1980 Austin Princess mild custom - 1951 Lanchester LD10

Sometimes I do the major bits first. Remember how much welding I had to do on the BX before I could even drive it? Or the burst LHM pipes that needed replacing?

Fact is, major jobs are just that and you can't always dive straight into them for a variety of reason, usually cost and space. Every car is different and a lot of the time the cars I'm working on are awkward to get parts for, especially mechanically, so trying to do a major job can mean the car sat idle for long periods. Throw in some life events and it gets more awkward, like when I managed to bend all the valves in the Princess' engine right before moving house.

There's also what I enjoy, and working on engines and much of the 'major bits' are often what I don't enjoy. Sourcing bits of trim, polishing paint, cleaning interiors, all that stuff I enjoy and helps familiarise me with the project better than, say, rebuilding an engine.

This is a hobby and something I do for fun so I need to work in a way that keeps me personally engaged, especially if I'm waiting for parts or having a frustrating time with one of the bigger jobs.

I'll use the Lanchester as an example of my work process, it's a bit simpler since it's a new arrival.

Inspection - go through everything, see what you've got and what you can see is immediately missing or not.

First Clean - this is to both familiarise myself with any damage on the car and to make it more pleasant to interact with. An interior clean is especially useful for finding any bits of history or parts that you might have missed on the inspection

Systems check - get a good idea of what is and isn't working, generally this is something I do for electrical items, but also applies to things like brakes and getting the engine to fire

First Start - as it sounds. Try and get the car to run and identify issues

Order parts/ask questions - This is the point where I have a rough idea of what's right and wrong with the car. I can ask questions about anything that's confused me (which happens a lot) and put in orders for a combination of important and trivial items to keep the interest in the project

Improve - while waiting for parts I can look at what I can be doing to improve the car. This can be more cleaning, repairing broken items, refitting trim... all the busy work. This is when it can look like I'm prioritising small stuff over big stuff and when what's often happening is parts are being hunted, ordered, or saved up for. This is the stage where it looks like my priorities are all over the place when, in reality, I'm managing what resources I do have to the best effect

Repair - new parts have arrived, and we can go through and repair and diagnose further, attempt to get the car running properly, identify more issues and go back to the order parts/ask questions stage. At the moment we're in the improve stage of the project while waiting for the big expenses like the wiring loom to arrive and useful things like the tyres to get here.

The complication to this process comes in when I'm also using the car, as with the Princess, because then I have to work around keeping the car mobile as much as possible since it's the vehicle I'm relying on. That's when it really can look like my priorities are a mess, especially if I'm buying some little trinket when I've got welding to be getting on with. Sometimes, you just need something that makes you feel happy about the project, whatever it is, and that can be something as silly as buying your car some little period accessory. It doesn't affect the money or time being spent negatively, it just makes you feel better.

All of this, which is a much longer response than I intended, really points out how differently everyone works. I know some folks like to get a project and take it to bits, repairing and replacing as they build it back up. Others like to only get the engine running at the expense of everything else, even safety concerns. Some like to crack on doing all the welding. Others like to buy lots of stickers and lights and all manner of doodads. Everyone's approach is different because everyone's enjoyment of the process is different, no one approach is particularly wrong and, depending on your end goal, some approaches are more efficient than others.

For me, this is just how I do things.

I understand Vulgalor's approach, since I have been working at home finding time to do the jobs which can be broken down into 15 or 30 minute chunks when I take a break for lunch etc makes it far easier to make progress than having to find several hours to put aside for a major job. At the end of the day it's all progress.

I assume these plastic collars are a reasonably modern invention. What would have originaly been used? Or did the valve stems just get worn?
I have previously owned a car that would have had this issue (1949 ford) but I can't remember this situation, too long ago!

That's actually a good point, another obstacle to me doing things differently is that I'm self employed and work nights, time management can be a bit of a nightmare because even though I do get a weekend, because I lose the first half of the day to being asleep it really puts a crimp in doing the big jobs.  That's balanced out by usually having time free in the early afternoon before work.  It's always a battle against the clock, regardless.  When you don't finish work some days until 2am it's not like you can just wake up earlier to get more done, and when you are really awake and want to do stuff you can't because nobody wants to hear an angle grinder or whatever going at that hour.

