Javelin Restoration - Project B

[Jack]

This thread is likely to become a blog, similar to the Jupiter SC restoration thread, hopefully with lots of contribution, some weird questions, and hopefully only a small number of life-threatening injuries. I am proposing that we will keep this first post for historical information about the car, particularly important photos and other information, and will link to any other pages or discussions on the site that are pertinent to the rebuild or the car. I am also hoping to put a contents page together as the thread develops, so you can pick up where you left off without having to search too much, and to make it easier for others in future to find particular progress.

Summary and photos of the state of the car are posted here, along with the modifications fitted to the car (we are currently working to establish when the modifications were made, and by who, all information appreciated) -this is the storyboard as displayed at the rally in Daventry.

There is a smashed windscreen (we have a new one inside the car) spare bonnet on top of the original one, and a huge mound of stuff piled on top of it. I can assure you that it's got a similar amount of stuff inside it, along with a fair old pile of parts underneath.

Finally we have named it "Project B" on the basis that there were currently 3 possible routes that this project could take, two of which could be really something quite special for very different reasons. Until we have got consensus from the team and firmed up the details we won't be able to unveil what is likely to happen, but watch this space for news on where this is all going. Apologies for being all mysterious, but there's several people involved already and I don't want to tell the world we're doing one thing, only to change the plan a few weeks down the line, I've done that plenty enough already for one lifetime Whatever happens it will be a million times better for everyone to have it on the road than having a Javelin taking up a whole lot of space in the garage, even if we go for the third very boring option of just putting it back on the road as soon as possible. Please open this link for photos, information on what the car is and its history.

Further photos pf the car from some years ago courtesy of Drummond and the Scottish Section - can anyone identify the people from these slides?





I would also like to thank the following, and will be adding to this list as time goes on, hopefully Keith will be able to advise of those who have helped us before I even knew about the car, and anyone else we may have forgotten who have already contributed. Please forgive my woeful memory, hence the list and the blog.

Bill Lock & Keith Clements for dragging a car that they didn't know was anything special out of a field - they just wanted to rescue a Jowett, it turns out they rescued a really rather important car.

Chris Spencer for continuing to astound everyone with his level of commitment to the cars, the club, and getting dirty in the garage at every available opportunity.

Phil Green & Don Craven for their advice and information related to Jowett, the Jowett Experimental Department, and the racing and rallying history of Jowett cars.

Noel Stokoe, Eden Lindsay & Drummond Black for their help piecing together the history of the car and changes made.

Regards,

Jack.

[Jack]

Today we had 3 objectives - get Amy's Mazda (her daily driver, a rather wonderful birthday present) into the garage to dry out (incredibly large amount of snow and rain has got the whole thing pretty damp) to get the CD player out of her car and into the Subaru which is being sold on Monday, hopefully. Finally we ended up quite by accident starting the grand garage clearout.

Two complete wheelie bin-fuls (I know, that's not really a word) of rubbish was cleared from the garage. Mostly it was old cardboard boxes, an old back seat from a Renault we're never going to use, huge numbers of old pots, dried up paint tins, jars with a list of contents that the HSE would probably faint at the sight of, and one absolutely mahoosive spider. It even made me jump a bit, and I don't mind spiders at all. We also found the body of a few sheep it had caught some years ago, it was that big, honest.

We also found all manner of bits and bobs that had been previously undiscovered down the back of the car, including a bag of keyways and various containers of waxoyl and other stuff.

We have also been able to send a large number of very very knackered old panels to the scrap man from the SC project - never throwing anything away until the project was finished, we are now able to start getting rid of the "just in case" stuff that we'd been keeping.

I also think this is the first time in a very very long time that we've had 4 cars in the garage, and it is certainly the first time we've been able to see out of the windows above the Javelin, the additional sunlight is very welcome and will hopefully make for a better working environment for everyone.

Once cleared, we then spent a little while removing about 20 years of dust from the car to try and cut down on the dirt in the garage that has been accumulating.

Once that was done, we kept Amy happy by finishing off fitting a CD changer in her Mazda, and after a bit of swearing the stereo from her car was in the Subaru, so job done there.

So, not much more than that for an update, hopefully we'll get a few photos of the car in its current state in the next few days so you can all see what we are attempting. Part of the project is likely to include a fair amount of civil engineering as well as mechanical, as we need to expand the garage in order to allow for the space required for the rotisserie thing we bought and potentially digging a pit in the floor to make working easier, as well as storage for a huge number of parts, paint shop for Mr S to live in for a while, the various new tools we'll need, as well as the 50" flatscreen telly and sofa I want for breaktime

Silly me, I nearly forgot. We should all congratulate Keith for breaking the habit of a lifetime and making the important step of agreeing to start throwing things away that he (and nobody else on Earth) is ever going to have a use for. Amy was actually concerned at one stage that aliens may have landed and taken over control of Keith's body, agreeing that various offcuts of vinyl from 60 years ago could actually go in the bin, along with a number of unidentifiable rusty nuts and bolts.

