Mr MURDOCK'S ALVIS
No. Not that Mr Murdoch. This one was R B Murdock Esq who purchased his Alvis TD21 from the London distributor Brroklands of Bond Street in July 1959.
IMAGE:- Brooklands of Bond Street Key Fob
Interestingly, despite being a resident of Monaco, his car was built to UK specification and British registered. At that time the car was Alice Blue (a light metallic) with an automatic gearbox. By the 1980's it had been sprayed white and converted to a 4 speed manual. When I purchased it in 2000 it had changed colour again, this time to red.
IMAGES:- Side view in white Side view in red
This account of my ownership is aimed at both the prospective Alvis owner (as a warning of what horrors lie beneath even a promising exterior) and current owners (as some guide to what to do when you find said horrors). In fairness I should say that I bought my Alvis fully expecting to do a good deal of mechanical work. Even so, it is surprising how a few bits and pieces can (indeed will) expand into a full blown refurbishment.
Work on my car has been not only repair and refurbishment but a good deal of restoring originality. Owners of more numerous clasics, eg. MGs, Triumphs, do not usually encounter many departures from standard. This is mainly because original components are largely still available. This is not quite the case for Alvis cars. Most owners, so far as I see, are more concerned with keeping their car on the road without worrying too much about changing the car from the way it was when it left the factory. So over the years some bits get changed and others get taken off and never replaced. What follows are odd jottings of things I have found useful to know in my progress towards a road-legal original car.
The Alvis Owner Club I have no idea why the AOC is unique in not being an Owners club but no matter. If you own an Alvis you need to join. Even if you do no work on your car and have no desire to meet anyone else who's got one it is till worth joining for the cheap insurance. I insure as a member through Footman James with unlimited mileage (bit academic as it hasn't moved off my drive for nearly two years) and the premium is under £80. This would be cheap in itself but it gets better because it includes free continental breakdown cover. If you do do work on your car the Club is invaluable as a contact point for second hand parts (I usually go to Chris Prince or Walkers Radiators but that's only my preference). The Club publishes a monthly newsletter (Calendar) and a bi-monthly A5 magazine (The Bulletin). The newsletter mainly carries information on club events and the for sale/wanted ads. The sales ads justify joining for the prospective owner as you will see more cars advertised here than in months of classic car mags. The Bulletin is a very professional publication truly stuffed with articles both technical and historical as well as accounts of the larger club events.
The Club caters for owners of all Alvis vehicles of all ages and types. This includes the military vehicles although I suspect the owners of these probably regard their toys primarily as military or all-terrain hardware rather than Alvis' and join a club relevant to that class of vehicle. That said The Bulletin has certainly published articles about the Stalwart in the recent past. (NB. the Stalwart is a lorry with six wheel drive, four wheel steering and amphibious with water jet steering and I am NOT getting one whatever my nephew says...)
Technical Literature One important thing for any intending purchaser to realise is that there is very little technical literature available for these cars. There is no workshop manual either by the factory or anyone else. The factory produced two documents; the Parts List and the Manual of Instruction which went with every new car. These can be obtained second hand but it is no more expensive to get new copies from Red Triangle. There are specific Parts Lists for all four models. Although better than nothing, the parts lists are not the best of their kind. It is very difficult to cross refer from illustration to text and the choice of what is illustrated and what is not at times verges on the bizarre (does anyone really need a full page line drawing of a battery?). The Manual of Instructions supplied with the car when new is very useful although the wiring diagram will cause blindness and madness simultaneously if consulted at all intensively. A very much better one was drawn by Lucas (see link below) and features in a very useful document published by Motor Trader. This trade publication used to publish technical and service data for new cars as they came out and you should try to get the one for the TD21 published in the sixties and reprinted in Classic Car magazine in February 1974. Another handy thing to have is the Haynes manual for the Austin Healey 100/6. This covers a lot of components used at least in similar form in the Alvis such as steering, gearbox, horns, heater, carburettors, &c.
IMAGE:- Wiring diagram
Pretty Pictures If, like me, you are facing a long period of work before your car is going to be anything like usable, it is nice to have some suitably inspiring material to hand to remind you of why it is all worth the bother. There is one book which is worth getting called "Alvis - The Postwar Cars" by John Price Williams (Motor Racing Publications - ISBN 0-947981-73-X). The title is self-explanatory and it contains some good photos of the cars when they were new including some body production shots. There is an older book (1966) called "Alvis Cars" by a K R Day but this is really concerned with pre-war models and sells for a price out of all proportion to its interest to the TD/E/F owner.
