Some notes on the handbrake

While the chassis was away being sorted out, I turned my attention to some of the minor assemblies. One of these is the handbrake, which was not in a great shape when I acquired the car.

I don't know where the handbrake comes from. I have heard that it might come from  a dumper-truck that is no longer made, but it could easily be a modified, off the shelf item. The ratchet seems to be similar to some kit car handbrakes. As for the shaft, the only one I can find that comes close, although not identical, is from a Jaguar XK120/150. TVR may have modified the assembly by brazing on a tail to which are bolted the twin handbrake cables, however, I have also seen illustrations of generic handbrake assemblies, which also show this tail, so who knows.

The handbrake clearly needed renovating, it had had a hard life exposed to the underside of the car. I asked a re-chroming specialist and it seems that a partial re-chrome, say down to the ratchet, isn't possible, which means the whole assembly needed to be stripped.

A clevis pin holds the ratchet dog against the ratchet, and that comes out easily, but the central button and the rest of the mechanism can't be released from the assembly until the thumb button comes off. Although it looks like its screwed to the push rod, in fact its held on by a pin, that simply drives out. The rod and dog can then be pulled out the back of the handle. There is a rubber grommet in the handle that seems to hold the rod to some extent, but it was mashed.

That left me with the handle and ratchet assembly. You can see that the  main pivot pin is peined over to hold it in place. The only way past this is to grind or file it off, so thats what I did. The pivot then dropped out easily.

Heres the kit of parts:

I've sent the handle and thumb button off to the chromers. On reassembly the main pivot will be replaced with a half inch clevis pin and split pin arrangement.

So, after a months wait, here is the newly re chromed handbrake lever. Its been stripped and rechromed, including the tail section. The quality is excellent, I am really pleased with it. Now it just needs re assembling!

Chassis sorted out

Its been a while since i last posted.

I have been doing odd bits and pieces, but most importantly, I managed to get the chassis away to be sorted out by Duncan Reuben of TVR Classiscs

As it turns out, once the chassis was measured up, it became clear that several errors had been made when it was originally fabricated back in 2000. It seems some of the dimensions were intended for a Griffith chassis. These all had to be cut out and then re-welded correctly. Fortunately the problems related to things like the bottom diff carrier tubes being set too low and the brackets that take the support arms of the diff, being incorrectly placed; nothing that needed major tubes being cut about. The engine mounts were also in the wrong place as I had already suspected.

The car came back in the first week of January and I re-assembled the drive train straight away so I could take these pictures. The engine just dropped into place as sweet as a nut.

so now I can get on with it in earnest again

Complete door rebuild: Part two

Having repaired the door body and the window frames, I have now started to look at the latches and door handles. After a certain amount of swearing, I have found that the most convenient way to re assemble the doors, is to start with the door handles.

The handles come from a Standard 8/10. My handles were both pretty much shot, so having spent some time looking for replacements, with no luck, I eventually went for new reproductions. They seem to be of quite good quality, and the guy I bought them off was able to fit a new lock for the driver's door too.

The door handle requires a small pusher, to operate the lever that frees the latch mechanism. I had to make up a new one as the old on was too badly damaged.

Next I fitted the latch. The latch mechanism itself is from a Ford Consul/Zodiac or Zephyr. I found some spares from a mark II that look identical to my originals. I think they are from the rear doors.

Theres a lot of damage to the door shells around the fixings for the lock mechanism It looks like it is due to attempts at adjustment of the door fit, or perhaps the fixings pulling through. In any case, I have filled the holes in and re drilled. I plan to make adjustments to the door fit using the striker plates if possible.

Attaching the latch mechanism to the door was a bit of a challenge. The original fixings I got with the car were a selection of odd bolts, which goes some way to explain the state of the glass fibre. What I had hoped to do was to use new low profile screws and washers to spread the load and protect the fibreglass, however, the threads in the latch seem to be 7/32 BSW, a really obscure thread that is not readily available. There isn't room in the metal to drill out and re tap, so, for the time being I have used the machine screws that came with the spare set of latches. I used a set of solid countersunk washers, to spread the load, but I am concerned that these will be too proud of the surface, and interfere with the closure. Well see later on.

The small screw in the picture above holds the rear of the door handle to the door. This looks like it will be a problem later so I will need to find some way of spreading the loading on the door skin at this point, to stop cracking.

The picture below shows the lock mechanism in place

After the handle and latches go in, the window frames and bracketry can be fitted. This is another knuckle scraping process, but I found if you reassemble it in this order, you get least cross!:

Attach the Aluminium Trim cross piece to the frame.
Fit the glass to the frame,
Insert the frame into the door
Attach the glass frame runners to one side of the bracket. You can do this easiest if you raise the frame a little and access the captive bolts through the cut-outs in the door back. You can get at the front one though the cut out for the door-opening catch mechanism.

