Sunday 3 November 2013

Left rear quarter complete

Getting there...
 



 
And the 'finished' product: left rear quarter complete:
The spare wheel lid hasn't been on this car since before I got it :-)

 

Monday 29 July 2013

Left rear quarter

My carpenter came over last weekend - either I didn't give him enough or too much beer...
Anyway, these pieces hold the spare wheel lid and are thoroughly rotten. 


 
While waiting for the carpenter to sleep off his hangover, I've replaced loads of rust with new sheet metal and a first bit of paint.  Almost all sheet metal in the rear quarter, i.e. boot floor (three layers), inner wheel well, and the outside panel have been replaced.


Without wooden supports:

And with the wooden supports back in place:

Inside the trunk, showing the tools storage bay with new floor.  While grinding off excess welds, this caused a bit of a fire - a spark must have somehow gotten to the inside of the rear seat upholstery and started causing a bit of smoke there.  It took 10 liters of water to kill it....

The wing is progressing slowly, lots of fittings and adjustments but starting to look good!

Friday 12 July 2013

New supplies and toys

Work's still ong, but in the mean time I've picked up a few pieces of ash.  Hope my faithful sidekick with much more feeling for woodworking than I have is back soon!
 
And some new toys (uhhh tools).  The lowest plyers are specially designed for (un)folding the doorskin around the frame and work like magic!  Shame I only bought them after already having done two doors.  Guess I need more cars ;-)
 

Monday 3 June 2013

Left rear fender Mk3

The inner fender now mostly done, it's time to tackle the fender/wing itself.  Most people would consider this a lost cause, and rightly so...  It's pretty horrific:


Plan of attack: first make a new mounting plate.  Now that the inner fender is repaired, this can be bolted onto the car and in that way, provide the exact shape the fender should follow.  After that, I'll repair the fender bit by bit.  The toughest bit seems to me to be the curved edge at the bottom of the wing. 
The front wings have a wire edge, the rear wings both have a more simple curved edge.  I wonder which is authentic...


I can't help doing several things at the same time.  I've already been working on removing the *bleep* window winder...
to be able to remove the door card to get at this:
The rod connecting the door to the pillar has been bent out of the way for ages, and the spring loaded mechanism behind it apparently jammed.  I'll get to it, just give me time!

Tuesday 30 April 2013

Register status

For some specific Marks I've been trying to keep a detailed record of the extant cars.  Current number of cars that I know or believe to still be around:

Humber Pullman Mark II: 8
Humber Pullman Mark III: 16
Humber Pullman Mark IV: 5

Humber Super Snipe Mark II: 21
Humber Super Snipe Mark III: 28

If you have a Humber I'd like to hear about it! 

Humber Pullman Mk III

I've been demotivated slightly by the state of the trunk section of the Super Snipe.  After several days of hammering away, the fit of the two boot lids is relatively ok, but now I need to start fabricating new pieces for which I have no pattern.

Consequence: time to think things over a bit (I need quite a bit of that :-)) and to tackle a job I've been postponing for two years now: the left inner fender of my Mk III Pullman. 
The Mark III Pullman is the first Humber I purchased, three or four years ago.  The front 50% of this car has had the vast majority of work done.  The engine runs smoothly with new piston rings, the body work has been almost completely done, chassis painted, brake parts replaced, etc.  By far the biggest job was the left front wing, which I sent out for repairs.  Considering that single wing alone cost me as much to have repaired as the whole car, and considering even more so that I'm so stubborn that I want to do everything myself, I did the other wing myself.  Now the rear 50%.  The two wings are clearly the largest job, for the rest it's only replacing the wooden frame around the boot lid.  All in all, I estimate that within 9 months I can have the car back on the road - if only I didn't also spend time on the other cars.


Why did I postpone this job so long?  Basically because I did not have access to the inside of this section.  I don't want to remove all the upholstery if I can avoid it.  Turns out that I can avoid it quite easily, no major problems in the end:




Now to continue along the wheel well with the smaller repair pieces.