The other source of inspiration is contemporary marketing material. Alvis produced some very nice brochures throughout the range. They are a bit limited as a technical resource - I have a sales leaflet for the Series 1 in which an interior shot has been retouched to remove any sign of a gear change mechanism - nevertheless they are attractive in their own right. They tend not to be very cheap partly because not many would have been produced in the first place. It is also possible to buy advertisments extracted from contemporary magazines. Alvis advertising tended to restrict itself to simple pack shots (usually a side or three quarter front elevation of the saloon and coupe) with some price details alongside. Sometimes they parked the car in front of a large tree (to symbolise traditional virtues I suppose) but very occasionaly they came over all artistic and posed cars against a backdrop of yachts, horses or a mittel europe street scene. All of this stuff appears quite regularly on the ebay internet auction site.
Of course the classic car press does feature relevant articles from time to time. The best I have seen was in the now defunct Popular Classics. The June 1993 issue carried a very good overview of the whole range with loads of good colour pictures.
Where to See Them There are a number of these cars on display both here and abroad. The most prestigious is Prince Phillip's TD21 Series 1 drophead (OXR 1 - chassis 26600) which is on display at Sandringham. This car was built with a large number of unique features including; 3" added to height of windscreen, leather covered dashboard and door cappings, Reutter seats with armrests, suspension uprights machined from solid (rather than castings) and was later uprated with TE spec cylinder head and ZF gearbox. Another TD21 drophead is at the Haynes Museum in Sparkford, nr Yeovil.
Buying Parts - A General Note Buying parts for an Alvis requires a certain amount of low cunning. The easy way is to just phone off a list to Red Triangle. This firm is Alvis' old service department which was floated off as a separate company when car production ceased. It is the only marque specialist and, one has to say, sets its prices accordingly. However one can often go elsewhere because many parts are not of Alvis manufacture. The electrical system is all Lucas, the brakes are Lockheed and Dunlop, the gearbox make varies but is also not Alvis, the carbs are SU, the instruments, switchgear and heater are Smiths and lots of other fittings come from proprietary manufacturers (eg. the fuel pump is AC). These "outside" components were not made specifically for the Alvis which means that they can be had from non-Alvis suppliers. For example, I got my gearbox stay rod mountings (which Red Triangle actually don't do) from an Austin Healey specialist. Of course some shared applications are not very helpful - the back lights, for example, are also fitted to Aston Martins which hardly gets the cost down.... I don't want this to sound too much like I'm slating Red Triangle who do a very good job of maintaining a supply of parts that no-one else could justify. I simply point out that a slavish adherence to one supplier will work out unnecesarily expensive. Mind you, where else can you get bolts engraved with the part number....?!
Of course you can often use second hand parts, indeed sometimes you will have no choice. The remarks above concerning going outside Alvis circles apply in this respect as well although mainly for reasons of ease. Given that Alvis only built about 1100 chassis in the first place the supply of used parts is obviously going to be a bit limited. There are slightly less than a handful of people dealing in a regular way. Getting access to these people, who advertise in the Calendar, is naturally another reason to join the AOC.
Talking of second hand parts leads me to my belief that these cars are too cheap for their own good. It is incredible that a car this rare, so universally admired, easy to work on and well supported should still be scrapped on a regular basis. Indeed a rough but perfectly revivable TD21 was recently incinerated for an episode of "Midsommer Murders" (a British TV crime series), and yes it was a total wreck afterwards. Values tend to be depressed rather hard for any car requiring body repairs because most people would have to farm out metalwork let alone ash framing and that costs money which any purchaser will obviously take account of. Also I suspect that there aren't enough buyers because too many people see dealer adverts for top class dropheads at realistic but nonetheless daunting prices and give up the dream there and then. It is also surprising the ideas people get about them. One otherwise good article stated "make no mistake, these are big cars" with the suggestion that this could make them inconvenient to own.. Well, in pictures they are huge but stand one next to an XJ6 or a Silver Shadow and the Alvis looks like a Dinky toy. Another disincentive is the lack of technical material. Yes, there are many AOC members who are very willing to help and advise, but it remains true that most people like to see a workshop manual and tend to fade away when they find that there isn't one.
