1906 Rover

Some of the brass edging strip round the bonnet and scuttle of my car was degenerating.  Making the replacement strip posed a few problems.

Degenerating edging strip

I started with a straight, ten foot length of drawn brass tubing.  The first hurdle to overcome was to devise a method of slitting the tubing along its full length.

Manufacturing brass edging strip

I achieved this by making a simple jig to support the whole length of the tube.  This was a long length of angle iron with some eyelets to keep the tube in place.  The most important eyelet is the one adjacent to the cutter.  When machining any drawn metal you release internal stresses, this would cause the slit either to open or to close.   Some experimentation showed me that in this case the slit would open slightly, so a slightly larger eyelet was needed after the cutter.  The jig then had to be set up so that it was parallel to the cutter to avoid the slit becoming a spiral.  Once I had achieved this it only took a few minutes to successfully slice the complete length of the tube.

Simply bending the slitted tube round a former resulted in the pipe twisting

The next step was to bend the tube without distorting it.  First the tube had to be annealed, then I began to experiment with bending it.  Simply bending the tube round a former did not work, as you can see in the photo it was not possible to stop the tube from twisting as it was bent.

Original strip and new strip showing temporary filling of solder

I tried a couple of  methods and found that if I filled the slit with soft solder I could achieve the perfect bend.  The solder was easily removed once the bend had been made.

The picture below shows the edging ready to fit to the scuttle.

New edging, ready for fitting

If a job is worth doing it is worth doing well!  It was very satisfying to see the final result was at least as good as it would have been when the car was first made.

New strip fitted to the bonnet

New strip and correctly fitted hinges

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The scuttle itself had suffered from mistreatment, it had had fifty unnecessary holes drilled though it during a ‘restoration’ by a previous owner and two extra peices of metal had been welded onto the bottom edge .  These were expertly filled for me by Nick Paravanni, who used a method I had not thought of.  Although some of the holes were quite small he cut metal discs to fit each one and welded them in to place.  I would have been cheaper and easier to make a new scuttle, but at least this method preserved the original one.

Damaged scuttle

Repaired scuttle