1939 Bristol K5G with a Weymann body

Well I have to say I’m a little disappointed. I give you a once in a lifetime opportunity to lie on a concrete floor in a puddle of bus dribble and the response is, er, well, less than I’d hoped for. Are you men or mice?
I say ‘men’ and I’m making a slight assumption that there aren’t that many women reading this. However I did invite a female friend of mine to come and spend some time working on GKE.

Haven’t heard from her for a while…

Anyway, I’ve been back. First job was to refit the steering drag link that I’d had at home.





You are quite right I’ve not fitted the split pins. There are quite a few bolts missing around the pedal assembly so we are going to have to go through the whole lot and check it. This is more about making sure we have all the bits and that they all fit.

Of course I needed to tweak the link positions to get it to fit so I had to pop the steering wheel on… Honest, I really did.





Whilst I was doing that Ian was working on the exhaust. Look, I have a photo of him!





I still don’t know what he looks like.

Next on my list was to fit the throttle linkage. It’s only four bolts. That won’t be difficult. Yeah right. Essentially it has to go over studs at one side and through a fixed bracket at the other. You could do one or the other but not both. I have no idea how they got it out. I think they bent the bracket. Anyway, Ian came up with the answer - remove the studs (which weren’t perfect anyway) and use bolts instead.





This got it in but it’s really tight between the engine block and the bracket on the chassis. It barely turns, and when it does it’s spinning the spherical bearings in the holders.
Here’s the bracket.





The bracket and the structure it’s fastened to is original but the structure further back is new. I’m guessing when it was rebuilt it’s not quite in the right place. Sadly it’d be a piece of cake if it was marginally slack, but marginally tight is going to be tricky to fix.
The bracket was a little bent, I’m assuming it was ‘pushed out of the way’ to get the linkage out. So I took it all to bits and then spent half an hour thumping it with hammers. It’s flat now and I’ve pushed it back a little but it’s still way too tight. Let’s come back to that.

The point of doing this is to offer the pedal against the twisted linkage to see if it’s a problem.

The pedal is connected to a piece of floor.





The gear stick goes through the hole on the left and the handbrake through the hole on the right. So let’s drop that over the levers and see what it looks like.
Er, no. Let’s not. You see that would only be possible if the handbrake and gear stick were parallel. They aren’t.





If you hook the floor over the handbrake the gear stick hole misses by about a foot. So the only way to fit the floor is to remove the gear stick from the top of the shift box.

Remember we had a problem with gear selection? While I was stuck in Oslo Ian had another go at it and got it working. But we needed to double check that it really was working and bolt everything up before doing anything else.

It did work really nicely and I spent the next little while bolting it all together properly. We’ll do the floor next time.


Ian pretty much got the exhaust on.





Look, it’s a sports bus with side pipes…




There is a small problem…
Remember I put a rubber bellows on the gear selector output shaft? It’s not going to survive.





I think we might be cutting that off.


As a last treat, while I was working in the cab the fully adjustable drivers seat was getting in my way so I wanted rid of it.





Judging by the electrical cables at the side of it I assume it’s power adjusted. I’ve also heard that it’s heated. But only by the drivers bottom when he sits on it. Again, not wishing to make assumptions about the sex of the drivers but I guess in 1939 the bottom would have belonged to a bloke.
That said, when all the men went off to fight for the glory of King and Country (a rather strange phrase that I mentally translate as “went off to get shot”) did they bring in women bus drivers? I’ve never heard of it happening but I can’t see why it wouldn’t. Does anybody know?
Back in the ’80s I knew a very slightly built lass called Yvette who did many hours in the cab of Lodekka. That had the advantage of a semi-automatic gearbox but it did not have power steering. She managed just fine with it despite looking like she’d blow away in a stiff Yorkshire breeze.

Anyway, the point was that in order to get the bolts out of the seat I had to drop the electrical box.





Which gives us a chance to look inside it.





I think the big black thingy is the regulator for the dynamo. I’m guessing we’ll have to work through all this lot and make sure it’s ok before we wire it up. Just at the moment the switches hardly move. But that might just mean I need to be a little bit firmer with them. A bit more ‘Yvette’ and a bit less ‘James’.

James

Another day in Maidstone another day spent doubled up in the cab of GKE68. You know, it doesn’t look like anything has changed. In fact I think we’ve taken even more bits off rather than putting them on. We do, however, have a plan.

Where shall we start our story?
Let’s start in the middle. It’s less complex than the beginning. I’m not sure how I’m going to write the beginning so starting in the middle seems like a good beginning.
Are you keeping up?


