Crankcase cleaning complete

The crankcase is now properly cleaned. New studs have been made and installed. Work is moving on to the flywheel and everything else that needs to be sorted before sending the whole lot off for white metalling.

Crank damper cleaning

Getting some vintage goop out of the crank damper. Once cleaned it worked perfectly.

Assembling the mains for the first time.

Assembling the main bearings on a much cleaner crankcase.

Dynamo conversion, before and after

Dynamo conversion, before and after. Both cars (Riley 12/4 and Sunbeam 3-litre) have inline dynamos so the dynamo is in between the starter handle and the crankshaft.

New dynamo

A dynamo made from a pair of Riley 12/4 dynamos bought for £35 years ago! It now needs to be sleeved to fit the housing. An actual twincam dynamo was never going to turn up. There was a design flaw and the water pump, if allowed to leak, would dump water into the dynamo housing.

Sump casting date

Casting date from the cleaned sump.

More Auto Kleans

Two new Auto Kleans. A nice petrol one with (importantly) an unchipped, uncracked glass. And another which I have no idea about. I assumed it would be much larger, but now I have to try to find out what it's from. It's definitely an oil filter and it has the ratchet mounting on it. That is usually attached to the clutch linkage, so every time you press the clutch, it turns the handle a bit and keeps the oil filter clean. Small car or maybe a motorbike?

Cleaning the crank case

Of course it isn't all exciting. Sometimes it's gently getting off years of accumulated baked-on Castrol R and filth without damaging anything!

Perot shafts finished

A finished perot shaft on a very dusty chassis. Also visible are a stainless steel hubnut, the dynamo housing casting and an unmachined block in the bottom right. It's great to see parts bought at different times from different people starting to come together.

New dynamo housing

This is the first new dynamo housing to be fitted since the 1920s. Nobody has ever managed to cast one since then. It took eighteen months to get the patterns and the casting process right, but they finally figured out how to do it. The first picture shows it clamped to the sump and crankcase after machining it to fit.

 

then drilling the first datum hole through from the sump

then after a certain amount of paper pattern making, then aluminium pattern making, then marking and drilling and measuring and checking and double checking and programming coordinates and centering....