Fasteners Most of us are used to the AF (Across Flats) system for fasteners. With AF a 7/16" or 10mm spanner, bolt or nut measures exactly that across the flats. Fasteners used on the Alvis are generally Whitworth. With this system fasteners and tools have a nominal size but this bears no obvious or useful relationship to the across flats measurement. Whitworth sizes are approximately half the AF equivalent (eg. 1/4"W is almost 1/2" AF) but this is a fact of no practical value as AF spanners (imperial or metric) will not fit Whitworth fasteners - they will always be either just too big or just too small. Persisting with the experiment will just produce a lot of very chewed nuts. You must purchase a couple of sets of Whitworth spanners. I got mine from an autojumble but they are advertised in the classic car press. You won't get them in Halfords...... You also won't get (without a lot of searching) Whitworth sockets - they do exist but I think the AF system had taken over by the time sockets came into common use.
Of course if you don't have sockets then you don't have torque wrenches or the figures for using them. There are ways of working them out and an article on this very subject appeared in the AOC Bulletin (Sept/Oct 2002). For the most part this is not going to be a problem since, as with any other car, I have been doing nuts up "tight enough" and so far nothing has sheared or fallen off.
Wheels My car was originally supplied with disc wheels but a long time ago was converted to wires. All of them had several loose or broken spokes which on a 100mph car is not good.. I had mine rebuilt and repainted although this is not really economic because new wires are relatively cheap (Dunlop shipped the tooling out to India in the 1980s) but I didn't want to just throw bits away and buy new. Mind you, the spare was really too awful to contemplate and that did go to the dump to be replaced by a decent second hand one. All this cost just over £300. One important problem I encountered was that QuickFit can't balance or "track" wire wheels and this probably applies to other high street tyre fitters. The firm that rebuilt them was willing to do it but their machine wasn't big enough. I ended up going to Vintage Tyre Supplies at Beaulieu who happily refitted my old tyres (with none of the usual teeth sucking you get on such occasions) and balanced them.
Brakes My car has been fitted with factory-spec Dunlop disc brakes on all four wheels (the rear ones probably at the same time the wheels were changed). I was pleasantly surprised to find that the calipers were all ok. It is common knowledge (apparently) that Dunlop disc brakes are prone to seizing up but mine show no sign of this (so far...). All I have done in this area is replace the seals in the master cylinder and bleed the whole system with new nipplies fitted all round.
Being an early model, my car has the umbrella type handbrake where the handle tugs on a short primary cable which pulls a bell crank which pulls the main cable which runs to the back of the car where it pulls on another bell crank which pulls rods which each pull on the handbrake calipers (rather like the system on the old Jaguar XJ6). I have tried several times to adjust all of this. The last time I thought I had succeded I went to go indoors only to be called back by my 10 year old nephew who was trying to stop a ton of Alvis rolling down the road. I think the problem is that the main cable has stretched. New cables can be had but are about £90. It is possible to have the inner cable replaced or shortened for a lot less than this. The main difficulty I have to face is digging the cable out from under half an inch of underseal.
Engine. I have not done any work within the engine yet. So, in the meantime, here are a couple of pictures of the engine bay of a TE21. All engine bays are pretty much alike. The only feature of note in the later cars is the power steering - the fluid resevoir is the black drum with the silver cap on the right of the front view photo. You will also note the rocker cover which is vitreous enamelled cast iron (not exactly a performance accessory....although the later Fiat Dino had a cast iron grille which was even more strange).
Clutch & Gearbox The starting point for all that follows is that the clutch was not fully disengaging. This could have been due to wear in the plate. It wasn't. It was actually due to poor adjustment which can be corrected with one spanner. I did not realise this and so decided to remove the gearbox to examine the clutch. Removal of the gearbox is not complicated - just very hard work. Take out the seats and the tunnel and you have total access to the propshaft and bellhousing bolts. The propshaft has to come out (passing under the back axle) to give you enough room to move the gearbox back to disengage the driveshaft. But now take warning. The gearbox casing is steel as is the bellhousing and they weigh a LOT. Take the gearbox out without the bellhousing because even the box on it's own is a two man lift. Of course, I didn't need to do any of this because in my case all I needed to do was adjust the release bearing. To do this get down along the driver's side and find where the rod from the clutch slave cylinder connects onto a hefty lever on the side of the bellhousing. This is clamped onto the release bearing pivot with a pinch bolt. Slacken this bolt and rotate the pivot towards the front of the car until you feel the bearing make contact with the clutch plate (ie. the pivot won't go any further). Tighten the pinch bolt. Done.
