Category: Painting Car

I’ve been away at work for the last 5 weeks so I’m really happy to finally be back at home. There s not much that I can currently do to the car as it is away being painted. However I’ve finally been able to visit the paint shop and see how it is coming alone. The car is currently almost ready to be painted in primer. With the car being away I limited in what I can do but I do but one job is to preparing some parts to be sent away to be re-chromed. I also need to spend some time fixing the front mud guards and battery box. If I can get these fix they can then be painted and will be ready to refit when the car returns from the paint shop.

In the last few days the restoration seems like it is going backwards instead of forwards. Nearly everything I’ve tried to do has caused me problems. One of the items I’ve been working on is replacing the bushes in the steering column. Replacing these wasn’t too difficult but it was impossible to achieve without seriously damaging the paint work on the column. This means I’ve then had to spend time repainting it. As I was going to get the spray gun out to paint the steering column I spent some time cleaning the inside of the bonnet so this could be done at the same time. The photo below shows the freshly painted bonnet.

The other area I’ve been working on in the last few days is the car electrics. A number of problems have been discovered. The most major one was the tachometer not functioning correctly. This was due to the electronic ignition I fitted causes the smiths RVI (current sense type) tacho not to work. After much surfing of the internet I discovered the easiest solution is to fit a later smiths RVC tacho. This type of tacho is connected to the negative side of the coil and detects the voltage change. This sounds simple in theory but it requires an extra wire to be added to the loom. What annoys me the most about this, is it wouldn’t have been such a major job if I had know about it a few weeks ago when I was rebuilding my loom, however as they are now fitted. I will need to remove them, remove the tape, add the extra wire in and then re-tape the loom. This means a simple change like this will create several hours work.
The other item I discovered that doesn t work is the dynamo control box. Instead of wasting time trying to adjust or fix the old one I’ve decided to take the simple route of buying a replacement.

I have not done much today apart from painting the underside of the car in black. The paint job is not great, and it has a number of runs but nobody will ever see it as it is under the car! I haven’t planned to do anything to the car tomorrow but I will hopefully be putting the shell back onto the chassis on Saturday.