Singer Owner November/December 2007

Roadster Repairs - Bolting the gearbox in place

Ashley Crossland

You will recall that I have another "back garden car" on the go, and the last episode of Roadster Repairs left me to finally bolt down the feet of the 4AD gearbox on the 4AB cross-member that I was marrying it up to. The differences between a 4AD and 4AB chassis are only minor, but the one significant difference is with the cross-member for the rear of the gearbox. Fortunately the 4AD feet do come over the 4AB cross-member even though it is a bit different in shape, but the main point is that the rail is set lower down in the chassis. I decided to keep the 4AB chassis rail, but this would then be one of those things that anyone in the Roadster team would be able to spot and identify the Roadster's real parentage.

So the gearbox feet needed jacking up a bit on the 4AB chassis rail, and this made it easy to do a homemade gearbox rubber mounting with some discs of half-inch thick sheet rubber. It just needed two new 3/8" holes drilling in the rail to match the feet centres - these go equidistant about the car's centreline. So I'm relatively happy about the positioning, but I must eventually make the bolts secure from loosening, but just in case there is some adjustment to do, I'll leave that for a later date.

With the gearbox now "firmly" fixed, I could turn to the front to get the cylinder head on etc. Thankfully I found that I had overhauled the cylinder head previously and it had never been used. To get the timing chain fitted followed by the timing case cover meant taking off the water pump and front engine bearer. I didn't dismantle anything on the cylinder head, but it looked to have a new camshaft, new springs, but re-used valves. I fitted a new "thin" Coopers cylinder head gasket and progressively torqued up new cylinder head nuts to 60 lb-ft. (More on the significance of the thin cylinder head gasket on another occasion.) I fitted a new top timing chain and finished the front end. In setting the tappet clearances, I realised that the men at the factory would not have messed around with feeler gauges under every tappet. They would have found out like me that backing off the adjusting screw by half a turn gave the desired 0.020" clearance and this was certainly accurate enough to get the engine going when eventually I get that far.

The reason for taking off the front bearer is that you can't lift the engine vertically off the front rubber sandwich as the engine casing swells out below it and gets in the way on a vertical lift. So you prop up the engine and remove the bearer, rubber and water pump in one go. That way it's easy. So by 4th Sept the front end chassis and engine was more or less finished. Nights were now drawing in, and by 8.00 pm it was too dark to work in the back garage without lights.

Now perhaps a word might be appropriate to say where this car had come from. It had belonged to my good friend Graham Smith, but it had a few bits missing, but that was of no detriment to Graham because he had planned to complete the car as a two-seater along the lines of the pre-war Singer B37, for which of course he needed a 1500cc engine to make it "authentic" which is why I supplied him with a 1500cc Roadster engine that I had done up, and also (Graham says that I did but I can't remember it) I gave him a radiator to go with the 1500cc engine as well.

Graham had started this Singer Roadster Project a few years ago and it's hardly my place to say why he reluctantly decided to let it go. However, for my part, I was happy to come to an arrangement with him, and ironically I did know most of the recent history of the car as I had actually been with Graham to help him when he acquired the majority of the parts.

As I've mentioned before, my idea was that the car should be a standard Roadster, using the 1500cc engine. The 1500 engine should be a bit easier as far as future spare parts are concerned, and it will give the car a better turn of speed - if Singers thought it was a good idea in the 1950's, then that would be OK for me. And remember, what was sports car performance in the '50s is only average motoring now. So that was it - I would use the 1500cc engine that I had prepared for Graham.

However, to get back to the real job of reconstructing a car: on Saturday 6th October 2007 I cut out the two sole plates from the pieces of wood that I had got - these sole plates are the long planks of wood which fit along the sides of the chassis and on which the body is mounted. I worked off a paper pattern that I had taken from my other Roadster, a 4AC Roadster - taken whilst everything else on the car was mounted around it, and even so it was compiled from 3 bits of paper so errors will have been inadvertently introduced - incidentally the 4AC was a prototype with all sorts of things different to a standard car, so it's hardly the right car to take patterns from. However, I used a box of drawing pins to prick through the paper pattern to produce the shape on the wood plank. I just hoped that the wood fitted in all the right places. It was a full day's job to saw out the two planks - long and tiring work to do it by hand. One advantage was that I had bought a new saw and it cut a lot better than anything else that I had. I wanted a relatively narrow blade in order to be able to saw round curves. Saw technology is one of those things that has obviously progressed, and using this new saw was comparatively like cutting through butter.

I cut out two identical shaped planks, leaving me to make them handed, left and right, when I had a scuttle to offer up and put on the bevels for the door pillars etc. So at this stage I am still trying to leave myself with scope for adjustment so that I can make the car right. This will always be the problem when new bodywork bits have to be made, but why some bits have not to be finally "bolted down" until you are exactly sure that their position is right.

I'll now go back out to the garage, but meanwhile all best wishes for Christmas and the New Year.