To Angouleme by Alvis 12/50 - Day 2

Fri, Sep 14 2012 12:49 | alvis, angouleme, bugatti, circuit des remparts


Saint Malo to Tiffauges, 160 miles







On Thursday we disembarked at about 08.00 local time and headed off on every small side road we could find in the direction of Tiffauges (L on map) which is about 160 miles away from Saint Malo. Our plan was to drive for two hours and then stop for coffee before doing another two hours driving, stopping for lunch and then a similar laid-back schedule in the afternoon.







Our first night stop was at Tiffauges which is a lovely little town with a very old castle which boasted a trebuchet, a very nice hotel and a fabulous but inexpensive restaurant, named Archers - Veal sweetbreads, followed by Coquilles St Jacques and Creme Brulée...







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To Angoulême by Alvis 12/50 - Day 1

Wed, Sep 12 2012 12:55 | alvis, angouleme, bugatti, circuit des remparts

Brighton to Portsmouth docks

Le Circuit des Remparts d’Angoulême is a series of races for old cars around the castle ramparts of Angoulême, which is a lovely town about two thirds of the way down France on the left hand side. It's 30 miles inland from Cognac and 75 miles north of Bordeaux. 

I’ve heard it said that Le Circuit des Remparts d’Angoulême is similar to what the Goodwood Revival once was before the organisers discovered that the Sussex Downs were paved with gold. 

I was lucky enough to get to both the Festival of Speed and the Revival in the very early days before it became a part of the social scene; it was all pretty relaxed and you could buy your tickets on the gate before it all went online and retro. 

The easiest way of getting the Alvis to Angoulême was to take the Brittany Ferries ship from Portsmouth to Saint Malo and then drive 300 miles over the next two days whilst sampling plenty of petit déjeuners, déjeuners et cafés. 

I did book the Angoulême tickets online as I wanted to ensure we got some seats rather than just wandering around and looking over people's shoulders, besides they'd already sold out of the Cathedral grandstand seats when I started booking in August so it was pretty popular. 

The seats were not expensive; €25 each for entry to the paddock for both days and €10  each for the grandstand seats for both days. If you use my sort of logic, what you save on Goodwood pays for the ferry...sort of.

I'd cobbled the carburettion together on the Alvis but was still without the all important 120 Solex jet which my engine seems to need now to combat the Ethanol in petrol that tends to make the mixture leaner. On the afternoon of Wednesday 12th September we met up with our friends’ Bugatti on the Brighton seafront before we headed off to Portsmouth for the overnight voyage to Saint Malo. 

The traffic through Arundel wasn't kind to us and the Alvis popped and spat back through the carburettor which was ominous...

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Woe 3

Fri, Aug 31 2012 02:41 | alvis, solex

With an hour to go before we were due to leave to meet you all at the forge for the Riley BBQ I climbed into the car, admired the new hood bag and the new woodwork and the newly repaired window and I went through the start up procedure...and I went through the start up procedure...and...but as you know we never got there.

I did all the obvious things like taking the carburettor apart, checking the float level, taking the jets out...

Then I turned my attention to the valve timing...

And then I retimed the magneto... 

And then I went through the start up procedure again...

Anyway after three days of repeating all of the above my friend John Copper (who owns the club which the Multimarquers went to in Peacehaven one Tuesday evening) came over to help. To cut a long story short he said "Have you tried the starting handle?"; well I hadn't, but he did.

WEIRD, there was absolutely no compression AT ALL. So there was no suction for the petrol vapour and so nothing for the spark to ignite.

We poured some petrol into each cylinder went through the start up procedure and it worked...but you wouldn't have still been at the BBQ...

John's theory is that the tappet clearance was too small and that coupled with the Alvis's Mount Ararat moment and possibly the dehumidifier had resulted in carbon forming between the valve seat and the valves thus jamming the valves open

I was mightily relieved as in a few nano seconds my brain had computed the cost of a complete engine rebuild before Angouleme in ten days time.
But I am still stuck with getting a jet for the Solex so if you think you may be able to help, please read on.

Having reset the magneto, the Alvis goes extremely well but it fires back through the carburettor on occasion which I am told is a sign of a weak mixture. Well, the jet is a Solex 110 which is designed for skinflints and people with 9 points on their licence; what I should have is a 115 which is richer.

Somewhere in the Royal Mail infrastructure is a 120, but it's been stuck there for a week. Peter Broom has kindly offered me a 125 which could be far too rich and would obviously make the Alvis significantly faster than any Humber.

Please save Loft from this dreadful experience and see if you have a Solex 115 jet which I could beg, borrow, lease or whatever to get me to and from Angouleme. 

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Woe 2

Wed, Aug 29 2012 02:43 | alvis, windows



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.
Picture wire was a disaster - it just kinked. 

Stainless steel wire from Namrick the Nut and Bolt store of Portslade was promising but too inflexible. 

