anglia4

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Duke Blackwood asked me to post this photo up as his phone was flat last night. He was having a go at repairing the utterly fucked fairings and found that someone has glued old pill packets across the back of some holes to bog over the front!

Its taken me 3 shed nights but I've finally finished changing the oil. I had to make a new sump gasket that I forgot to take a photo of. There was nothing particularly nasty to report in the oil. I now know that to clean the oil filter I have to remove the hood, grille, number plate, radiator & undo the front engine mount bolts... Happy days.

I managed to have a bit more of a tinker the other night. These don't have an oil filter as such, instead they have a wire gauze under the crank to filter the oil as it drops into the sump. So to clean this you have to whip the sump off. Unfortunately... The bastard sump catches on the chassis rails by about 3mm in the front corners, so to get it off the studs I had to lift the engine off its mounts... And to get that to lift high enough I had to lift the radiator off its mounts... Then the crank handle fouled on the grill... And the number plate was in the way... you get where I'm going with this..... Once I managed to get the sump off I called it a night for that job, I'll pull the gauze another time and finish it. Having done battle with that I thought I'd tackle a nice easy "feel good" project, like fitting the new wheels and tires....... FUCK IT ALL.... Turns out there is more than one wheel size for A7 Ruby's Does anyone want to buy a set of 4 brand new 19" tires, tubes and rim tape? (or swap for 16"...)

I did a wee bit more tinkering with the Ruby last night. I made a start on an oil change, have drained the old oil out and undone all the bolts on the sump to get at the filter gauze. Annoyingly it looks like I might have to lift the engine off its mounts to get the sump past the front two studs. I might see if I can get the studs out first. Either way, its annoying. The oil that came out, aside from being old and a little sludgy, is in much better nic than I would have expected after being sat for so long. I sprayed a bit of CRC around the front windscreen latch and hinges and veeeery gently pushed it open. Unfortunately the latch mount on the window frame appears to have been made from die-cast cheddar cheese and crumbled away in front of me. So I'll need to manufacture a new one of those... I'm sure (I know) it isn't the only thing like this I also found this funky spanner on the floor under the car. Not sure where its fallen out of, I think maybe its for adjusting the valve clearances.

Ok I stand corrected on Amazing Austin fact #1... it was a caddy

Ah bloody internet put me crook

AMAZING AUSTIN FACT #1: The Austin 7 was the first production car to have the controls as we know them today. I.e Clutch -> Brake -> Accelerator etc. AMAZING AUSTIN FACT #2: I learnt this one the other night while pulling apart one of the doors to have a look at its rust... Austin 7's have a wooden frame! The wooden frame thing was a bit of a shock. Here I was one minute looking at the door thinking it should be a pretty easy rust fix, then pulling off the door card off the next minute and finding that it was actually going to be a very challenging rot fix... My skills at steam forming ash timber are fairly limited, and while there are companies in the UK that manufacture the parts, I'm too tight to spend that kind of money. So my loose plan at this stage is to replicate the ash wood parts by cutting and laminating ply. Worth a try anyway.

Last night I had been in the shed working on one of my bikes, finished and packed up but still had half a bottle of beer left before I could leave. So I wandered over to the little 7, which has been sitting with the pistons soaking in CRC for a couple of weeks now, and as expected, I lifted it off the stands by the crank handle Had a couple more mouthfuls of my beer, lifted the head back off and gave the pistons a fairly gentle tap with a hammer and block of wood. nek minit NO FUCKING WAY! i’m chuffed to bits, it turns over beautifully smooth, and has no real marks in the bores that I’ve seen yet. We pulled the dipstick and it’s full of oil that looks better than the stuff in my daily. The original goal of “get the wheels to turn” has crept now into “let’s see if we can drive it out of the shed”

At this point the efforts to try and get the engine free'd up had been to grab the crank handle and lift the car off the axle stands while seeing if it will turn... some 2 stroke oil and CRC down the spark plug holes didn't help, so I pulled the head to see what the state of things was. I was worried that the valves might be stuck in the guides and didn't want to damage them trying to force the crank around, so I took off the manifolds and exposed the valve springs to see if they were free. All but one moved nicely so I fed the one some CRC and left it for a week or so.

Oh I’ll get it open lol having the opening front windscreen is mandatory. yup it will get painted. I’m thinking 2-tone blue or blue/black. Inspired by one I sat in in Nelson a while back. I’d quite like to do light blue body and dark blue guards with light blue interior, dark blue accents/piping etc

The more I work on this thing, the less insane I feel for having taken it on as a project. Can't wait for the day when I can drive this to the dairy to get milk.

We took the car to my dads workshop as he has a bit more gear than me for getting things free'd up, the initial goal being to get it to a state where it could be pushed around and easily moved about the limited space of my own workshop. We got it into the shed, jacked it up, squirted some CRC at the wheel studs and left it overnight. I came back the next day to start the mammoth task I was expecting to get the wheels off. Armed with a range of metric and imperial sockets, I found the nearest I had to the BSW (*shudder*) wheel nuts and gave an exploratory lean on the breaker bar for the first nut. It turned easily and then came off by hand... NO FUCKING WAY... I repeated this for all 12 nuts, yes it has 3 stud wheels! What I had set aside an afternoon for, took me less than 5 minutes. I later went to take the bonnet off it, it wasn't attached properly and only had one bolt in it. No tools required here, I undid this 82 year old bolt with my bare fingers... As I said earlier, this thing has given me a few surprises about how easy it is coming apart. This is probably a good point for an explanation... When grandad parked up a car for what he thought might be quite a lengthy period of storage, he had a habit of pouring a few gallons of waste oil over them. Makes a hell of a mess and collects every spec of dust and dirt, but it does an impressive job of keeping everything working. The 68 Rambler Rebel in the background was in the shed next to this, and everything on it moves and functions and it has minimal rust due to the oil protection. The floor pans in the austin look as though they have had a tube of grease smeared over them, but zero rust there. The only real rust on the Austin is around the spare wheel, and in the sills, where the oil didn't really get. I've been having a tinker to try and get the engine free'd up. So far I have managed to remove the head, exhaust manifold etc, all without any broken studs. Thanks grandad! In fact the only thing I have found seized up on the entire car so far is the lever for the folding front windscreen (and the engine...)

A few photos were taken and then onto the trailer and off to the workshop. Yes it fits on a fairly standard size trailer!