Fiat 18bl at Stow Maries Aerodrome

I am the proud new owner of the Fiat 18bl restoration project. I have bought it along with another investor to secure it for the aerodrome and get it finished

It is partially restored and have all the important bits. The engine is a runner ,gearbox needs a minor repair,diff good,diff lock and drive shafts need rebuilding,chain adjustors need new bearing surface ,got new chains, sprockets great, l/h rear stub axle bent, chain guards awful as it had been driven with shattered wheel bearings. I have already built most of a new flatbed. the rad is good but makes a good fountain when connected to a hosepipe, steering box good and so is linkage, no mudguards, I have fabricated a new hood (bonnet) and hinges . So all in all not too bad!!!!! My real headache is the wheels. The spokes have been cut down and new rims welded on to take adapters for pnuematics. The adapters are completely rotted but I want it back on solid tyres. I am hoping that the ones in the French auction last year are still there. The ones I need have round spokes. Can anyone help with info.

Pictures to follow

John the Blacksmith

Stow Maries Aerodrome

p.s. The Oxford Concise Dictionary no longer includes the word Aerodrome but spellchecker does!

Welcome to our small solid-tyred-transport fraternity. May I suggest you get in touch with Dale... "Chaindrive". Queensland isn't really that far away when information and parts are scarce! Good hunting... Robert

Hi John

Good luck with the project. Happy to help with any info you require. You may know more than me however. Your project sounds to be more advanced than mine and more complete as well. Sounds like you have most of the 'hard to find' parts, so the rest should be quite straightforward.

Regards

Dale

You can see from the photos the problem thatI have with the wheels.The spokes have been cut down and the rims altered to take adaptors for pnuematic tyres These adaptors are rusted out. Does anyone know of any complete whees for solid tyres (the round spoke type). I am chasing up the ones in France but might not be successful.

New bonnet panels and hinges/ I made awooden tool to do the louvres

John,

I would have thought that finding wheels for your truck would be far easier than almost any other part. When a WW1 truck has been through all its lives, what is left seems to usually be a mangled chassis with four wheels and nothing else. You will find some somewhere. Tyres are a bit harder of course !

Is it possible for you to post a couple of photos of your louvre tool. I have some to make and they need to be quite a distinctive shape. I have never punched louvres and it would be nice to make a tool to get them right. What were the problems? Also how did you press the ridges round the edge of each panel of the bonnet?

Good luck with the restoration

David

Hi John

The crankcase looks impressive, what material is it?

Hope to see you on the weekend of the May fly-in, should be an exciting weekend, will you have the Fiat be running for that weekend?

Regards

Tom

Hi John,

Very impressed with the Fiat progress, look forward to meeting you on the fly-in weekend, I am bringing my Lion engine down.

Andy

Hi John,

 

Very impressed with the Fiat progress, look forward to meeting you on the fly-in weekend, I am bringing my Lion engine down.

 

 

Andy

Answers to some of your questions. The crankcase, gearbox and diff are cast in bronze.The bonnet panels have been made with 18 swg zintec steel which is quite easy to form. I used my swage rolling machine to form the swages around the panels.

Pics of diff / gearbox before it was cleaned up. Note transmission brake. The outside shoes are fabric lined and water cooled. The unit is very clean inside but a fork shaft is mis-aligned due to a collapsed bearing. The casing has a 50mm crack in the side where something on the inside has hit it. I will either bronze weld or silver solder this.

To David Herbert. Tyres are easy to get hold of . It is paying for them is the problem . I have been quoted £5000!!! It will be the most expensive part of the rebuild . I want to get the Fiat back on the road and take it to Flanders so old tyres won't do.

There is our annual fly in at Stow Maries Aerodrome on the 10th and 11th of May.There should be lots of planes, vehicles including my Fiat plus a unique WW1 Home Defence Aerodrome to explore.

Oil pump worn out . I am wondering if I can fit a gear one tooth larger in here , changing it from 28 mm to 30 mm. It will eat into the rim about .5 mm but might not matter. HPC can supply lengths of splined shaft at 2 mod that I can machine . I do not know what the clearances should be in an oil pump.

I forgot to mention that there is a strip of brass soldered around the chamber to take up the ware. It has started to break away

I am busy restoring a 1927 Velie car. The oil pump was in a terrible condition and would not even pump oil. I purchased a new high output pump for a VW Beetle. We used the gears from this pump, measured all the clearances and machined a new pump body to fit the gears to the measured clearances. The VW pump is cheap and available. Good luck!

I don't see a problem in fitting slighty larger gears as long as they match correctly at the same center distance. Also check on displacement volume, more teeth means usually a smaller tooth depth thus smaller displacement but a few percents should not matter. I like Tom's idea, you could also check on hydraulic pumps and maybe find a pair of gears that can be modified. The brass strip is probably an earlier fix?

Marcel

Oil pump worn out . I am wondering if I can fit a gear one tooth larger in here

I can make you some bigger gears. I have a hobbing machine and hobbed gears "just work" even if the tooth shape is strange.

In this case you can probably get away with keeping the pitch circle the same and just having more Addendum.

What is your tooth-count and shaft spacing, and what OD do you need to suit the un-shimmed cavity?

I will be cheaper than HPC, I do this for fun :-)

Thanks for the offer Andy but I have already got the gear blank from HPC. I now realise that adding one tooth would mean I could not keep the same gear centres. I am considering making a new centre for pump and pinning it in position .I have bought a blank with 12 teeth ,the same as original.

Thanks for the offer Andy but I have already got the gear blank from HPC.

That doesn't necessarily make that the best solution. You made that purchase before I made that offer and you may now be falling for the "sunk cost fallacy".

Your ideal fix is to re-bore the cavity to the current shaft centres to only-just-round then see what the gear diameters end up at, then make (odd) gears to suit.

Perhaps the gear blank will be useful in the future?

New back soldered into pump body. New face plate machined . Needs screw holes drilling and matching with new holes to be tapped in body. Idid try brazing the damaged holes in the old face plate but it was like trying to turn cheese as it had gone so soft with the heat .New impeller and shaft on it's way.

Has anyone seen a thrust bearing like this before. Radiused on one side. It comes from the gear shaft that has the crown wheel drive pinion on it . It did not have any balls in the race so the pinion at the other end was not properly engaged . This caused burring on the crown wheel which will be ground off. I am not concerned about the wear sa the truck only goes 15 mph.

Has anyone seen a thrust bearing like this before.

I have seen the concept, but not in a bell bearing.

http://www.timken.com/en-us/products/bearings/productlist/roller/thrust/TaperedRollerThrust/Pages/TTVS.aspx

is the same idea, but taper-roller.

Just a follow up on the new oil pump made for my 1927 Velie: Start up pressure is 60 Lbs. and at slow idle hot is 30 Lbs. I need to modify the relief valve spring a bit to bring it down a bit. The VW gears are 32mm OD.

Has anyone seen a thrust bearing like this before. Radiused on one side. It comes from the gear shaft that has the crown wheel drive pinion on it . It did not have any balls in the race so the pinion at the other end was not properly engaged . This caused burring on the crown wheel which will be ground off….

It is difficult to see from the photograph if the shape is a function of design or wear, but I'm wondering if it was a plain spherical thrust bearing. Maybe there never were any balls/rollers in it - I don't think ball/roller bearing design had progressed that far at the time the machine was built. For the slow speeds involved in that era it would not be a big task to replace the thrust cap fairly regularly to take up the inevitable wear.

edit: Ah! I can now see what might be a ball track on the inside (flat) face of the bearing half. So was this was a ball thrust bearing with convex outer faces so it would be self-aligning? But why would it need such movement?