Slide the winder mechanism into the door and fit the arm into the window glass channel.
Now jiggle the winder mechanism spigot out through the hole and screw it in place.
Attach the second bracket to the first
Bolt the brackets to the door
Now screw down the aluminium trim piece to the top of the door.
Wind up the window fully
Fit door catch mechanism. It needs to be separated from the door skin by a spacer, a bolt does the job

and that's it! Mechanism completely rebuilt! The window winds up and down, the door latch works and everything.

Dead chuffed!

The door body itself still needs a lot of work, but that I will save until I get to the bodywork as I want to be able to match the curves in properly. The shut lines leave a lot to be desired as well. Hopefully I will sort that too.

A couple of final bits to mention: first the striker plates. In the boxes of bits,  I only had one striker plate and it looked like this.

A closer look at the photos I got when I bough the car showed that, at the time it was dismantled, it had two, mismatched striker plates. The one above on the drivers side and different one on the passenger side

The driver's side B post has two sets of holes, one vertical pair that matches the striker plate, and another horizontal pair. The passenger side had only the horizontal pair.

It looked very much like the striker plate I had, must have been a later addition, the two additional holes being for the original striker plate. I think the passenger side striker plate was from an earlier version of the Zodiac/Zephyr/Corsair or Consul. In any case, I sent a photo to John at Goldendays parts and he was able to source a pair for me.

So there we are. One door completely rebuilt and correct striker plates sourced.

Lastly I sent the door hinges away to Adrian Venn at Exactly TVR to have them rebuilt. They came back all sorted out, bead blasted and primed, which save a lot of messing about.

Complete door rebuild: Part one

Tired of not making any progress on the car for the last couple of years, towards the end of last year I decided to pull down the crappy old shed that I did most of the work in, moved loads of stuff out of the garage into a new shed and re arranged one end of the garage into a workshop. Then I built myself a new work bench and got on with the car.

I clearly have some sort of mental block with the engine as I STILL haven't sorted it out, but I have made progress on the doors and so I thought I would write that up.

Here, for effect, is what the worst one looked like when I got the car.

The inner section had been cut off in order to expose the mechanism. Still, its a good illustration of how the mechanism goes together! The hinges were shot, pins seized in the casting and now wearing into the outer steel brackets.

Note also the blue paint over luminous pink! Blue seems to have been the final colour of the car before it was taken off the road, but at some point someone decided it was a good idea to paint the door jams luminous pink, I imagine to try and stop people driving into the open door. Probably seemed like a good idea at the time!

The winder mounting nuts were rusted solid and all of them broke off in the threads. The door opening mechanism was rusted but otherwise OK. The door handles were both badly pitted and pretty much U/S. The locking handle - drivers side - had a seized lock (series ones only have one door lock!).

Oh, and see that rusty remnant on the second picture? that's the remains of a pair of brackets for holding and positioning the door-glass frame. Its more or less dissolved.

Both the frames and the glass were there, but one frame needed a bracket soldering back on.

The bits of fibreglass cleaned up OK! The mess at bottom left appears to be where someone has tried to laminate the door glass support to the front panel, possibly in an attempt to provide a bit of stiffness. This might have ben why the door was cut up; in order to get the frame out of this lump of glass fibre. The foam in the middle is where the bottom of the second leg of the glass frame touches the front panel. This is to stop the glass channel banging on the back of the panel and causing crazing on the front. It will have to be replaced with something little more  robust. 

Re-assembling the two halves wasn't technically difficult; its just a question of tacking the halves together with ali strip and self tappers and then applying fibreglass mat behind to hold them. Access is poor and now my arms are covered in lacerations from the edges of the fibreglass. It was very difficult to get at the back all-round, and the repair took ages.

The whole front panel had been smeared in filler for reasons unknown. There was no sign of damage to the panel from the inside, so I am guessing the filler was an attempt to repair some crazing. This all needs to be rubbed off  and then the door will be re tissued before painting. But that will be dome later. Right now I'm just concentrating on fixing the mechanicals and getting it back together, to check if anything is missing.

Onward and upward.......

The frames were rather distorted, maybe due to someone pulling on them to open the door, and took an age to straighten out. I found some bits that seemed to be part of the frame in the boxes of bits.

This is the frame to go with the door I repaired. Its a bit distorted and it has a bracket missing

The bracket was present on the other frame and helped me identify one or two of the odd bits that were in the box of nuts and bolts. Just goes to show, never throw anything away!

I was able to solder this back on quite easily. I was a bit daunted by the prospect of soldering aluminium, but I found an excellent on-line video and with a little practice it worked out OK. I used "Alu-flo 440", which has built in flux and flows beautifully once you get a bit of practice in.

The drivers side frame was in better shape, but was missing the bottom part of the quarter light frame, luckily also in the box, along with a further useful bracket. The drilled and radiused cross-piece is an alloy trim that holds the frame to the door top, via 3 x 3/16" machine screws, and adds a lot of stiffness to the frame.

