An Introduction: Chris Collins and Morris Tilly Project

[jack neville]

The winder gearbox’s are all dry inside and very stiff. They are only held together with three spot welds so separating them was easy by drilling out the welds.

[jack neville]

Cleaned and lubricated and then reassembled. They don’t need to be rewelded as there are three bolts that will hold the two halves together when bolted back to the door.

[jack neville]

The bonnet needed a new hinge pin but the correct size rod is not available so I bought a length of brass rod and turned it down in my lathe to suit.

[jack neville]

The later Morris has a trafficator switch that mounts on the centre of the steering column with the horn button. This is fixed to a steel tube, containing the horn and trafficator wiring loom that runs through the hollow steering column. The steel tube is fixed in place by a brass olive and nut at the bottom of the steering box. This allows the steering wheel and steering column to rotate around the tube. Disassembly results in mostly damaged tubes and stuffed wiring and the switches have been found to be dry of lubricant. The brass olive tends to damage the lower end of the steel tube. We had enough steering boxes to rebuild two good units but until now I had not taken much notice of the internal arrangement with the wiring. One steel tube was of sufficient length to use but had a score around the outside where the brass olive had become loose. This had worn through half the wall of the steel tube so I built this up with bronze. The second tube was damaged and after removing the damaged end was short by 10cm. We had some other damaged tubes so after cutting the required repair section I turned up a steel spigot to use to align the two pieces and also prevent bronze blocking up the tube. I chose to add the repair to the upper end of the tube.

[jack neville]

Next was to disassemble the switch itself. Apart from being dried out they were both in relatively good condition and after cleaning and attaching new wires, the loom was rethreaded through the steel tube and installed. A very fiddly process to rebuild the whole set up but it all appears to operate very smoothly.
With the rebuilt steering wheels Chris had done it all looks pretty good.

[jack neville]

The next major task is the wiring loom but as electrics is not my strong point I will enlist Mr Smith to take care of that and i will assist. We are now down to a lot of those fiddly bits that take as much time as everything else combined it seems. Door check straps, tool box latches, masonite kick panels, rear axle dipstick access door (YES!!!!)

[cliff]

awesome, just awesome Jack.