Singer Owner January - February 2010

Roadster Repairs - Improved Rear Wing Bolts

Ashley Crossland

Anyone who has ever tried to take off the rear wings of a Singer Roadster will have run into a bit of trouble. Well, that is if the car was more than a couple of years old I'm sure you would have run into trouble. Singers made the cars with bolts through the wooden wheel arches and a square nut then held on the rear wings. A nut that is therefore exposed to the weather and wet, and which therefore corrodes itself "fast" onto the bolt. Even if you soak the nut well, and even apply a bit of heat with a blowlamp, and even if you get a good grip on the nut what you find is that the nut and bolt will turn round without unscrewing. You see all that is restraining the turning is a square shank to the bolt, and as it's only into the wood of the wheel arch, there's really nothing much to stop it from turning. Even if you get to the "inside" of the bolt, the head is not even a hexagon nor a slotted head to help you. Despair or the use of an angle grinder usually sets in if you need to remove the wing.

There's a poor drawing of the wheelarch and square shank bolt in question in the Singer Owner of October 2008. What Singers used was a dome headed bolt that was screwed 1/4" BSW, and was 1.1/4" long, with the square under the head as mentioned. I tend to think of these as coach bolts but they are also known as carriage bolts. A plate of aluminium 2.1/2" long x 1" wide with a bump in it to cover the bolt head is held on by 4 nails in the corners. There are 6 holes through a Singer wing, one hole right under the tail however is just a woodscrew as far as I can tell, but the other 5 holes follow this coach bolt method of construction. Of these 5, 3 are easy to get to under the upholstery covering the rear wing; one is also relatively easy being the front, bottom one under the floor level; and one that is inaccessible being half way up the wing (opposite a point roughly half way up the boot lid). If you are doing some restoration, then this last bolt is the one that you really must get in place before you pin back the aluminium bodywork.

For my present restoration however, I'm using a different method of holding on the back wings and which I believe is an improvement. Quite simply the nut bit is now placed inside the car and thus is mainly isolated from the wet and corrosion, and therefore provides every chance of being able to be unscrewed when required. Not only that but the nut is secured from turning relative to the wing. What I've tried to do is use a plate something like the size of Singer's original one, but fix a captive nut to it. More expensive, but better and should last 50 years until the next restoration. The drawings will show what I'm on about.

So why should I want to go into print on this topic? As Roadster Registrar you expect me to defend the Roadster's reputation, and the quality of Singer's build, and in general I hope I do this reasonably well. I am after all quite fond of Roadsters, and would not have been happily running one for over 30 years if I had not been pleased with it. But when you know the cars as well as I do, you realise that there were one or two shortcomings in the car, and I fear that this rear wing bolt is one such example. It might have been convenient to build the car this way, but it was a useless method when you want to dismantle a wing. Why, especially when just about everything "mechanical" about the Roadster is really first rate, well designed, and competently put into practice? And yet the wooden bodywork covered in aluminium panels (and with which I also associate the rear wing bolts) gives me the impression that it was built to completely different standards. You will perhaps have previously read about me joking about the left hand half of a Roadster body did not match the right hand side of the same car. I assume that two different men made half each, and perhaps they disliked each other, or at least each thought they were doing it the right way. Suffice to say that if you compare lengths of wood taken from each side of the car, you will find that their lengths can easily differ by 1/4". And I'm sure that there will be cars with even greater discrepancies than this!

This condemnation of the wing bolts rather puts me in somewhat of a dilemma as usually I don't approve of change. Luckily this is rather trivial, but where it comes to safety related topics I am careful to endorse Singer's designs, and I perhaps over-emphasize this in the magazine. As I see it, as far as MOT items are concerned, you always have the safeguard that this was as Singers manufactured the car. And if you should be unlucky to be in an accident, then you will have the same safeguard with your insurance company. Where life is involved, I think it is important to keep your car as standard.

So will these new wing bolts of mine lose me points in the concours? Will I lose points for originality? Or will I win the safety award? Who's daft enough to stick their head under a wing to find out? For my new captive nut plates I've used brass sheet and those riveting nuts that are sometimes also called hank nuts, but as an alternative you could easily use steel sheet and weld on a nut. So here is my new illustration.