Modern valve holes are 11.5mm, in the 1940's & 50's many were 16mm & tubes had a larger diameter valve to suit, the latter were still available 20 years ago however I do not see them listed anymore hence the use of plastic collars, for more info' see

www.blockleytyre.com/technical/valve-stem-diameters-and-uses

i use an old land rover innertube to make rubber gaskets. very handy

jambo to all, 

in the old day's the valve stem would be bigger in dia, so no need of the plastic collar's....

Had a little free time at lunch to do some more tinkering, encouraged by some new parts arriving, namely the sidelight medallions, replacement washer bottle, and the new carburettor service kit. It took a while to find out what the medallions were actually called. The Lanchester uses Lucas LD109A sidelights and on our car at least, comes equipped with the little red transparent insert so that you can see when the sidelights are on from inside the car. There's no dashboard telltale as you'd get in a modern car so this is quite a neat solution in theory. One side is present and dull, the other side was missing. New ones are available again from www.s-v-c.co.uk/ for not very much. We ordered a pair but the old one that's still in the lamp is quite firmly attached so we opted not to replace it. A little WD40 helped fit the new lens, they're a very tight fit and you have to push down on opposing sides equally to get them to snap into place.






The other item, from burlen.co.uk/ was the carburettor service kit which contains all the parts we should need to clean up our carburettor. Removal was a little tricky without being too frustrating. I opted to undo the bolt for the throttle linkage rather than unclipping the ball and socket since I was less likely to lose the small clip. Then there's two nuts that hold the carburettor to the manifold, the choke cable locking screw, and a fitting for what I believe is the vacuum advance line. I had to be very careful with the latter, I opted to unscrew the carburettor from the line because the two pieces on the end of the line were quite firmly attached to one another and the pipe was trying to twist. Some heat and penetrating fluid may get these components undone properly. The fittings look to be brass while the pipe is copper, so it's all very soft and easy to damage.


The carburettor itself isn't too dirty, all things considered. The heatshield is the dirtiest item due to being covered in barn dust more than anything, and while the carburettor does have some oily deposits, it's far from the worst I've ever encountered and should clean up very well. I shall be taking lots of reference pictures as I go along with this carburettor, I'm only really familiar with SU types and while this one does look very simple, I don't want to make a silly mistake by not taking care.




The heat shield isn't the original, someone has crafted a sheet of aluminium into a suitable sized square, folding two edges over so there's no sharp bits. I can't see any reason to replace this shield so I've just cleaned it and will reinstate it.


Our last item of note today is the NOS (or so I thought) washer bottle. It is a direct replacement for the one in the car, though I question the NOS credentials as it has clearly been fitted to a car previously. I gave it a rudimentary clean and compared it to the original, aside from a slightly squarer profile to the top of the bottle, all of the other dimensions are the same.


I was most disappointed by the angle grinder gouge out of the top corner. This wasn't shown in the listing. Had the bottle not been so cheap I would have kicked up a fuss, as it is it was very cheap and doesn't leak, so it'll have to do.


Aside from not having a massive crack, the new bottle has the added advantage that the cap actually clicks into place properly. I didn't bother removing what's left of the original sticker, there wasn't really much point, and it looks fine in the engine bay as is.


A small update this time, and mostly busy work. Hopefully the next update will be the carburettor rebuild and very soon we'll have some new tyres going on.

glenanderson stopped by today with the lovely tyres and other goodies kindly sent from @grumpynorthener and Sharon, via samta22 and I'm grateful to you all for offering your time and resources, very much looking forward to getting these tyres on the car as soon as the new inner tubes turn up.

Carburettor is cooking away in the ultrasonic cleaner and I'm checking on that, swapping parts and fluid in and out as necessary, while I do my regular job. I'll do a full update later, but what I can tell you now is that the carburettor very much needed a clean and there was sediment in the float bowl that was chunky enough to block up jets so hopefully this will improve the idling issue.