I can't work on it anymore & the boy has so many other things on that he doesn't have the time, and he wants the proceeds to put towards the business he wants to start....Meanwhile it's sat in the garage, no doubt getting rustier by the day.

 

Bloody cars!

 

Keith

[Horsetan]

....Bloody cars!

You're talking to someone who has spent the best part of the afternoon charging the CX's battery, which drained over the course of a week.

 

Definitely considering one of those solar charger things now....

[brianusa]

 

early victor.jpg

Interesting to read Allan's post about having a fleet of these as hire cars.

I can remember Luton being universally trashed in the British automobile press for the first Victor's styling as 'the car with the built in shunt'.

And GM did quite early on eliminate that curved vertical groove in the rear door panel.

Looking back those Brit car magazine pontificaters were impossibly po-faced with their string-backed gloves and early 2.4 Jag saloons.

 

Looking back now you realise it was a really clever piece of Detroit positioning (like the French Ford Vedette fastback that enabled their drivers to imagine themselves as JP Belmondo film noir hoods).

The advert is brilliant with tiny people enjoying the spacious front bench seat.

All those Vauxhalls were strong cars - ideal as 'leave cars' for folk like me who had 'long leaves' back in the UK ever few years and needing cheap family transportation they could scrap on the way back to Heathrow..

 

dh

 

Family car in the UK before coming to US and saw some over here sold through Pontiac dealers.  Best of times and worst of times for English cars.  Lots of AHs, Triumphs, Sunbeam Tigers (at $2500), Metropolitans.  It didn't last long as by that time Japanese cars were to take over the import market .

 

Brian.

 

Brian.

[allan downes]

Worst kit car build ever ?