SPARE WHEEL

I forgot to mention in my last posting that I visited, with a friend, the London Classic Car Show last week. Interesting, a new show and rather elitist, with mainly very high value cars on display and virtually no stands selling the usual bit and bobs. I was hoping to buy a pair of driving goggles, but no chance.Hopefully if it succeeds it will develop and be more interesting for the hands on owner, not just for the gentleman owner with deep pockets. However there was a beautiful replica blown Bentley, yours for £400K. Fabulous car, fabulous colour, wish it was mine and hopefully my little project might look a little like this, the only real difference is that this one has four wheels!!

Another little job was to fit a switch on the dashboard for the fuel pump, there have been plenty of times when I wanted to check out something which required the ignition to be switched on, but I had to remove the fuse to silence the fuel pump. A simple job and the new switch is mounted just below the fuel gauge and is balanced by the spotlight switch, which is just under the volt meter, the other side of the steering wheel.

The main job however, was to securely attach the spare wheel to the back of the car. I eventually decided to centrally insert a 10mm riv-nut into the rear aluminium panel and screw into it a 160mm bolt, which will pass through the centre of the spare wheel hub. The only problem was that my riv-nut puller kit only went up to 8mm. The following photos show my home made puller, which comprises a 10mm bolt with the nut drilled out to remove the thread so that it revolves freely around the bolt. The bolt with nut over the thread is screwed into the riv-nut, which is inserted into the 12mm hole, one spanner holding the de-threaded nut and another turning the bolt eventually the riv-nut is pulled. An M10 riv-nut is a fairly meaty thing and requires quite a bit of muscle, but eventually it sits tightly in place.

It had been suggested to me that the wheel should tighten back onto rubber door stoppers, HomeBase provided these. I used a bit of scrap screwed into the riv-nut and with a hole at the other big enough for a felt tip pen to protrude a described a circle at slightly over 12in. and marked out where the four holes needed to be.

M5 bolts slipped into the door stoppers perfectly and four M5 countersunk riv-nuts set into the back panel secured then into place.

The wheel now sits snugly back onto the stoppers and eventually the spacer and head of the bolt will be hidden under the hub cap. I might though invest, in the future in a long leather strap, just to give that authentic period look.