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Woe 2
Previously I'd just finished repolishing all the woodwork after the Alvis gave its own interpretation of the Ark on Mount Ararat.
I was just refitting the twenty four pieces of beautifully polished mahogany when I noticed that the cable which winds the window up on the drivers side was frayed.
Now these window winders must be a coachbuilder's optional extra; Jim's Wolseley has them, my Alvis has them and a Gordon England bodied Austin Seven which I was looking at on the Internet the other day also had them.
These window winders work on the same principle as a roller blind; except that roller blinds aren't really very heavy but a sheet of 4mm glass is ******heavy.
How do I know that? Well I just touched the frayed cable and there was a noise like the Guillotine as the roller spring didn't so much let go but rather did its own interpretation of a space launch in reverse - I was surprised to see that the door was still there as was the running board...and my toes.
Obviously these "roller blinds" need some fairly significant cabling to raise the windows up; two of the windows appeared to have picture wire, one to have a scaled down version of the Titanic's mooring rope and the fourth to be a bit of waxed cotton!
Perhaps I should explain a little more about the mechanism.
I have no idea how it works.
But after a lot of experimentation (eg winding it the wrong way) I did finally manage (several hours later) to work out what was going on.
The cable has to wrap around the roller and also to connect to the window...it's so simple but I don't understand how they did it without special equipment. Although I've put it all back together it really does need a winch to get the correct tension on the spring, but then it might break...
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The cable is held in place by a 4 ba screw so the cable has to be THIN.
But finally I found Tecni-Cable Ltd on the Internet. If you do nothing else, Save this site!Comments
Woe, Woe and Thrice Woe
If you’re old enough to have a bus pass then you will probably remember Frankie Howerd (Lurcio) speaking these lines on television in “Up Pompeii” through the early ‘70s. I have a certain empathy with that but in my case “Woe” is also known “As if it ain’t broke...parts 1, 2, 3 or 4” so without further ado...
Woe 1
You left me last month with a new hood bag but a soaking wet car having driven over the South Downs through the clouds and the sort of rain us Southerners thought only happened north of Watford.
Two days later with the help of the dehumidifier, the car was dry but....the woodwork had taken a real hammering. Being a sort of upmarket convertible it has copious bits of wood trim. I'd previousl repolished about ten pieces around the windscreen where the rubber had disintegrated but this job was much more comprehensive; in all there were 24 pieces which I took out and a nice touch was that most of them had the body number from Carbodies who made the bodywork, written on the back in pencil.
Repolishing them was a production line event.
Each piece needed three coats of stripper to get the old polish off; the drive over the Downs hadn't quite stripped them!
Then I cleaned them with White Spirit.
The next step was to varnish them using a pad which comprised the best soft linen or cotton I could get and in the centre of this I put either cotton wool or some other absorbent material to act as a reservoir for the polish. This ensured that there were no brush strokes.
The varnish I used was an exterior satin finish yacht varnish. Each of the four coats of varnish was left to dry for 24 hours and then rubbed down using 0000 grade wire wool and again cleaned with White Spirit.