STAFF CAR REPORT

MEET OUR BLENHEIM BARN FIND

Off the road for 35 years, a non-runner with no record of why it was retired? You’d be mad to buy something like that…

WORDS: NIGEL BOOTHMAN PHOTOS: NIGEL BOOTHMAN, WILLIAM BOOTHMAN

Iwasn’t planning to buy a RollsRoyce, much less a project car, but sometimes these things just happen. I was visiting classic and vintage car specialist Hightone Restorations in Oxfordshire last October. There, in the car park, was a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow looking a bit sorry for itself. It was dark brown, with a cloudy, matt-finish bloom on the paint that reminded me of milk chocolate that’s been in a cupboard for a year. All bar one shiny door. I asked Hightone’s boss, Gregg Alvarez, what it was in for. He told me an intriguing story.

The car came to them from the Duke of Marlborough. It had belonged to the previous Duke, who died in 2014, but it had been off the road for much longer than that. Hightone had examined it and found it would need some labourintensive recommissioning to make it roadworthy, which would come at a significant cost. The Duke was considering what to do, but it seemed the Shadow might soon be for sale.

I went to crawl round it, expecting the usual crusty sills and bubbling arches. But I couldn’t find any rust, which made me think I wasn’t looking hard enough.

‘No, there isn’t any,’ said Gregg. ‘We’ve had it on our ramp and it really is that solid. I think it’s been in a nice, dry garage at Blenheim Palace all these years.’

But the paint…a full respray on a Shadow soon gets costly, even if there’s no metalwork to do.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Gregg. ‘Give it a rub with a cloth, and it comes up all shiny.’ I tried, and it did. To a remarkable extent.

THAT CONDOR MOMENT…

I thought about the car a lot on the long drive home to Scotland. About that rather exciting ownership, and the service book full of stamps from Broughton’s of Cheltenham. I grew up in Cheltenham and once or twice pressed my nose to Broughton’s window when they were still at No1 the High Street. Maybe I’d seen this car. So a couple of days later, I asked my pal John Wyatt if he felt like sharing the risk and going halves with me. To my surprise he agreed, and I found myself making an offer. And here I must cut a

Factory underseal and no rot!

long story short, because the process of buying the car ended up taking several months, during which John pulled out and was replaced by his son Findlay, a 21-year-old hereditary car nut. But in March this year, the car finally made its way up north.

A formal inspection by Gregg’s team at Hightone gave us fair warning – fuel system dirty, hydraulics and especially brakes certain to need flushing and potentially extensive replacement, rear discs ruined, transmission unknown, tyres rather old and so on. But the engine had eight encouraging figures from a compression test and of course there was this excitingly un-rusty shell. The interior trim, in mellow beige or magnolia hide, is a little grubby but undamaged and should be easy to revive. Same with the carpets, we hope. The dash veneer is a nice enough to keep while the door tops and dashtop strip will need revarnishing.

On each back door is a tiny crest, symbols representing the Spencer and Churchill families with a Ducal coronet above them. The chrome has survived amazingly well with only a bit of spotting to the top of the front bumper, and that may clean up. The paint, as we know, needs only a bit of light polish and a cloth, but we’ll save that for last. So what about the mechanical side?

Here it was clear we’d have plenty to do. And this led Fin and I to our first big decision – crack on by ourselves or get some help? Because the plans for storing the car were changing fast, and would ideally suit a vehicle that could at least be started and driven in or out of a parking bay, we chose to get some help while we arranged where it would end up.

Polish rapidly makes an amazing difference to the Marlborough Brown paint. Note tiny Ducal crest

A FRIEND TO THE RESCUE

Our friend Stephen is a clever mechanic, but more importantly, someone you can interest in a silly project. He seemed amused by the Shadow, enjoying the daunting level of technical complexity and detail that Rolls-Royce built into the design, so I flooded his computer with PDFs of workshop manuals. We decided to try and make it run. This, apparently, had been done some time before at Hightone and possibly even before that, but using only a surrogate fuel supply.

