Old Bill
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Posts posted by Old Bill
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Nice job. I wish I could weld like that!
Steve
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Well, the Dennis is now safely home again. We went up to the rally field to find the poor thing completely alone in a large empty field. It did look lost! After a top up of the water and a walk round, I gave it several winds but it didn't want to know. Whilst I was getting my breath back, we took the plugs out and gave them a good clean. They didn't look bad but the engine started instantly on the next try so I think our problems lie in that direction. For two days, the lorry has only been pottering around a field or sitting and idling, neither of which are good for combustion. The drive home was nice and Tim noted that we hit 22mph at one point. I am getting more confident now but managed to upset a tanker driver by pulling out in front of him very slowly. I had left the handbrake partly on and just could not move fast enough. He definately wasn't pleased but there was no real harm done.
Today, I have been making up the headboard for the body and good progress is being made there. I really want to finish the job before getting stuck into the Thornycroft.
Steve
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Did I see some of your vehicles at the Honiton Hill Rally on this Bank Holiday Monday?
Yes, the whole fleet, and I am shattered now! Dennis will come home again tomorrow.
Steve :-D
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Well, we are safely home although the Dennis is still in the rally field. As you have suggested, we are short of drivers. Our joiner friend, Mark, took charge of the civilian Autocar. He is a big lad and can't get into the FWD which is made for really quite small people. I am pretty ordinary size but certainly can't afford to put on any weight or I won't get behind the wheel myself! On the field, Tim took the other Autocar, Dad the Dennis and I had the FWD which was fine. I took the FWD up the day before with Tim driving tender in the Land Rover. Coming home, I again brought the FWD with Dad and Mark in the Autocars and Tim driving tender. Those three are safely in the shed and we will make another trip tomorrow to bring the Dennis home.
Taking four lorries to a show is surprisingly hard work and I expect to sleep very well tonight! Starting has been a problem all round this weekend. The Autocar has simply stopped a couple of times and has had to be wound up again. FWD has been fine cold but once warmed up has taken a lot of effort. I stalled it reversing into the shed and it just would not go. We pushed it in the end. Dennis has been strange. I have moved the starting handle around the shaft by 90° to make it easier to swing and so, now, with some extreme effort, I can pull it over and keep it rotating by hand. Last weekend it started every time, more or less, and was fine yesterday to go to the show. Today, it has been awkward and it took a good few goes before it ran first thing this morning. As the day went on, sometimes it would start and sometimes it wouldn't culminating in a refusal to go into the ring to receive the 'Best Military Vehicle' trophy. All very annoying. A reliable start is most desirable as I seem to have spent the day swinging big engines and am absolutely done in!
I have taken the 'Slick' impulse starter that Dad found on Ebay and have made the adaptors to fit it to our spare mag. That is away being rebuilt at the moment but once it is back, I can set up the trigger-pin positions and we can see if it makes it any easier. Unfortunately, the original mag which is on the engine at the moment, doesn't have any mounting holes for an impulse device so for the time being, it is brute strength only.
I am getting too old for this!
Steve
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That rope looks terrible! Must do something about that before we go!
Steve
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Nice pic. Pre-war I should think.
Thanks for posting!
Steve
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That's a nice piece of work Tom. More than one way of skinning a cat!
I did make the pattern for the Dennis impeller and that worked out quite well in the end. We are fortunate in that we have a spare for the Thorny. At least, if we could find it. We haven't seen it for ten years and it hasn't turned up yet!
Steve
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I have just been filing the latest batch of photos of the project bringing the total to 4500 in 23 albums! We seem to have got a bit carried away but I do love flicking through them. The original objective was to record how to put the bits back together. Even with all of this lot, I keep wishing we had taken more. I have just frightened myself by working out the cost as well. Each album comes to around £30- so this represents nearly 5% of the total spend on the project!
Still a few more until the job is done. I will get Tim to post some of the latest odds and ends.
Steve
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Many of those bits are humble cast iron, and while many of them could be used as patterns, it is generally so much simpler to make new patterns.
Gordon
Thanks Gordon. I couldn't have put it better myself! Years ago, four of us clubbed together to get patterns made for the radiator. Hampshire County Museums Service were one of the four and they provided a gash radiator to use to make the castings. Their parts were reworked to provide core prints and new core boxes were made. We each had a set of castings from them and the museum holds the patterns still. The Dennis top and bottom tanks are more complex and can't be used in the same way so I will have to make them up complete. These water pump bits are in the same league I think so I won't be able to use them.
At the moment, though, I am still finishing off the Dennis!
Steve
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That has to be the most amazing Great War survivor of all! An entirely original mobile X-ray unit in Turkey of all places. I wonder how it got there and does it still have its X-ray equipment installed? Something for my 'Things to See' list!
Steve :wow::wow::wow:
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Don't we count Les Warren's (in civvy colours)? :undecided:
At the moment, I am counting vehicles presented as military of whatever provenance. We can expand to commercials of the period later. Of course then there are those which will be military but which are as yet unrestored such as our Thornycroft. If we include all of these, we reach the best part of 100 vehicles in the UK. Let's stick to Military for the time being!
