Month: December 2024

This project is a bit of a bucket list project. My first car was a Triumph Herald (see car history) and since then I have always wanted the bigger engine Vitesse. This is a Mk2 with the rotoflex suspension, overdrive and of course it’s lid free.

Firstly, the straightforward stuff: windscreen wipers, water jets, steering wheel and the windscreen. With the windscreen removed, then removal of the air vents on top of the dash and the dashboard itself, is a lot easier. Looking at the additional switches added to the standard dash layout, I knew someone had been fiddling, but one peak behind the dash confirmed the extent. I bit of a rats nest. I will need to trace many of the wires to figure out what has been done. I will also definitely need to redo the earthing. There were earth wires strewn everywhere. Some grouped and connected to the back of gauges but not even tightened up. I am sure most of the dash functionality would have been intermittent at best.

After some time on the keyboard and a couple of visits to potential candidates, I found one. Well not just the rear tub. I ended up buying pretty much the whole car. The back story here is that its owner had started the restoration a number of years ago but has since been distracted by other projects and the car has been sitting under tarp at the bottom of this garden ever since. I hope he won’t mind me using his first name here, but Dave has a passion for building small steam tractors from steel, brass, drawings and his lathes. His engineering skill and attention to detail are something I can only admire and wonder at. I fear that when Dave and other engineers of of his generation finally turn their lathes off, we will lose this capability for ever.

The car Dave had started to restore was a 13/60 convertible. The rear tub had been refurbished and fully painted. The front tub was likewise almost finished as was the chassis. The bonnet and ancillaries were yet to be completed. The car was still in pieces, but that was fine as it would save me the job of dismantling it. Not only did this car cost me less than the price of buying new panels, and save me the time of welding them all together, I also bought some of Dave’s engineering skill as I an expecting the welding and structural integrity of the shell to be as precise as components he is making for this steam tractors. And the other major positive was meeting and talking to Dave. Great chap.