Stephen found both carburettor float bowls full of gunk and with punctured floats, soon replaced with some from Flying Spares, the first of many parts we were grateful to find in stock. The points needed cleaning and I bought

'One titled owner'...in this case, it's true

a fresh battery. We had a spark! Stephen had already replaced the fuel filter element and blown through the car’s fuel pipes with compressed air. He rigged up a clean jerry can full of Super Unleaded and fed it into the fuel line, as we hadn’t yet had a chance to clean the fuel tank out.

When Fin had first tried the ignition »

key, it produced nothing at all – not even an ignition light. Nothing worked in the auxiliary position either. Yet when Stephen tried it a few days later, it behaved as it should and we had power in the ignition circuit. More on this gremlin later, but then Stephen turned the key the engine burst into life. Great news! Well, good news, at least. It wasn’t going on all eight and there was a nasty ‘tick-tick-tick’ from somewhere around the top of the engine that got louder and more unpleasant with increasing revs.

As the car was living at Stephen’s place, and Fin and I were only able to turn up and join in from time to time, we spent the next week or two discussing various options for the cause of this noise while Stephen investigated. Prime suspects were one or more sticky hydraulic tappets or the brake pumps. As you may know, the complex hydraulic systems are driven not by a belt-powered pump like you’d find on a Citroën, but by two plunger pumps that live in the middle of the ‘vee’ and are actuated by special lobes on the camshaft. They can get stuck, the lobes wear, their springs break and any of these can cause a noise. Or maybe they were just starved of fluid?

GREEN GUNGE AND RODS THAT DON’T PUSH

The hydraulic fluid reservoir is the metal tank the size of a modest garden pond that lives on the nearside inner wing. To our astonishment, the

Car has eight-track player visible through wheel plus separate radio between seats Furred-up thermostat has been replaced

bottom two inches of the contents were a green, slightly gritty sludge that strongly resembled pesto. No pump was going to function while trying to shift that. So we removed the tank, a wrist-aching challenge of awkward fixings, and I took it home so my son William could help me clean it thoroughly and re-paint the rusty lid.

With the tank reinstalled and fresh fluid (just Dot 3, to flush it through – the proper R-R juice can wait until we know everything’s ready) in the system, we thought the engine was quieter…but only a little. I rang Nigel Sandell, who generously offered to answer any questions that came up, and explained the engine noise. He gave me various possibilities including scary things like a piston skirt that had corroded and picked up on the inside of the bore, but near the top of his list was a bent pushrod.

Stephen had been concerned about

“...I couldn’t find any rust, which made me think I wasn’t looking hard enough.”

starting a long-stored engine without removing the rocker covers to see if any valves were stuck. However, Hightone had it running within the last year, albeit briefly, so we went ahead. Sure enough, when Stephen removed the offside rocker cover to have a look, two pushrods were bent right out of shape and jammed in their apertures. Removing the nearside cover revealed another one, with a fourth slightly bowed. So whenever the engine was first started after the decades of inactivity, four valves had indeed been stuck, and refusing to move, caused the pushrods to bend – which they do by design, being the easiest part to replace.

Stephen managed to heave the bent ones out with mole grips. Would there be any other damage? With four straight second-hand ones from Flying Spares dropped into place, we had a nervy moment as the engine fired again. And there, for the first time, was a lovely quiet, smooth Rolls-Royce V8. I should end on this victorious moment but soon after that, when we attempted to re-start it, the ignition gremlin returned and has been with us ever since. After much study and a noble effort by Fin to try and get the lid off the ignition switch-box in situ, Stephen concluded the switch-box had to come out. And we’ll save that horror for next time. n

Pesto-like gunge was spooned out of hydraulic reservoir Removing each of those pipe connections beneath reservoir is challenging