Singer Owner September - October 2008

Roadster Repairs - Wheel Arches Part 1

Ashley Crossland

Summer seems to have flown by, and whilst having holidays and attending rallies are all very enjoyable it doesn't complete the restoration of a car. Of course this latest back garden car is not a race against time, but it is the inspiration for these Roadster Repairs articles, and when there's been less progress then there is less to report. So perhaps then it's time for a bit of planning.

I think the Singer Roadster is a superb car of its type. It does have 4 usable seats and a bit of boot space, but even so by modern car standards the car is somewhat cramped. Talking of boot space, a current spare wheel is a bit tight in the standard spare wheel well, and for this reason one of my deliberate deviations from the standard car will be to make a deeper spare wheel well. A boot floor to make? Well yes. There has been some flat tin ware to reconstruct and I have wanted to show fellow Roadster restorers that Singers used a lot of basic techniques in the construction of the Roadster, and that these can be easily copied and faithfully reproduced. Aluminium bodywork survives quite well, as does the main "external" bodywork like the wings, but woodwork and things like the car floor and the boot floor seem to suffer. And these things are vital to the strength of the car and should not be overlooked in a restoration. It's better to have strong structural members than a bit of rusty old tin. Over the years I've seen many Roadsters in various states, and really many would be more rigid with all the woodscrews put back in. I seem to remember one car whose rear seat pan was not screwed in at all - "it makes it easier to lift out". In reality screwing in the rear seat pan adds a lot of strength to the rear end, and shouldn't be neglected.

In the planning ahead department, I must admit to having been upstaged a bit on the task of making the rear wooden wheel arches. Let me explain. The original Roadster rear wheel arches are sort of laminated wood, and in the past I have made very creditable replacement wheel arches from bending ordinary plywood, and then gluing 4 or 5 thicknesses together around a jig. However, you first have to get the plywood to approximately the right shape before you do the gluing, and for this my trick was to leave the wood outside for the rain and damp to do its work whilst the ply was draped over the garden swing with one or two lumps of stone coaxing the ply into the right shape. Six months of this usually does the trick.

However, my Son-in-law, Jason, was persuaded to collect a sheet of plywood for me, and actually he came back with some bendy-ply. It's classed as moisture resistant interior ply, and the "grains" in its 3 plies all run the same way so it bends easily in one direction. You can either get the bend long ways or cross ways depending which version you buy. Standard thickness is 5 mm so laminating up three layers comes out just about spot on for a Roadster wheel arch. I'm not worried about it being interior ply as by the time I've stuck 3 layers together with waterproof glue, and varnished it all, it will be both strong enough and quite durable for a Roadster. So yes I have been upstaged - I never knew this stuff existed, and now I have already glued up one wheel arch in sort of 6 minutes instead of 6 months. Bendy-ply does bend easily and I will show you the results in a later article, but for the moment I just want to write a bit about Singer's original wheel arches.

I have to admit that Singer's original wheel arches of this 4AB/4AD era were not brilliant, and I have drawn a sketch that I hope will explain things. My wheel arches will be in "one" piece of wood, albeit in 3 pieces laminated together, but Singer's original wheel arches were in 4 pieces each laminated from 5 layers of wood. So what you got was a lapped joint about a third of the way round from the front which was held together with 3 screws put in from the top. And 3 screws put in from the bottom side. Each of these two pieces was made from 2 parts screwed together edge to edge. Yes - edge to edge with, in my example, 10 wood screws that over time have rusted and prised apart the layers. The wood layers all run longitudinally, and I assume these were steamed to get the required shape. Another thing that wasn't exactly brilliant was the fact that it was only the wood that was supposed to stop the squares under the heads of coach bolts from turning when the wing was being tightened up. This might be OK for one go in the factory, but after that is pretty useless. So there's an improvement to devise for that feature of the wheel arch.

I'm at rather a loose end to say why Singer's made the wheel arches like this. Usually, one would claim that it was economical to make things in a particular way, but whether shortage of other materials dictated this type of construction, I wouldn't know. I imagine that Singers already had a steaming facility and jig to mould this shape of wheel arch, and they used what they had. After all, the Roadster scuttle is the same as a 1935 4-seater Le Mans to all intents and purposes, so Singers were good at manufacturing things with the jigs, fixtures, equipment and techniques that they already had. The location of the lap joint is a useful marker for where the arch starts a taper, but other than this the whole wheel arch is a disaster waiting to happen. Anyway, I suppose they have lasted 50 years so perhaps I shouldn't grumble, but I think mine are better.

Anyway, I cut 7" wide strips, 6 ft 3" long of this bendy-ply to lay up on a wheel arch jig that I borrowed from the previous owner of this car, Graham Smith. Graham devised and built the jig so I can't take any credit for that. The finished wheel arch is a complicated shape width-wise, which I will go into next time, and I will also show you the jig so that you know how to make one. The finished width of the wheel arch is a little over 6.3/4" wide, but I will measure it more accurately for the next article. The 6 months gestation period was also supposed to give me enough time to locate and collect together all my G-clamps - holding the plywood to the jig needs about 20 G-clamps. You are faced with a dilemma - either walk round an 8' x 4' sheet of plywood for 6 months or get on with the job, even though you might not have had time to find all your G-clamps. So I've been getting on with the job.

And just when we have been getting a nice bit of rain that would have been ideal for making the wheel arches the old way