Back To Your Rootes – No 11

The following article is one of a number I wrote several years ago for the Humber/Hillman Car Club’s ‘Torque’ Magazine - Graham Smith 2022

Well in my last instalment. I was up to the mid 1970s and having just sold our 1961 Series IIIB Hillman Minx we were the owners of three large Humbers – the 1951 Mk III Humber Imperial, the 1960 Series III Humber Super Snipe (our daily car) and the 1935 Humber Snipe ‘80’ kitset. We used the 1960 Super Snipe as our daily transport as we were allocated a carpark in the grounds of the old wooden Government Building. At that time it cost $26 a year ($1 a fortnight) which was pretty good but there was a bit of an uproar a couple of years later when the price was increased to $75 a year – outrageous! We used the 1960 Snipe quite extensively. Shortly after we married, Esther’s parents moved to a farm near the Wanganui River just south of Taumarunui and we would travel up there via Wanganui and the Paraparas on a Friday night for the weekend several times a year. The farm was down the Retaruke River and a bit north of ‘The Bridge to Nowhere’. The Retaruke was one of the few valleys that remained open after many First World returned servicemen settlers walked off the land in the district during the depression. The road was unsealed and went around two big papa bluffs and it was quite normal at night to have to stop and remove rocks from the road. One night it was raining hard and there were dozens of frogs on a half mile stretch of the road. Initially I tried to avoid them. However when their numbers became hundreds and then thousands we just had to drive through. I’ve heard stories of it actually raining frogs (rather than cats and dogs) but what the actual reason was that night I don’t know. We were close to the river and the road would have been warm so that might have had something to do with it. We frequently also travelled to Auckland in the car to see my parents or to attend various Humber annual rallies. The car only let us down a couple of times, and both were probably my fault! On the first occasion, when travelling home to Strathmore from work one Friday afternoon just on dusk, I braked quite hard for another car which hadn’t signalled its intentions on the roundabout by the airport. The engine then died and wouldn’t turn over on the starter motor and we were stranded. It seemed to have no electric power, no lights, no wipers (it had just started to rain) but the glovebox light was working! Apparently not a battery problem. Someone in a Holden stopped and offered us a tow home – he confessed after we got home that it was the heaviest thing he had ever towed. I spent all day Saturday and half of Sunday trying to find the problem. As I said, everything electrical was dead apart from the glovebox light. I finally determined that the ammeter had blown, and that the glovebox light was the only thing that wasn’t fed through the ammeter. Now why had the ammeter blown? They read up to 30 amps and would need a lot more current than that to burn them out. Finally I traced the problem back to some ‘handiwork’ I had done the previous weekend. I had taken the radio speaker in the top of the dashboard out and replaced one of the loose rattling retaining screws with a heavier and longer one.

Unbeknown to me, and unseen, the longer screw had been touching a terminal on the back of the headlight switch and, when I had turned the lights on just before the roundabout, there was a dead short which, fortunately had burned out the ammeter and not caused a wiring fire. So, nothing to do with the braking. Lesson - use short screws for your speaker! The other occasion was during a tour of the South Island. Prior to the trip a fellow Vintage Car Club member from Wellington, who worked for Motor Spares (not Motor Specs) had come over and checked out the engine for wear while I had the head off. The inlet valves were quite coked up from too much cold running commuting but there was less than one thou wear in the cylinders. I should explain that Motor Spares were dealers in engine parts, particularly pistons and bearings. After the de-coke the car was running really well. We took my parents with us and travelled down the West Coast and over the Haast Pass to Dunedin. There my parents got a hire car and went north to see relatives, while Esther and I continued south to Invercargill. Now the roads in Southland were (and still are) pretty good with very little traffic and the distances can be deceptively large. Anyway we were travelling at a pretty steady 80 (and that’s not Ks) over two days and then we noticed an ominous rumble when heading back to Dunedin. We called into the AA in Dunedin and they diagnosed big end bearing problems. We took it into a recommended garage and left it there to be fixed and flew back home. Although there was little wear and no damage to the bores when we had given it the de-coke the garage said it had some broken rings and scored bores and would need to be re-bored with new pistons, as well as a crankshaft regrind and undersized big end bearings. I duly imported oversized pistons from Australia (took a bit to convince Customs that, although it is an English car, the pistons were made in Adelaide Australia and so eligible for lower tariff under CER) and a few months later in May I returned to collect the car. Well it hardly made it up the steep hills north of Dunedin. We still had all our camping gear in the boot and so I camped overnight on the Kaikoura coast (man was it cold – with a jersey and socks on and two sleeping bags I froze in the pup tent and crawled back into the car at 2.00am!!). Mulling over the lack of power I decided to have a look at the timing. Sure enough it had been set to the mark on the crankshaft pulley which is top dead centre, and not given the required 5 to 7 degrees advance. The car then ran better but even after the run-in period just didn’t seem to perform as well as originally. It wasn’t unit about 6 years later that I discovered why. With the head off again for a decoke I found that the pistons fitted were the standard compression pistons, whereas our car being English assembled originally had high compression pistons. I’d ordered high compression pistons from Australia (they have a raised crown with cut-outs to clear the valves) but I hadn’t checked them when I finally got them through Customs at Wellington airport and instead dashed them off to the engine rebuilders in Dunedin unopened. A lesson there. Further, the distributor centrifugal advance curve is different for the different compression engines. The higher compression has less centrifugal advance so to make up for this with the lower compression pistons I have now advanced the static timing a couple of degrees more. Not really spot on but a compromise until I maybe obtain a standard compression distributor, or better still some high compression pistons. More on the Snipes and Imperial and our shift to Gisborne next time.