The change in the garage is dramatic, and obvious from just a few hours of clearing things. If we can keep this up for a couple more weekends, and we get some good quality shelving sorted, we will give ourselves a whole lot more space to work with throughout. Plus we might not get closed down by a risk assessor.

Jack.

[p.p.]

all the best for the "PROJECT B" hopefully i will see it in may, by my visit.....

peter

[Jack]

all the best for the "PROJECT B" hopefully i will see it in may, by my visit.....

peter

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Brilliant.

Peter, you are very welcome to come to the garage to see the Little Shop of Horrors and Frankenstein's Workbench but there is no way in a million years, ever, that this car is going to be at the rally in May. Not May 2011 anyway We'll see about May 2012, that seems a realistic deadline, but we'll see how the initial inspection and strip down goes - until we've done that we don't really know how much work is ahead of us.

One thing I do know is that we have a fair old amount of rust on the rear wheel arches, which is likely to be a right old pain. But if it was easy it wouldn't be fun.

Jack.

[Jack]

We are gradually making progress. Something I think didn't get mentioned is that with an increasing number of cars, and an increasing amount of work required on the multiple cars, we also need to expand the garage a little before we really get stuck in.

So today was a day of clearing to make way for some building works. I was counting as I loaded them, and so far we have thrown away 12 tyres of various shapes and sizes, all of which were either bald, cracked, full of water or otherwise damaged beyond sensible use. They'd also mostly been there for more than 20 years, so wouldn't have been safe for road use regardless.

We now only have another 10 tyres to go I think. The various other stuff which had been stored there has been cleared, mostly plastic roof panels which had aged and cracked when removed, and lots of bits of rusty bars and drainpipes.

2 full boot loads went to the tip, and there's another full boot load to go tomorrow. But this is progress.

Once the corner is clear we can work on digging out the soil and getting the posts in place, then a decent flooring, roof and walls, and we will have parking for at least one other car, giving us a much bigger workspace for Project B.

Tomorrow we clear the last boot load and then get on to the hood for the SC. Once these are sorted we can really get going.

Jack.

[Jack]

A historic day for everyone today at Team SC, we now have a new team member. Huge amounts of progress in the garage, and lots of help from our new apprentice, Joe.

Joe is doing a good job of keeping the average age of the team under 40 (just) as Keith and Chris continue to drag the average sky high. He's not a member of the club yet, but has a keen interest in mechanics, and has done quite a bit of engineering on models and projects with family members, and is considering a career with a spanner in his hand.

His first job was to help me shift a few bits from underneath Project B. By a few bits, I mean 4 doors, a rear axle, 2 overdrives, large amounts of steel for shelving, and at least one mouse skeleton. It looks like mousey died peacefully, curled up in the corner of a Javelin window. Should have taken a photo really, or kept him as a warning to other mice planning to spoil carpets in the garage, he looked so peaceful, and like he'd been there since the Pyramids were built.

I carried on shifting bits from under the car while we gave Joe the fairly entertaining job of trying to sort the huge number of sockets that were jumbled in the boxes - he got to work quickly sorting a set of metric sockets from the ones we actually want, and then put a full set of Whitworth sockets together. Homework for this week was set - finding out about Whitworth threads and how the sizes work.

We shifted something like 20 brake drums from underneath and around the car, these were moved for careful storage under the house, we won't be needing them for a while, if ever, and they were very much in the way. I couldn't believe the weight of the things - 4 of those are adding a whole lot of weight to the car, but the design does seem to work!

Soon after Chris arrived to have a formal inspection of the wreck. His timing was perfect, we'd just got the underneath of the car cleared, and soon the jack was lifting the car off its bricks and onto axle stands. The first time this car has moved in any direction for at least 10 years I reckon. Keith should be able to confirm. After a thorough inspection, Chris declared the car "restorable" which was good news, as otherwise we'd be in a bit of trouble. There is clearly a massive amount of work to do, but our hope is that it might be a quicker project with availability of panels etc from JCS. We'll be calling them on Monday with our shopping list I think!

Not content with merely inspecting the underside, work seemed to begin on stripping the rear end to see what was going on underneath the spare wheel holder and fuel tank. We got a lot further than we were expecting today, with these coming out and the car looking ready for restoration now.