The fender itself is in quite poor shape.  I need to replace most of the foldover, then place a new attachment strip on the inside of that, and also repair the filler well - that's the easy part.
On the right the Pullman fender, on the left the Super Snipe fender.  These have all really suffered over the years...
 

Monday 8 April 2013

Trunk area - stripping

Spent two or three days stripping the rear section.  Turns out there really is nothing either original or properly aligned.  The lower horizontal cross section is banged up and missing large sections.  I guess the good news is that I can work from scratch, the bad news is I haven't got a clue how to start...  It'll have to start with the outside of the cross section so that the spare wheel cover will fit properly again, then the inside box section.  Then work from there - sounds simple, ehh?

 
 
 Came across something nice on EBay as well:
 

Friday 5 April 2013

Prep work

Stripping the rear of upholstery, panels, and woodwork (warned you this blog could be boring and tedious...).
The misalignment on the spare wheel cover is due to a dent lower left section of the body work.  No surprise, as this is a brazed on piece of junk.





Wednesday 3 April 2013

Left rear door, part 3

Turns out that with a few hours of very careful hammering, I was able to shrink the weld and get a reasonably well line-out door.  Part of the trick was to remove all the excess weld on the inside of the panel.  See below



The average deviation is less than 1 mm, and when I get a better flat panel hammer I'll continue to remove some of the bumps.  But bottom line: it's going in the right direction without a new repair piece :-)
So what is the next project area?  The basic plan is to refabricate the rear-most box area, it is completely rotten and in addition, it covers the lower rear outside panel (the part with the dents).  To knock the dents out, you need to cut out the box section completely.  Luckily I have Mrs Erlands' restoration log, which covers the exact same procedure. The trunk:



A few repair pieces and a severely dented rear section.



You're not supposed to have external lighting here.  But the section looks much easier to attack now that all the junk and cardboard panels are gone.

Left rear corner.


And from below.


Oops, spare wheel cover doesn't quite line up.  Fitting the top section of the trunk lid shows it is most likely the spare wheel cover that's out of line, since the top part fits properly.  I'll need to spend some time measuring to confirm this.

 


 


 

Tuesday 2 April 2013

Left rear door

I guess it should have been expected, but I didn't manage to weld the skin back together without it buckling more than I consider acceptable.  Two options: try to hammer it out, at the risk that I don't do it well enough and cause more stretching than shrinking; or to cut the repair piece (which is in far worse shape than the original part of the skin) and some of the original out and make my own.  The second option is the better one...



Sunday 31 March 2013

Left rear door

Seemed as if I only needed to replace the lower 10 cm of the inner frame, as a new section of skin had already been welded in.  And for a change, it looked quite well done.  Not.  The smallest application of heat caused buckling with a bump up to half a cm.  I tried Jeroen's newly taught skills on it, but in the end I cut through the old weld because there wasn't enough room for any of my anvils on the sides, pulled the two pieces together, and have started tacking them together.  Almost two mm's were cut out - probably way too much for my new shrinking skills to handle.
Most of the clamps already removed.  NB door is upside down :-)

(relatively) flat.  Believe me.

Saturday 30 March 2013

First steps

Plan: Body work, front to back.  Missing metal to be replaced, as close to original as I can get it.  Sounds simple, ehh?

This is the leading edge of the body, i.e. the drivers left foot.  The rot is extensive because it's covered by the wing and the running board. 
As I'm writing this some months after the work has been done: 'Work in progress':

The body is similar all around.
The left rear wing was almost completely detached from the car - three layers have rusted away: wing flange, outside body, and inner wheel well.  This will be an interesting part to fix...

The left front door isn't too nice either.  The frame has had a new part brazed onto it, meaning rot has simply continued on the skin.  Bottom line: lowest 5/10 cm of both skin and frame must be and have been replaced.




 
And the rebuilt door has been fitted.  Progress so far: both front wings, bonnet, radiator cowling, left inner and outer doorsill, both left doors.  All parts are basically ready for final sanding before a layer of primer can be sprayed on.

By the way, the door hinges are really really really tough to remove.