As we have the gear selector working I needed to tighten all the nuts. One of them was inaccessible because the exhaust down pipe was in the way. We only put it on last time and it’s already in the way.
So I loosened the downpipe and the manifolds enough to wiggle them out of the way of my nuts. You know what I mean.

Except… The manifolds were already pretty loose.





Here’s the question… If the manifolds were never properly fitted do they have gaskets on them? Even if gaskets had been fitted GKE has been dragged around Kent a few times and they could well have just dropped out. Well, with the manifolds slightly loose I could almost get my finger up the back and couldn’t feel any gaskets. Hmmmm.

Ok, let’s just take them off and find out for sure. It’s only 5 nuts and spreader bars to remove them.





Oh, and half the cab interior also has to come out. I couldn’t be bothered with that and they did slide back far enough to do a proper inspection. Indeed two of the exhaust gaskets fell out.





The other three were still in position. And there are no inlet gaskets.
So how, I hear you ask, do you prevent gaps between the inlet and the head from sucking unfiltered air in?
Well, remember it’s a diesel so there is no throttle and no inlet vacuum to worry about. No turbo either so no pressure deal with. But also, in 1938, Gardner had a novel way dealing with the potential issue of unfiltered air getting sucked in through gaps in the manifolds. They just didn’t fit air filters so it didn’t matter.

The inlet comes over the rocker covers. Well, while trying to bolt it back together I noticed that the rocker covers aren’t tight either. The bolts are bottomed in their holes and haven’t touched the covers.
Great, another job for another day.

We'll do the first part of the story in the next post. Or maybe the last part... What do you reckon?

Given how big the thing is it's surprising how tight space is. There is a long twisting vacuum pipe to fit soon and I do wonder how much we'll need to take off to get it in. Probably nothing, it'll just drop in.

There is obviously provision for air filters. It breathes through these openings cast into the rocker covers...





I've seen photos where an elbow is bolted to those intakes with a pancake air filter on the top. And there is space under the bonnet to fit them. They just weren't fitted. Clearly they were not thought to be important in the UK.

Interesting thought about export models. I'm not sure if Bristol had much of an export market. Bristol got merged into Leyland Buses eventually and I know Leyland put a lot of effort into exports. I'm not sure if Gardner sold abroad either. I do remember reading that Gardner engines were in short supply at times but that could have been because they were flogging them all abroad.

I might have to read up about Gardner. They were ubiquitous, the engine of choice for many commercial vehicle, industrial, and marine applications. And then in a fairly short space of time completely failed to exist.

Gardner engines sold well all over (particularly in the commonwealth), they were/are well regarded for reliability. Unfortunately, like a lot of British industrial sectors, they didn't keep up with the competition.
High powered, high revving turbocharged diesels from the likes of Cummins and Rolls Royce were out competing them for the domestic truck market.
Trying to compete with the Swedes and European offerings, their engines didn't take well to turbos, quickly looking antiquated. (Look at a late 70s LX and it won't differ too much from your 30s one).
They are in demand for marine applications still, and for years were used by showmen to power generators long after the lorries they were fitted in reached the end of their working lives.

And they sound bloody lovely.

Now that we’ve done the middle part of the story first and the first part in the middle, and then had a diversion into other questions, I guess we should do the last part, er, what’s left? I do believe we should do it last.

Back to that photo of the throttle linkage.





See the blue arrow on the left of the linkage? That’s supposed to connect to the bit with the orange arrow. Well that’s not going to happen. It turns out that the shaft that runs across the front of the engine is on backwards too.





So the long, orange indicated link should be where the short, light blue indicated link is and visa versa. But also it can’t possibly work with the arms at 90 degrees to each other. They actual need to be at 180 degrees.
There’s only one thing to do at a time like this. We turned it round and put the arms on at 180 degrees to each other. You can’t quite see it but the one on the far end points roughly downwards now.





So here’s a question, how did somebody manage to get one of the arms on in the wrong orientation? I strongly suspect this is a question we’ll be revisiting shortly. Mostly because the linkage is in my garage where it’ll require some fettling.

James

It looks like that roof panel has come into contact with a few branches, lampposts, and bridges

glass beads ? Looks great

I tend stick with glass beads as well, hard work with heavy corrosion but leaves a really nice finish on all the metals I've tried, also good for etching glass

media blasting is the more modern way, can be problematic with tempered glass, the old fashioned was Hydroflouric Acid, some seriously dodgy sh-t, we used to use it for dissolving pyrex glass casting cores in magnesium, it would dissolve the complex cores but not attack the magnesium,