My afternoon was spent making way for us to be able to get to the front of the car, this meant shifting the very tall and somewhat unstable shelves that were in front of the car, these were then converted into two shorter stacks of shelving to go underneath the workbench in the corner of the garage. The shelves were perfectly designed for Tesco plastic grocery trays, an open appeal if anyone has their shopping delivered, try and hang on to any spare trays you can and please send them our way - we need approx 30-40 of them to store parts, tools, nuts and bolts, currently the cardboard fruit trays in the garage are busy deteriorating and not really strong enough to hold heavier parts.

The shelves took a bit longer than expected, we now have a rule that any space that we can get to that we haven't been able to get to before must be cleaned before putting anything back. There was also a fair bit of cutting and playing with bolts to get the shelves to the right height to fit etc. They went in shortly before we finished for the day, and I am pretty happy with how they have worked out. The garage now looks significantly bigger, we've not lost any storage space, and now there's no leaning towers of Dexion over any cars that have taken months to restore.

A couple of photos from today, phone photos so difficult to get anything in great quality, but we'll keep trying to share pictures of what is going on in the little shop of horrors. These are pretty much "day 1" photos, up to now all progress has been just sorting things so that we can get to the car, now we are starting to get working on the car, which is nice.

Jack.

[Tony Fearn]

we gave Joe the fairly entertaining job of trying to sort the huge number of sockets that were jumbled in the boxes - he got to work quickly sorting a set of metric sockets from the ones we actually want, and then put a full set of Whitworth sockets together.

Joe - welcome to the world of Jowetts.

I also have a "huge number of sockets" I bought an actual bucketfull late in the day at a car boot sale a couple of years ago for £5!! My right arm is still longer than my left.

But now, after buying various obsolete colour car spray paint cans, (at 50 pence each at the same venue) all my open-ended, ring and socket spanners in the various types are easily identified even when "jumbled".

BSF/Whitworth have a maroon flash, AF are yellow and metric are white.

Sounds a bit prosaic, but it's worth the trouble, believe me, especially if you have a range of cars needing different spanner sizes.

Tony.

[Chris Spencer]

Well - Jack may like to title the car 'Project B' but to me and Keith the car is better known as 'LAMEROD' - the reason behind the name being when getting somewhere close to completing Amy's SC Jupiter last year - Jack was feeling left out of the classic scene - This Javelin had been stuffed into one corner of the garage by Keith - some 20 odd years ago as a possible restoration project. Jack hit on the idea of possibly turning the car into a rod by changing the running gear for something a little quicker etc but keeping the body style - Now in my book if you are going to go all of this trouble then it needs to be done right with a suitable lump for the engine and a decent drive train. Instead Jack had designs on replacing the Javelins 1500cc engine with a Subaru 1600cc engine - in my book pointless - hence my term of it being a lame-rod - the name has stuck ever since.

Back to the real world - the rod idea shelved - the Javelin will be restored as a Javelin with Jupiter power - not sure of colour / trim and how we will present it just yet - but it may just be slightly different than the majority of Javelins -

With this in mind the car was de cluttered and raised up on to axle stands so that I could creep under the car and assess if the car is worth the effort - after 30 mins of prodding and poking - scraping underseal off - tapping and banging - we decided to delve a little deeper and spent an hour removing the spare wheel carrier and the fuel tank in order to investigate the vehicle structure a little more.

The main chassis rails are solid along with all front suspenion mounting points including the torsion bar mountings, the metalwork at the front of the car is very well preserved due to the fact that it is covered in so much oil and grease. The rust damage is very much the same to both sides - the front inner wing lower sections at the junction with the A posts will require repair, front & center outriggers will be replaced - although not holed the sills are a little on the thin side so we shall be replacing these as a matter of course, the worst sections are to the rear of the vehicle with the rear inner wings abutting with the outrigger, chassis rail closing section and the mounting points for the rear trailing arms. The inner rear wheelarches require repair along the edge that joins with the boot floor rails. There is the odd minor repair to the shell structure elsewhere but I have seen and repaired far worse than this example in my time.

Some of the outer panels are too far gone - the O/S front wing is repairable but the other 3 are scrap - Keith already has some decent used panels set aside - the bottom of all 4 doors are poor but again Keith already has the repair panels so unless we can obtain any soild doors - we shall be repairing the originals - the roof, bonnet, boot are all sound. The plan is to get the structural welding done first - hopefully while this is happening some of the team can commence rebuilding the mechanicals as sub units - off the car.

So we have made a start - it will not be mad rush that we found ourselves in with the SC but then again you never know - we may just have to implement a target date at some stage !