Green plastic garden twine was just perfect but I just couldn't imagine it lasting. 

The yacht chandlers at Brighton marina never got back to me....

But finally I found Tecni-Cable Ltd on the Internet. If you do nothing else, Save this site!

The wire is amazing; quite strong, very thin and you could tie knots in it...so I did. 

I ordered several metres of 0.75 mm which has a Maximum Breaking Load of 40kgs

Several hours later I'd just about managed to wind up the roller and with the occasional murmur of "Let them eat cake" I finally managed to get the window to go down, fairly slowly and to go up, without too much difficulty.

And that should have been that and I should have been at the Riley BBQ but...time for another Woe 3...

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Woe, Woe and Thrice Woe

Thu, Aug 23 2012 02:45 | alvis, varnish, windows, woodwork


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. 

However it was a bit trial and error as, to begin with I used a cheaper cotton cloth which just left bits of fluff behind so they all had to be redone.
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. 

This was followed up with four coats of Liberon Black Bison wax. This was applied with 0000 wire wool, left for about an hour and then polished with a good quality polishing cloth. 

So with seven or eight coats of varnish and wax this now has a nice honey coloured look in addition to the mahogany itself.

It's tempting to see what happens to it if it gets wet...but I won't!

However that was not the end of it as the windows are all of the wind up variety but they work on the same principal as a roller blind but obviously with a much MUCH stronger spring....see Woe 2

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What do these two have in common?

Sat, Jul 21 2012 02:47 | alvis, double-duck, hood, mohair

Well, this one has mohair on its back...



And this one has mohair at the back...





















But that's where the similarities end, as goats don't get to be 85 years old, Alvises can't climb trees and anyway from what I can see there’s no reason why a Mohair hood should be made from mohair - after all, a Duck hood isn’t made from ducks***.
"Alice" the Alvis is being prepped for a trip to Angouleme in September but being a firm believer in...If it ain't broke, don't fix it, the only thing I could do apart from completely rebuilding the car was to have a hood bag made for the car.

So where to start? 

We do have an RMM list of suppliers which used to feature Polyfacto before they closed their doors for good so I listened to what other RMM petrol-heads had to say. James Mann had recommended Diane an ex-Polyfacto employee based near Pevensey and Tim Wilson had good words to say about JSM Trimming. I spoke to Diane and she suggested that I try JSM - I got the impression that my wish list was perhaps a little too challenging and JSM are almost on my home territory.

JSM comprises three partners - Jay, the owner of Chariots, Scott, an ex-Polyfacto employee and Maria who started at Polyfacto when she was sixteen, since when a few years have passed...

Jay owns quite a sizeable chunk of ground on the Uckfield Road which houses not only Chariots (a Wedding and Limousine hire company) but also a motor engineers and numerous delectable old cars which are used for his hire and chauffeuring business. 



To name a few - Model T charabanc, Lagonda, Rolls Royce, Daimlers - many of which have received the JSM treatment.




The day I went along Scott and Maria were working on an Aston Martin DB7; we discussed the various types of hooding material from Double Duck through Vinyl to Mohair. Originally the hood on the Alvis was leather with no hood bag; double duck would have been a less expensive alternative and strictly speaking that's what I should have employed for the hood bag. However double duck does fade quite quickly whereas mohair does not and I didn't want instant patina.



A friend of mine has a similar Alvis to mine and the hood bag on his car is attached by Lift-The-Dot fasteners.

Scott reckons that this is not really in keeping with the age of the car so I opted for turnbuckles with mohair material. 


Four weeks later I took the Alvis back to them and three days later it was finished! 

Scott had also tidied up the leather door panels and Maria had done a little repair to the AC tonneau where it wears as one takes it on and off over the rollover bar behind the driver (a little bit of cost cutting by AC I think).

When Scott picked me up from Lewes station I asked him how Maria made the hood bag...apparently all by eye with no patterns at all!

Of course when I left JSM it wasn't raining but as I drove over the Downs and through the clouds, it poured and poured...so now the Alvis is back in the garage with the de-humidifier sucking all the water back out again - I hope.

(Unfortunately my hope was misplaced - see Part 2 and maybe even Part 3 for the resolution)

More on Chariots

“Chariots based in the heart of East Sussex specialise in Wedding Car Hire as well as Executive car hire and Chauffeur driven tours.”


More on J.S.M. Trimming

“J.S.M. Trimming is a company with over 35 years experience in the car trimming industry with ex "polyfacto" staff. We can trim a wide range of vehicles from vintage to modern day. We also offer a full Boat and Caravan trimming service, as well as house hold upholstery and repairs for both Trade and Retail customers. We also offer a leather redressing (connolising) service that revives your tired leather back to it former glory.”


***Double Duck, or should that be Double Dutch?... as the word Duck is derived from the Dutch word “doek” meaning canvas



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