Steve
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Try this link! It should take you to the Canadian War Museum Artifact page.
Steve
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Well, if you consider Dennis, the total is just one.
With Autocars, I think the total is two. That would be ours and also an armoured version used by the Canadian motor machine gun brigade and now preserved in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. That is a complete, original vehicle with a provenance. Does anyone have a recent picture?
Steve
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That's very neat. Thank you for taking the trouble to demonstrate the process.
Looking back, I see that my picture is not very clear. The spring is actually a coil of 20swg x 3/8" wide flat strip. I can probably wrap the main coil in the lathe but the eye looks tricky. It wants to be wrapped around a pin but that will only be 1/16" dia max. My best attempt so far will be to bend the top over in the vice and then to keep wrapping and squeezing in the vice jaws. It will have to be done cold and in the annealed state because it will cool too quickly to be done hot unless there is some special jig I could make. There has to be a trick to it as clocks have been made for quite a while!
Steve
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after installing the mag it started without troubles, see this movie:
All the best
Marcel
You make it look too easy! Thanks for the inspiration!
Steve
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Tested spring Company in Tividale, Birmingham. They'd help with the spring.
Thanks for that recommendation, Hedd.
Thank you chaps for your comments too. I can pull it over compression but not very fast. Too many years driving a desk! The FWD has an impulse and starts well when cold, just by pulling it over the top. Hot starts are a different matter but that's another story!
I am currently making up various adaptors to allow me to hang the 'Slick' starter on the spare Simms mag. This is looking promising but I would like a proper Simms if I can. Making the springs is a bit of a challenge as I can't see how to bend the eye so tightly. The eyes are only 1/8" in diameter and are very neatly bent. I did make somthing similar for the FWD spring clips which have similar eyes on the ends and although they are satisfactory, I could not get them tight. Those were made from spring steel in the soft state which I heat treated afterwards in a sand bath heated using my propane torch. I quenched and tempered them in chip fat raided from the fryer. I must state that I didn't put the oil back afterwards though!
If you have any thoughts on how to bend the eyes, I should be very pleased to hear them.
Steve
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Do we know whether the engine is imperial or metric?
Steve
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Here is another. This is a Locomobile and is probably as 'original' as one can get. It spent many years as accomodation but was untouched beneath a skin of corrugated iron. It now lives in Suffolk.
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Hi Al.
What a splendid question! It is amazing how many subjects this exercise has turned up! I can't give you a definitive answer unfortunately but this is how it came about. We have two photographs of New Zealand Division Dennis lorries so we picked an ID number a few away from one of them. Then we sent a scan of the picture it to our cartographer friend Andy who very kindly digitised the numbers and laid them out full size for the signwriter. He copied the font exactly but cursed because it was completely non-standard and he had to modify something similar to match it. The signwriter used Andy's print to lay out the numbers on the bonnet but then said 'I don't like that' and did his own thing!
The army specified a height for the numbers but not the font so when you look through the old photos they are all sorts of styles. Now the US Army provided stencils so they are all lettered the same way and look very similar to those used in WW2.
I'm afraid that doesn't help you much but it does mean that you can't get it wrong! What is your particular interest?
Steve
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You have beaten me to it! I must say that the Liberty goes well. I was overtaken going up Clayton Hill whilst I was driving an Albion!
This Liberty is somewhere in the US and came up for sale on Ebay last year. I don't know anything else about it unfortunately.
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That was a nice surprise. It's a small world! I asked Steve what he had left over after he had sold his Thorny. It turned out to be only a single item, a water pump impeller which is now safely on the shelf ready to replace the cracked one Father has found in our engine!
Steve
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This splendid machine is a French Army De Dion of 1914. It turned up in Brighton a few years ago having been driven over from France!
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This is the Imperial War Museum's Thornycroft J type AA Gun lorry. It served in France and later went on show at the Crystal Palace when the museum was based there. Later, to save space, it was returned to Thornycrofts who stored it for many years. Later, they moved it out into the yard to deter the Hun during the Second War. Sometime after, its engine was removed and sold and then it was sold in its entirety to Tom Redburn who fitted it with a Commer engine. At some point, the IWM bought it back and it was completely overhauled and rebuilt with the correct engine by Richard Peskett.
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Now, a Pierce Arrow. This one served with the French Army during the war and was later purchased by its regular driver. Now owned by Grundon, it was rebuilt by Richard Peskett into a British Army configuration.
How Many Great War Vehicles Remaining???
in Pre WW2 vehicles
Posted
That's an interesting one. Our American built Autocars and FWD are also right hand drive. We believe that with so little traffic around in the early years, they were more interested in avoiding the ditch than other vehicles! British built Foden steam wagons of the same era are left hand drive. The Americans seemed to go LHD from about 1920 onwards.
Steve