1980 Austin Princess mild custom - 1951 Lanchester LD10

I know you've said before that quite a few of your neighbours have stopped by for an "I remember" type chats.
How are they with the controlled disassembly of the latest acquisition?

That's quite an advanced design chassis for 1951.
Bears a few similarities to mine (X brace, particularly). That should be quite a mild mannered little car to drive.

True, mine can trace roots back to the thirties. Many post-war designs are likely to have "this is a bit better based on what we did before" type engineering.

America going to eat a second time in a decade did create w number of changes though. English cars started to reflect that by the sixties, for sure.

The wiring on the bulkhead does help since it shows the proper routing and while someone has chopped off the ignition switch and some of the instruments before we got the car, everything else is there. On the assumption that things were correctly connected, I've got the reference of wires going to the voltage regulator too, and the proper wiring arrangement where the parts of the harness meet in the boot corner. I do think we got to the bottom of the wiring problems on ours as it happens, it'll just be good to have some extra reference from this donor to compare and see where we're at with things.

The one bit of wiring the donor doesn't have is the run from the bulkhead on the engine bay side to the headlights and horns, balanced out by having the remains of a wiring P-clip on the bottom of the radiator grille shell telling me where the harness should be secured on the front of the car which is something I wasn't sure of.

Something the donor did highlight was just why there's all the connectors on the harness in the boot and at the bulkhead. It looks like the chassis and running gear was completed as one unit, with the associated wiring for the engine and front lights while at the same time the body and wiring for things like the dash instruments, interior light, and rear lights was assembled. That gives you two fully wired units you can bolt together and just connect up rather than having to struggling feeding a non-split loom through everything once assembled. I daresay it must have saved a lot of time in construction since it's a lot easier to get to the harness in the chassis with the body off than it is with the body on.

The harness from the donor is too far gone to re-use, and complete enough to be a reference for most of the harness. I've been trying to piece together a concise little video and set of images to explain the wiring routes and how it should be, plus what we've changed from standard for ours, plus the absolute nightmare it arrived with. It's just going to take a lot of time to piece everything together and keep it cohesive so it's an easily understood nugget of media.

That would be a nice thing to do with the bits. I have had many trailers through the years, a lot of which were home-brewed affairs that weighed a considerable amount due to their amateur construction and use of reclaimed car axles etc. As far as I can remember, using reclaimed car running gear (ie the back of an old banger and something nailed together out of old pallets) has actually been illegal for a very long time. I currently have a little unbraked Anssems 750kg trailer that's so light and manoevrable when it's empty it's hard to believe. I'd certainly advise getting something similar as a starting point over the cheaper Erde type tinplate ones; although even one of those would be a good candidate for a "backdate". Some stud adapters to get the wheels bolted up, the Lanchester wings modified to fit, some period lights and reflectors and a quick coat of paint to match the car would be a really useful and "period" looking tool.

I really need to get my backside into gear with mine, as I have been planning on fitting larger 14" rims to it, to match the ones on my big twin-axle braked trailer and give me the convenience of one spare tyre fits whatever I am towing, as well as to raise the ride height of it to sit a little better behind the Land-Rover as it's a little nose-high even with the hitch at its lowest. 

A little bit of Princess news. Over the last however long it's been I've been keeping an eye out for and collecting panels I need for it. For the first time since buying the car I finally found a rear arch repair panel, something that is incredible difficult to find now. Best of all, even though it's a pattern piece it fits exceptionally well.



This saves me a whole world of effort and time and frustration because I don't have to make any of these complicated shapes. This, with the front arch repair panel for the passenger side (acquired in Lincolnshire), the full front wing for the driver's side (acquired in Scotland), and the full outer sill for whichever side I need it will repair all of the areas left needing attention. The Princess is far from rotten and would definitely be fine for a while longer, I just want to fix all of this while it's not so bad so it's easier to do and longer lasting.

I don't know when I'll be doing the bodywork on the Princess, only that I will eventually. It's only really the rear brakes being unfinished that's keeping the car off the road at the moment, something I'm stretched too thin financially to do anything about just at the moment. It'll all come together eventually.

9" Girling drums which are on other rear wheel drive cars but it seems the front wheel drive application is unique to Princess and Ambassador. It's not even shared with the Maxi.

That's not the problem. The problem is I don't have a brake flaring kit or new unions to reconnect everything and I'm completely wiped out at the moment financially so can't get a kit either. A few more weeks and I should be able to get the tools I need and get it done though, providing nothing else expensive metaphorically hurls itself off a cliff.

Cheapest I can find is here;

flare tool

Next best here;
same tool

It's been a busy day today, doing my best to get more of the donor gone through. The wiring harness that runs through the chassis was proving difficult to remove so instead I removed all the other wiring which will be hopefully useful for reference for later. The battery cable was also removed, it's not really in good enough shape to use again but is complete so like the wiring harness will be very useful for reference when ordering parts to make a new one.


Some smaller items like clips and bits of the chassis ID tags that had self-removed were rescued, as was the brake light switch. Amazingly, the one on the donor car isn't seized and only has minor surface corrosion, even the rubber gasket is in good shape. Once I've cleaned and tested it to make sure it's good, I'll be fitting that to our main Lanchester in place of the dodgy plastic switch that doesn't seem to work.




All of the front suspension has now been liberated, along with the main front-to-rear brake rod. I had intended to then remove the rear axle but I was done with fighting rusty bolts and skinning my knuckles so changed tack.


With the front suspension removed it was very easy for Pat and I to pick up the front of the chassis and just move it to the new location. The only thing that made that difficult is the rear wheels won't roll. This could be a lack of weight so it's just easier for the ancient tyres to skid than roll. It could be that because I've removed the handbrake cable and mechanism, and the front-to-back brake rod that the brakes are on, or it could be that this was the first time we'd tried to roll the car forwards and something is broken meaning the rear wheels only roll backwards. I don't know. It didn't matter anyway, because there was so little weight we could just drag the thing to the new spot to free up the garage and get the good Lanchester out.


The main reason I wanted to do this was some metal drip trays I'd been keeping on a stack of wheels had fallen off without any input from anything, apparently, and I couldn't get in to sort it out without getting the Lanchester out of the garage, which of course I couldn't do with the donor blocking the way. Turns out some of my plastic storage boxes are collapsing, had shoved against the stack of tyres moving them far enough that the metal trays fell off. I suppose I better spring clean the garage then.


Much better! I've relocated the tyre stack, shuffled all my rubbish... er... valuable and rare spares.. about and gained a foot or so of extra width and length to the useable space in the tiny garage. That's quite an achievement. I even threw some things away! What I didn't do was go through every single box and organise things because the boxes are fragile, I only had so much time, and I can't afford the racking I want to put in the garage to solve my storage issue. The good Lanchester is way easier to get in and out of the garage now we've got that extra space to play with, and I can get to stuff easier too because there's room to walk down the side of the car at last.


Good Lanchester out of the garage and I'm happy to report no signs of active woodworm, moths, or other pests. Aside from some dust, all looks well. As a little treat and to keep them from getting accidentally damaged, I boshed the three trim rings that came with the donor car on our car. These rings will get the oxalic acid treatment followed by a coat of lacquer or similar to keep them from completely dissolving. It would be nice to find a fourth scruffy one to match, for now these will do.


Looking forward to being able to dig into KKV again soon and get things moving once more now the donor car is properly out of the way. Still more to remove from the donor of course, there's just less pressure now since we've got to wait up to another month before we can chase the DVLA about the V5.