Propshaft This is a good example of how jobs can grow. Having taken the proshaft out while playing with the gearbox I thought that it would be a good time to replace the UJs (which felt a little loose) and get the shaft balanced (someone had used jubilee clips the last time). Fitting the UJs is perfectly straightforward but what I then realised is that getting a propshaft balanced in a world full of front wheel drive cars is not as simple as it used to be. I eventually went to Oselli Engineering in Witney, Oxon. who did the job for about £55.
Exhaust System My old exhaust was stainless steel but very badly designed in that the offisde silencer was positioned diagonally under the end of the gearbox (not what Alvis intended at all). The silencers are elliptical and to fit this one in it had to be fitted "vertically", which meant that it projected lower than it should and had been comprehensively bashed as a result. I bought a good second hand stainless steel system which, being from a TE, is a larger bore (I had to fit TE manifolds which are a different shape as well as a larger bore from the TD type). Three things worth noting here are that Alvis did not use a manifold gasket (although Red Triangle can now supply one), an exhaust system can be fitted without lifting the car and you should retain all the old mountings as new fittings are either unobtainable or surprisingly expensive. The really tricky mounting is the one right at the back. I have given a drawing here showing how I made my own.
IMAGE:- Exhaust Mounting
The only real snag I hit here was that one of the grottier manifold studs in the head snapped when I tried to take it out. Should this happen to you, in any context, do not use those screw-in extractor things. The idea is that you drill a hole into the stud and the tool, which resembles a tapered drill with a left hand thread, screws backwards into the hole until it jams and the stud starts to unscrew. In reality the extractor snaps off and you are left with a snapped stud now with a core of machine steel which only spark erosion will get rid of. Thankfully I found a man who operates a mobile stud extraction service (no, I couldn't believe it either). He saved me a lot of money because taking the head off to a workshop to have it done would have involved replacing the head gasket which weighs in at an unbelievable £98 (yes, just the head gasket alone).
Carburettors Mine were OK but very filthy. Having taken them off to replace the exhaust manifolds, I tried a tip I read of soaking the carbs in white spirit before brushing with a brass brush (I used one sold for use on suede shoes). Straight after an overnight soak they looked disgusting but the spirit seems to have the effect of drying out the dirt so it brushes off very easily. The result isn't like brand new but very acceptable considering how little effort was involved.
Another little problem has been the pipe from the auxilliary carburettor to the inlet manifold. This is sealed by an olive at each end exactly as you would find in domestic plumbing. Unfortunately plumbing uses 15mm pipes and this pipe is 12mm. I am told that this size is common in France and that it is used here on some kitchen mixer taps. I eventually got some from New City Plumbing & Heating in Kempston, Beds. (01234 855939).
Front Suspension The one job I have done is to replace the rubber bushes in the upper wishbone pivots. This is quite easy on the near-side but on the drivers side the pivot bolt (which passes through both arms of the wishbone) won't go past the steering gearbox so this (and the steering column attached to it) must be undone from it's mountings and rotated to allow the bolt to come out. Your car may be different but on mine the fluid pipe to the offside front brake caliper passes around the steering gearbox and I had to take this off as well and, of course, bleed the brakes when I put it back.
One job that exercises a lot of minds is removal, for whatever reason, of the front springs. Now the MGB, for example, uses a very similar suspension layout and the springs can be removed by putting a jack under the lower wishbone, undoing the suspension upright at either the top or the bottom and then letting the jack down allowing the lower wishbone to drop far enough to extract the spring. Despite appearances you cannot do this on the Alvis because the lower wishbone will not come down far enough to let the tension off the spring (I think that's the reason). Anyway, what you should do is remove the telescopic shock absorber (which is fitted within the spring) and use a special spring compressor. This compressor cannot be bought but must be made. Drawings for this and a device for pushing out the lower wishbone pivot bolts, were published in the July/August 2002 edition of the AOC's Bulletin.
