Singer Owner March/April 2009

Roadster Repairs - Some Fundamentals about the Bodywork

Ashley Crossland

Thanks to global warming, it's been the coldest February for a long time, and as I am writing this at the end February and beginning of March, I must blame the cold when I admit that I've made little progress on the Roadster rebuild since the last report. I must also confess that getting the woodwork sorted represents a big challenge in finding enough patterns from which to copy. With metalwork, you can always straighten up the bent bits and do a fair job of estimating the correct shape of things. With pieces of woodwork (as opposed to laminated woodwork), you don't know if it has warped since it was made, but one tip here is that there is usually a "flat" side to the pieces. Singers had to run their pieces through a band saw for which they needed a flat side to sit safely on the saw table. So that's possibly a tip worth remembering.

In that Roadsters can be described as coach-built cars, this is an excuse for saying that the coachbuilders could do pretty much as they liked with the woodwork and its aluminium panelling to get things to fit. I say, "fit", but their responsibility was to get a good gap fit to parts like the doors and boot lid, and after that didn't seem to matter for the bodywork to be perfectly symmetrical. (A different proposition for the pressed steel parts like wings and bonnets that would automatically be made "perfect".) In the past I have hinted that a different person made the left hand side of the car to the person who made the right hand side. It might not seem too obvious on a completed car, but it becomes clearer when you try and fit a hood or tonneau cover. However, the point that I want to make here is that it's much easier to draw round a wooden RH part to make a LH part (and vice-versa) than it is to make RH part from a RH part. And if through warping the RH is not like the LH then you are stuck. Not to worry, we do our best and explain that it is in fact a coach-built car.

It's also of some importance to us to know that Singers built these cars from the inside outwards, i.e. they built up the woodwork with screws put in from the outside, and then they covered up these screw heads when they put on the aluminium panel. This inconvenience means that if you need to replace any wood sections, then to get to the screws you need to remove the aluminium - and this usually means removing the entire aluminium panel unless you are going to saw it into smaller parts. When the rear body wood has "gone" then it starts flexing and cracks start propagating from the corners of the boot opening. If it's necessary for you to have smaller bits of aluminium, then you can easily accomplish this by using a hacksaw to extend those boot cracks.
So how to get the aluminium off? As we know, the aluminium is formed with a flange (about 1/2" wide on the rear bodywork) which is bent over the woodwork and nailed on with 3/4" nails. Nails that will have rusted' by now, and to get them out needs a bit of patience and ingenuity. The technique that I found worked best was to prise a thin wood chisel between the wood and the aluminium just to ease the nail head up a bit. Then push back the aluminium to where it was so as to leave the nail head proud of the aluminium. Then to get hold of the nail head with a pair of ordinary pliers and start by rotating it, not pulling it! If you try pulling it straight away, the chances are that the head will just break off, and it might have been that the bit of wood would have been salvaged. Once the nail has "turned" a bit - and they are round nails not tacks - then the nail can be waggled out with a combination of turning and pulling. Even by trying hard, some nails will break so don't worry. At least if the head comes off, then the panel can be parted from the woodwork. Incidentally, you do need to get all the nails out before you can spring the aluminium off.

The bit of bodywork that I am concentrating on for the moment is the rear bodywork. The boot floor and the rear seat pan do a splendid job of setting the width of the body and keeping it square. Another fairly substantial bracket holds the pivots for the hood frame, and it screws to the corner of the body to keep the door closure post firmly aligned and attached to the top of the body. By substantial I mean that if you had to make one of these brackets from scratch you would need some metal approx 12" square. This bracket also carries the trafficators when fitted. The brackets that I have are the sliding hinge sort, which were the subject of one of Singer's patents.

To be honest, these sliding hinge brackets came from my running car, the 4AC, but when I first restored that car they looked a bit of a pain and so I used some normal ones. Why did I think they were a pain? Well it was because they didn't seem to slide like they were supposed to. The idea is really quite good. They are spring loaded, and keep the hood under tension. Thus regardless of whether the hood has stretched or shrunk, or indeed if the hood was a good fit to start with, the spring loaded hinge will force out the hood irons and keep the hood taught. Brilliant, and if we refer to the patent number GB703570, it was the invention of Charles Frederick Palmer. I wonder if this was his attempt to overcome the problem of the men doing left hand sides of the car different to the right hand side?

The patent was applied for on 30 July 1951, and a copy of the drawing that was attached to the patent is reproduced here with permission. The upholstery panel has a slot in it at an angle, otherwise there is nothing much on a car to show that you've got one of the special sliding hinge brackets. Indeed, I suppose there will be some Roadster owners who are unaware of this improvement. As drawn in the patent, the bracket fixing it to the woodwork bears no relationship to the actual ones made by Singers, but the constructional details of the sliding pivot are nevertheless accurately represented.

The hinge brackets slide down a slot and have a sort of guide peg arrangement (number 46 on the drawing), which slides in hole 48 that keeps the hinge firm and square and yet movable. The holes on my examples are 7/16" as if to take a 3/8" peg but in fact my original pegs were half this size, which not only means that mine are flimsy and bend under load, but they also let the main pin twist slightly sideways and so don't hold the pivot straight and so the assembly "jams". Hence I didn't re-use them on 4AC1, but they are the only ones that I have, and so I need to use them on the present car as I progress with the restoration. According to the Singer parts book, the new sliding pivots were introduced at body number 4AD733V - i.e. in the 1952 season.

Incidentally, if anyone is keeping track of details on my 4AC, then it didn't have trafficators fitted, indeed the slots for the trafficators in the aluminium bodywork were welded up, I can only assume, in the factory. Their welding is exceptionally neat, and aluminium welding is something that I will have to perfect when I try and stitch all this aluminium bodywork back together.

For copyrighted drawing mentioned in this article, please see hardcopy Singer Owner.