[Jack]

Keith also agreed, and we have witnesses, that if I bought him a couple of socket rails he would keep his sockets on them. Partly because I have no idea what size is bigger than 3/8 (4/8? That must make it a 1/2?) so having them in order, on a rail, will make life much easier for me, on the pretence that it is so Joe can find his way around the spanners and sockets more easily, but I think there's a few of us that will benefit from having things a bit more organised.

I'll be buying some socket rails this evening, hopefully we can use some of the decades old boxes full of sockets and spanners for something more productive in our new and reorganised garage where everyone will be able to find things! The time spent now will hopefully pay off during the project, and will mean that Keith spends more time doing restoration on the car than helping us to find things and parts all over the place!

Tony - you're absolutely right. Only trouble is that we have so many sets of Whit and AF sockets, all of which seem to be painted or not painted in various forms, in different boxes etc, that we are probably going to need to do the same - once we have the rails sorted a quick mark with the spraycan may be very sensible to help everyone putting them back in the right place at the end of the day. I've got some lovely flourescent orange paint that will come in handy.

Jack.

[Jack]

So we have made a start - it will not be mad rush that we found ourselves in with the SC but then again you never know - we may just have to implement a target date at some stage !

Rule 1 - We have demonstrated that we are dead without a deadline.

Rule 2 - Never tell anyone what that deadline is. Ever. Until we have an MOT cert, the deadline is "soon".

[Forumadmin]

The 'B' in Project could stand for all manner of words. Are we now 'Team B'?

I was very impressed with progress at the weekend on many fronts. I had to mend a cracked window in the garage last night which was leaking water. The new panel gives even more light now. Sorry Jack the washing was in vain.

Once we get Joe involved on this forum we should have a Jowett Junior's view of the restoration. Joe drums with me at Saracens Rugby matches. After sorting his set of tools, Joe helped strip a door of all its reuseable bits. Joe used the special Jowett door window winder handle spring compressor, punch, hammer and lots of assistance from each of us to remove the trim and window glass.

It was fascinating listening to Jack teaching Joe all about mechanical things around the Javelin!

[Jack]

The 'B' in Project could stand for all manner of words. Are we now 'Team B'?

I was very impressed with progress at the weekend on many fronts. I had to mend a cracked window in the garage last night which was leaking water. The new panel gives even more light now. Sorry Jack the washing was in vain.

Once we get Joe involved on this forum we should have a Jowett Junior's view of the restoration. Joe drums with me at Saracens Rugby matches. After sorting his set of tools, Joe helped strip a door of all its reuseable bits. Joe used the special Jowett door window winder handle spring compressor, punch, hammer and lots of assistance from each of us to remove the trim and window glass.

It was fascinating listening to Jack teaching Joe all about mechanical things around the Javelin!

I think we'll see what direction the project is going in, then come up with a better name for the project, and perhaps the team

Joe is taking photos of the car to show his mates, which is good, hopefully we will be able to download the photos at various points and share them - one thing we haven't done enough of in recent months is documenting with pictures the progress.

You guys may have to undo some of my teachings in the months to come. We got as far as a brief difference between metric and Whitworth, and why the engine is different to a lot of other cars, but there's not a huge number of further lessons I can offer. Chris did a nice tutorial on how to snap a bolt later in the day, I can do a revision session on that one approximately once a week for any interested students I also do a good line in "how to move stuff that other people can't move" involving a sledge hammer and a lot of WD40. I may have to edit out the swearing for Joe.

Jack.

[p.p.]

"Spear Project"

"J J Rose Project"

"Herts Poject" with the Heraldic Flag of Herts

peter

[Jack]

Further progress with sorting tools, and another set of shelves to be cleared this evening.

The socket sorting was priority, so I now have an idea how many socket rails I need to buy and what sizes. We sorted a set of metric impact sockets, a set of small metric normal sockets (including randomly a 4.5mm socket, anyone got any idea why such a thing exists?) one and a half sets of Whitworth sockets, the other half are in the pile somewhere, and a set of AF. Visit to the shops tomorrow to get some shiny new rails and a new tub of Swarfega for the troops.

The new window in the garage is looking good, hopefully when the tree comes down this week there will be loads of light in the garage to work by, and the building work on the garage can continue, giving us even more space.

Saturday is the big day this weekend, with a return visit from Joe and hopefully Chris will be joining us as well. Any and all volunteers welcome, I am increasingly thinking that with all this sorting and clearing the garage might soon be safe enough for us to invite normal people into the garage as well. Many hands made light work of Saturday, other than my back hurting a bit on Monday from lumping that axle into the cellar.

Jack.

[Chris Spencer]

Jack - The answer is so very simple - the reason for the 4.5mm socket is that it fits the head of a 4.5mm bolt or nut.