From Robins to Bentley Beasts
I'll start with a shout out for Mini Spares for fine customer service – I ordered a couple of alloy 12in wheels and some new tyres for the Reliant Robin, paying retail and not telling them I’m a journalist. They arrived well packed and rapidly, but the delivery was one wheel short. When I noticed, pointed this out and asked them to include some wheel nuts and invoice me for those, they apologised and sent the missing wheel and the nuts the next day, but with a zero invoice and no charge made for the nuts. That is fine customer service, and on this occasion the payback is right here.
Next though, I'll shout at myself for carelessness. I took out the MkVI Bentley for a run to a Rolls- Royce Enthusiasts’
Club event at the Doune hillclimb an hour or so from home, which was actually pretty good. The car ran well, the road from Helensburgh to Stirling is entertaining, the day was grey but dry, lunch was good and it all went well until a couple of hundred yards from home when Gorgeous Wife unplugged the Dashboard Bitch and its wire caught fire. The Dashboard Bitch is what we call the electric woman inside the GPS, as she has on occasion been unhelpful and annoying. The 1947 Bentley did not come with a navigation GPS system mounted in the dashboard, so we use a Tomtom GPS stuck to the windscreen, and a paper map to check she’s not talking nonsense or directing us in circles.
The Bentley is wired positive earth, which is fine but means you can’t use anything that is wired for negative earth unless you think about it and make the casing live with the earth going through the power cable, and use an insulated method of mounting it. The GPS socket and cable are not wired into the car, and just sit on the floor when in use. (I do actually have the original AM radio for the Bentley, but it’s the size of a Welsh dresser, and it probably doesn’t work as it was not fitted to the car when I got it.)
Powering the GPS is easy – you just use crocodile clips, wire and a cigarette lighter socket, although it obviously becomes a cigar lighter when it’s in a Bentley. Clip it directly to the underfloor battery, pos-pos, neg-neg. Easy peasy. But when the GPS plug was pulled out of the socket, the wire caught fire and the car filled instantly with smoke at 30mph. Pull over and stop, Gorgeous Wife had already yanked the cable off the battery so the fire was out.
It still doesn’t make sense. Why would unplugging the GPS cause a dead short and put the full current of the battery through the wire? The SatNav still works fine on its internal battery, so the only possibility I can see is that the USB convertor that is needed for modern GPS plugs failed in some way as it was being disconnected and caused the
dead short. I’m not going to test it and start another fire just to prove my theory, though. There’s no damage to the car, the crocodile clips are not burnt and neither is the ciggy lighter/power socket. I’ll bin the USB widget and replace the socket and the wire, but next time I’ll wire in an inline fuse, which is what I should have done in the first place. The maximum draw is no more than two amps, so a 5A fuse will suit. Any fuse will do really, as it’s only a sudden 60A dead short that I’m avoiding.
With a new coil and condenser, the Bentley’s engine has been running sweetly, although it still burns more oil than a dirtydiesel Liberian-registered ship carrying lithium for Tesla batteries. Mileage per gallon on a smooth 50mph run seems to be something over 20, which is very good going for a tired 4¼-litre engine. Mind you, I once won a mileage-stretching competition with 18mpg from a 6.75-litre Silver Shadow, so I do have a cheap right foot.
Incidentally, my brother’s 2011 Freelander has a navigation system in the dashboard, which doesn’t work very well even if it were up to date. Updates are in any case discontinued – if you’re not buying a new Freelander, you don’t matter to JLR or Tata. The upside is that the Land Rover’s nav screen is now a convenient place to put the Tomtom sucker.
The Freelander was being used for towing my boat, a McGregor power sailor, to a cheaper sailing club location rather than a marina, but somebody had been trying to steal the wheels, and one of them fell off at the marina entrance, causing a most entertaining traffic jam until they got a crane out and lifted the whole rig up so that I could borrow studs off other wheels and get mobile again. My plan is now to use two different security wheel studs on opposite sides of the hubs so that any further scrote attacks don’t result in detached wheels.
As for the Bentley specials, the 35in-high grille that defines the front of Beast 1 is heading over to Berwick to meet the chassis for the most exciting part of a car build, the part where we put the chassis on stands, assemble the axles and start the design process. The grille was created by making a fibreglass mould from a MkVI Bentley grille shell, then making a positive in GRP, extending its height and depth with bits of wood and lots of filler, then painting with filler primer and finally gloss. I then got the shape cast in aluminium, and then spent what felt like a couple of years rubbing it down with finer and finer grades of paper, and then finally machine polishing. My arms were worn out down to the elbows by the end of this, but luckily they soon grew back when I stopped the rubbing down.