Never Paint…

… if you can avoid it.

I hate painting. It almost always ends in disaster. With the frame I was asked to make came two tins of Hammerite. Ha! I do know something and that’s to avoid at all costs applying Hammerite with a brush. I popped down to the farm shop and bought a tin of tractor paint – the same stuff I used successfully on the Hillman’s block. What could go wrong? Just about everything. Sticky, draggy, nasty stuff whose sole purpose was to ruin my day. And so it did. In the middle of the night, I thought that applying a second coat with a roller would do the trick. Well, had the paint not reacted with the roller and spontaneously melted itself to the frame, it might have done. I resorted to the paintbrush, slapped on a good thick coat and now there’s runs. It was also below 8°, so it’s bloomed as well. Great.

To complete the Special Builders Breakfast Club badge, I cast about for a suitable saw. I remember Pa had a Vibrosaw – an electromagnetically driven thingummyjig which I thought The Other Wright Brother now possessed. Apparently not, but he would lend me his scroll saw. For delicate tracery, this was entirely unsuitable – at least in the hands of an amateur. What an animal! If not bolted down, it could get across the workshop quicker than I might. The week was not going well.

In an effort to get back on track, I bored a hole in the new downpipe and added the Lambda boss which had arrived in the post. I had to drill the blanking cap for locking wire – something I’m surprised the manufacturer doesn’t do.

The Great Collector is custodian to a 1950 Bedford KD lorry that, in the vernacular, was ‘failing to proceed’. I picked out my handy Newnes Motor Repair notes and found a few pointers on the Commercial Vehicles (Petrol) page. The information didn’t go back far enough but the engine in one guise or another seems to have been carried through to the ‘T’ Series Forward Control models.

The engine was a KM type; a 6-cylinder pushrod job with a Zenith carb. Nice and simple.

The fuel tank was half full of stale nastiness, so I disconnected the line to the carb, took the glass bowl off the AC pump to stop it from sucking, and with what I had to hand in the field, rigged up a feed. After fiddling about with the electrics, we got the engine to fire but I suspected the condenser was shot – a few sparks then nothing, rinse and repeat. A new one is on order.

Another interesting addition to Awkward and Leon’s stable is this Douglas T35. There are one or two things that might see the purists clutching at their pearls (the Triumph Twin tank) but as Awkward rightly pointed out, if it were all present and correct, its history would have effectively come to an end. Special Builders like to continue to paint the picture.