Raumer's Heavy Vehicles - Unipower Bodywork

Agreed, a common theme for the British Motor Industry.

There is still a lot of manufacturing in this country, a lot more than people give it credit for. Most of the mass manufacturing has gone but at the cutting edge there is still a lot. Companies like Taylor Hobson, Renishaw, Delphi (diesel), Rolls Royce (not car) etc... still produce the majority of their products here.

Having been brought up ,in what was then rural North Worcestershire, and been indoctrinated with the saying, "if  yow cor get it in the black country, nobody mecks it", which was literally the truth.

Then bit by bit the major players, for various reasons, closed shop and down the pan things went.

I did establish a list of one-man band outfits, who were craftsmen in their own right, and it was possible to get most things made as one-off jobs.  On moving to rural North Norfolk, it has taken a lot longer to find similar contacts, but they are here; hiding away in small workshops tucked in farmer's yards; even an old mushroom works, where there about 70 - 80 units working away in what are almost poly-tunnels on steroids, and many more.  I business that I use quite often, specialises in stainless steel/aluminium/titanium welding.  He has attracted one car from the USA for work to be done; some from Europe; a large following of UK based owners of American cars;plus all of the exotic cars that you think off, and more.  Trades as ATM Engineering, Beeston.  So yes we do have some manufacturing base, just smaller.  Hey ho.

Finally the door handles I mentioned a couple of pages ago have turned up. norfolkshire gets the bonus points for identifying the handles and getting it spot on! Step by step details below.



First of all a comparison of the original door handle that was fitted on the left and the new one on the right. As you can see very close in both size and style.




The old one fitted. You can just see the tab that locates the threaded section of the door handle. The new door handle uses two flats instead.



The pan that the handle fits into. This is after I had filed the tab down so that the new door handle would fit. This also creates a flat to hold it into position.



View from behind with the new door handle fitted.



Finally a photo of the new handle fitted to the pan and mounted on the Unipower. Looks the same as the old one. If I didn't have the original for comparison I'm not sure I'd spot the difference.

The passenger side one fits just as well. Whilst I've got the pans & handles off I'm giving them a clean up and repaint. Still probably a few years away from getting the whole Unipower repainted but always good to get the awkward parts done as I go along.

These door handles are also used on Scammell Constructors plus other classic lorries. So I'll pass the details on to the other owners groups. Should help out a few more projects.

On to probably the most time consuming part of any restoration - making a wiring loom. The amount of time taken in thinking it through and planning it out I find is far longer than doing anything else. Especially as I tend to come up with the diagram from scratch rather than copying the vehicles existing one. Mainly because most of the vehicles we have there aren't wiring diagrams for and we add lots of additional items on.

So far we have done wiring looms for 5 vehicles, 3 will crop up on this thread and my Landrover one. The other two vehicles were an Imp and a Davrian race car. The Davrian being the easiest with very few electrical items on it. Because of this we have a nice big box of the different reels of wire, connectors and other bits. I do have one box with all of the tools and bits we normally need for finding and fixing electrical faults. An instrument screw driver, multimeter and a piece of emery paper being the most used items. I'm sure 90% of electrical faults are dodgy earths!

I'll start with the rewire of the Rigid 6, mainly because I can't find any photos of when I did the Unipower. Although I did do the two of them together. And I haven't got many photos of the R6 rewire, but at least enough to start with.

First big positive with the R6 is that it has an original fitment fuse box! I didn't know that vehicles this early had fuses.


The nice stylish dash. And underneath the silver cover in the centre -



A fuse box. 6 fuse positions that use fuse wire. On the back of the silver cover is a holder for spare pieces. Above the fuse positions you can see five toggle switches and the contacts they switch in to. Sadly I don't have any more photos of this set up. But very neat and easy to get to.

On to the actual rewire. The first thing we did was to come up with a list of items we needed to wire in and what switches were already in place.



After that it was time to come up with a diagram to work from. Done in powerpoint and just has the basic details.



