Popular Post anglia4 Posted July 11, 2019 Popular Post Share Posted July 11, 2019 Discussion: Lurking in the back shed at my grandads farm for all of eternity has been an old Austin 7. There was a bunch of old cars there that as kids we used to play in, but the Austin had been there for so long that it was completely buried under hoarded shit and was far too scary to play in, but was always interesting to see if you peered past the old L300, Fergie 19 & piles of old timber. As a 10 year old kid, I was smart enough to know that this one was well beyond rescue... Fast forward 20 years: Grandad has passed on and the sheds have been mostly cleaned out for the next generation of hoarding, revealing this little Austin. Now 30 year old Jeff is not half as smart as his 10 year old self... So now I look at it and think "I reckon I can save that... maybe..." 33 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post anglia4 Posted July 11, 2019 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 11, 2019 So I started to hatch a bit of a plan. Retrieving it was going to need a decent plan, the poor thing has been parked there for nearly 50 years and had literally started to become one with the earth. I started a tradme saved search for "Austin 7" just to see what kind of stuff came up. I scored a good set of wheels, and then some tires that were just round the corner from home. So armed with knowing that I had decent rolling stock, it was time to start seriously thinking about uplifting it. From the limited access we could get, the underneath of it was looking pretty rusty, so we wanted to be very careful about what we lifted off/pulled on to get it out of the shed. The plan was to put some box section through underneath it from one side to the other, and jack up the box section lifting the car on that. I was going to get it high enough using that method to then wheel the trailer underneath and lower it back down onto the trailer. Lets face it, its been 50 years, those wheels aren't going to turn... 26 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anglia4 Posted July 14, 2019 Author Share Posted July 14, 2019 So armed with a few trolley jacks, stands and a couple of lengths of pipe we got stuck in one day and cleared the path. We jacked up the car using the bits of pipe, getting ready for my plan of lifting up to roll a trailer underneath. Once it was up a gave one of the wheels a bit of a kick and the bloody thing turned! I couldn't believe what I was seeing! The last car we dragged out of this shed, which had been there half as long, needed big long bars, oxy-heat, dragging round and round the paddock etc etc to get the wheels to turn. And it had even been off the ground on blocks. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post anglia4 Posted July 14, 2019 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 14, 2019 12 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post anglia4 Posted July 14, 2019 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 14, 2019 So given this complete bombshell of how easy this was looking like being, we put a strop around the diff. Put the VX landcruiser in low ratio, and gently towed it out of the shed. To blow my mind even more, I think I jokingly said, "wouldn't it be easy to steer if I could wind the window down" at which point I grabbed the window winder and wound down the bloody window! This little car blowing my mind with how much of it still works is kind of becoming a theme. 18 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post anglia4 Posted July 14, 2019 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 14, 2019 The interior has this lovely shade of green everywhere, which somehow looked quite familiar. I asked dad if it was in fact the same shade as the benching in the kitchen at my grandparents house when I was little. The very same. Jeez grandad was resourceful. 12 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post anglia4 Posted July 14, 2019 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 14, 2019 18 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post anglia4 Posted July 14, 2019 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 14, 2019 A few photos were taken and then onto the trailer and off to the workshop. Yes it fits on a fairly standard size trailer! 26 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post anglia4 Posted July 16, 2019 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 16, 2019 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...) 27 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post anglia4 Posted July 18, 2019 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 18, 2019 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. 12 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post anglia4 Posted July 18, 2019 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 18, 2019 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” 37 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post anglia4 Posted July 22, 2019 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 22, 2019 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. 20 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anglia4 Posted July 23, 2019 Author Share Posted July 23, 2019 Ok I stand corrected on Amazing Austin fact #1... it was a caddy 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post anglia4 Posted July 26, 2019 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 26, 2019 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. 15 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anglia4 Posted August 26, 2019 Author Share Posted August 26, 2019 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"...) 2 3 1 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post anglia4 Posted August 29, 2019 Author Popular Post Share Posted August 29, 2019 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. 12 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post anglia4 Posted June 2, 2020 Author Popular Post Share Posted June 2, 2020 I left instructions at the local bike shop to collect any worn 16” tyres that they took off so that I can get this thing rolling. The local posties did a run of new tyres for their fleet of GN125’s this week, so today I delivered a box of Old Dark and collected these which look like they should do the trick! In other good news, I sold the 19’s for exactly what I paid for them, and motomart swapped the tubes and rim tape. GC’s. Also a couple of months ago I was at an engineering shop in town and spied a familiar looking gasket hanging on the wall behind the counter. I asked the salesman to bring it over for a look... you know when you move something that has been there forever, and the paint behind it isn’t faded, this was like that... Sure enough it was a head gasket for an A7. A bit of negotiation down from the retail price that had seen it stay on the shelf for decades and it is now in my shed ready to go in the car. Do you put anything on these gaskets or do they go in dry? its multi layered, seems copper and some fibre (probably asbestos haha) 15 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post anglia4 Posted June 4, 2020 Author Popular Post Share Posted June 4, 2020 I managed to fit 3 of the new tyres last night. Stupidly I left the 4th wheel at home as I had separated it from the rest to sort tyre sizes a while ago. So I bolted on one of the originals just to be able to put it on the ground. The GN tyres look pretty lo-pro and sporty on it, but I don't think they look kosher enough for when it comes to on-road-inspection time. 21 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post anglia4 Posted June 11, 2020 Author Popular Post Share Posted June 11, 2020 I found the 4th wheel and fitted it last night Also picked up the head from being hot tank dipped and fitted it with the new gasket. For my own future reference: 360 in.lbs is about 30 ft.lbs, but the internet suggest using 20 ft.lbs so as not to strip old studs out of the cylinders. Next up I'm going to whip out the engine and electrics and give the whole chassis a steam clean. I've had enough of working on such a sticky greasy thing. 18 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post anglia4 Posted July 27, 2020 Author Popular Post Share Posted July 27, 2020 The first thing that needed to come off was the crank handle. I spend 2 x shed nights fighting with it, different methods of heating, pulling, hitting etc. Its off now. And now I'm not convinced that it was supposed to come off the front as it seems. I still can't quite make sense of it. Either way, I'll just rebuild it later. Note I had to jack the front of the car up because the crane didn't fit between the wheels haha. I've never had to do that before. Interior out next and then into some serious cleaning. 23 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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