So, to repair of the mechanisms. First off, I remade the brackets that hold the bottom end of the frame legs to the door. Its just two pieces of 1 1/2 inch angle, made up out of  steel sheet with captive nuts brazed on; two to hold one angle to the door and two more to allow the second angle to slide over the first and be locked in place by short bolts. These bolts are accessed from below the door through two holes in the door bottom for adjustment of the frame.

This bolts in to the door like this

It attaches to the ends of the runners with two small nuts and bolts that fix the distance between the two runners. As one angle slides over the other the runners are pushed outward and adjust the  window frame in or out at the top.

In fact, having got this far, I realised that the bolts that hold the ends of the window frames would be much better as captives, so I brazed in a couple of stainless 3/16" machine screws. This saves much swearing when re assembling the window frames.

The photo above shows the rough assembly in place.

So to re assembling the window frames.

The frames where a little distorted and required a fair bit of adjustment to get them back straight, but having done this, I turned my attention to re glazing the quarter light. 

The quarter light frame comes apart at the bottom, to reveal a pair of mild steel brackets (rusty one on the left, new one on the right). The bottom piece is attached to these using very small countersunk screws. These appeared to have been brass on my car, but were of course rusted in and just stripped out when I tried to remove them. So I made new brackets drilled and tapped to M4 and replaced the screws with stainless machine screws. 

The single hole in the cross piece seems to be for a screw that holds the frame to the aluminium cross piece, for rigidity.  Oddly, its in different places on each side and I haven't seen these on other series ones. Probably a later fix.

I sealed the quarter light glass into the frame with 3mm closed cell neoprene (thanks Adrian!), which slides easily into place with bit of silicone grease.

 

The odd square shaped bracket attaches the framework to the drilled aluminium cross piece. Must remember to tidy up the weld!



The window glass runs in the framework, supported by a woven canvas strip, 22mm wide that folds into the runners. I got mine from Woolies Trim as 22mm bonnet tape. Although its close, its not the correct stuff, which actually has three ridges, which support the glass. Despite looking everywhere I have been unable to find this tape. The bonnet tape seems to work.

So, there we have it. Door repaired, window frames repaired and reglazed and frame support brackets remade and fitted.

I think that will do for part one. Next step is to repair the locks, winding mechanism and interior opening mechanism.

A tale of a chassis

Well, I haven't posted for quite a while. Thats mainly because I haven't achieved anything for ages. I've DONE loads, its just that, as the French say, I have been peddling in the semolina ((They do, really!)

I managed to get the engine back together relatively easily. No great issues except:

1. New cylinder head bolts for the engine were apparently not available at the time, so I reused the old ones.
2. New flywheel bolts from a well known supplier of parts for ford engines are made of cheese. This time I felt it start to go and removed it, before it broke off, so I saved myself yet another trip to the engineers!

So, there I was with a nice newly rebuilt engine, bell housing attached and everything, and all ready to go in. I sourced a new pair of engine mountings attached them, slung the engine from the crane and lowered it into position.

Could I get it to fit?

No!

What ever I tried to do I could not get the engine attached to the mountings with the starter cowl clear of the chassis on the right hand side and the clutch slave bracket clear of the lower chassis rail the other side.

Bell housing fouls the chassis triangulation on the RHS

Clutch mounting fouls the chassis rail on the LHS 

I spent quite a while jiggling the engine around, but to no avail. I was beginning to think maybe I had the wrong bell housing or something like that. 

After posting my dilemma on Pistonheads and getting some helpful pointers, it became obvious several things were wrong.

1. The chassis was made with the wrong engine mounting brackets. These are the ones from my original chassis, taken from a photo supplied by the previous owner:

You can clearly see that the mounting face on the bracket is canted backwards and there is a curve at the top, pushing the mounting face outwards.

And this is the mount from the new chassis

The face is flat and there is no curve towards the top, which explains the odd angle the mounting is forced to take up in the second picture. 

2. The new chassis has one of the triangulations between the upper and lower chassis rails in the wrong place. Here again is the old chassis:

You can clearly see that the triangulation on the genuine S1 chassis is wider spaced on the RHS. The arrow shows where the bell housing comes.

This picture shows that my chassis has the triangulation identical on both sides, and you can see where the triangulation is fouled by the bell housing on one side and by the clutch slave bracket on the other. 

I have the original receipt for the chassis and it was clearly ordered as an 1800S chassis. If you look at an 1800S chassis it DOES have the triangulation the same on both sides! 

With the help of some very kind S1 owners, I have managed to work out that the chassis has the same dimensions as the Vixen S1 chassis, but does have the wrong mounts and triangulation.

So I bit the bullet and cut off the triangulation.

I am now waiting to get the chassis to a specialist who can put it on a jig, check the dimensions, add the correct mounts and generally check it over. 

Thats where I had got to in August last year and, what with one thing and another, thats where I still am.