We did the dash wiring and most of the connectors sat in the living room at home. But for the lengths we did them on the vehicle. Especially on a 30ft long vehicle it's a lot easier to feed the wire through and then cut to length. To cover the wiring we use split braided sleeve. This looks good, offers good protection and has the advantage that it is easy to add another wire in easily. We also used superseal connectors for things like the light connections. Easy to take apart and reliable. All hide out of sight so still looks original.

Originally the Scammell was built with no indicators, no brake lights and only oil front sidelights. For safety we decided it was a good idea to add some modern led lights to cover these functions on top of the original lights.

At the rear we did it by taking all of the rear wires in to a fuse box mounted in the chassis rail. Then splitting to go to the original rear side lights and to go to a trailer socket. Then we made up a trailer board to sit across the back.



This is first fit so the wiring is very messy. But you can see the trailer connector and the highly visible trailer board. It's on a couple of brackets so it is easily removed at shows. Then the trailer socket tucks up in to the chassis. Gives us high visibility on road and originality when parked up.

On to the front. We made up a pair of brackets to mount led side lights and indicators. The idea was to make them removalable and to help we fitted 3 pin superseal connectors.



They are not that noticeable so we will change the brackets and make them a permanent fit. Makes a huge difference to driving on the road.

I'll take some more photos of the wiring loom in place and some of the details in the next couple of days. Plus at some point we need to remake the rear trailer board, we had a minor accident with it. But the idea works.

The other thing that is great about the modern LED stuff is how little juice they need, so extra lights don’t add up to a lot. Redid our trailer with led bulbs as the LR has a bodged trailer connector with no relays which solved the issue with indicators. Only issue they spit out is needing an electronic relay.
Nice progress, the tractor needs a rewire but not high up the list, as a new battery and a trickle charger masks the Dynamo not working pretty well - the joy of old diesels that need no electricity to run.
Keep the updates coming different and interesting.
James

Handles look smart, looking forward to seeing the rest of it matching

I hadn't seen the fuse box on the R6 before (not with the cover off anyway), that's unusually user friendly for a Scammell! And rather nice too.

A few more photos of the R6 wiring and a few bits I had forgotten.

First of all a view of the trailer plug tucked up in the chassis.



Does still need tidying up, in my defence I did finish the rewire on the last free day I had before it went out to it's first & so far only show in our ownership. You can also see an earthing block that we fitted to make the rear wiring easier. The earth block is screwed in to a wooden part of the body. The R6 has some light fittings that are made of wood. Seemed odd initially but wood is an insulator and was readily available whereas there were a limited number of plastics at the time.

Next is a shot of the two electrical junction boxes.



There is the original Lucas round connection box that has the side lights and indicators going through it. The fused box is for the brake lights. One wire coming in and then splitting out for the two rear lights & the trailer board. Again I do need to still tidy it all up and heat shrink the connectors on. You can also see the coiled up wire. This is for the original rear sidelights that we have not yet refurbished and refitted.

And as we are talking about brake lights. Here is the brake switch.



Nothing was originally fitted so time for a bit of ingenuity. The previous owner had a brake switch like this fitted at some point but nothing was there when we got it. The switch is a Lucas one that just relies on the centre strip being pulled. This makes a contact between the incoming voltage and the output to the lights. The spring stops the movement pulling the switch apart. The jubilee clip is on the main brake rod that runs to the rear wheels from an air actuator. Works well and is simple to check that it is working.

One thing we didn't have was an indicator switch. There was a spare hole in the dash so we have mounted the indicator switch there.



The switch is a bit modern but we had it lying around. Again at some point we'll redo this bit. But for the time being it works.

A better view of the dash showing the main switches and the etched labels for them.



An example of how the finished bits of wiring look. This is the various bundles of wires going down from the dash and through the floor. Again the loose wires need tidying up, this is becoming a common theme!



And a really neat bit of wiring. This is the drivers side wiper motor, no wiper motor fitted to the passenger side.



I'll do one more post on the wiring later showing the battery setup.

They're not Phillips screws but Pozidriv, that's why...

I did notice, after I posted. Pozidrive patented in 1962 by GKN, way too modern.