Consort - family owned from new

[Peter Grant]

Hi Brian,
Google Denis Ley’s Consort restoration.
Denis has videoed in great detail his restoration of a Consort and one of the videos shows him replacing sections of the car’s roof and gutter. It may asit you in deciding the best way forward with your own car.
Best wishes on the project
Peter Grant
Sydney Australia

[Brian-H]

Hi Peter

Thanks to you in a different thread , I've seen those videos. He never removes the headlining or the wooden structure, "all" that he does is cut out a small strip of the roof adjacent to the guttering (where the metal had gone a bit porous), and he welds a new piece in. You can see the wood behind, and the small amount of wood visible, looks ok in the video.

But on this Consort, it looks like water has got into the wood from the gutter, leaving the roof metal ok, but swelling the wood, which has expanded and distorted the roof. The wood can also start to laminate.

So my questions are ....
Was the roof shape pre-formed in the factory, and the wooden structure inserted when the roof was already attached to the rest of the body ?
Would the wooden structure come away with the headlining still attached to the wood (see pictures at end of previous page of this thread) ?
Would the metal roof retain its shape (i.e. when they originally inserted the wooden structure, I presume that the roof shape was already formed) ?
Does the wooden structure just act as a "support" for the central pillars and the roof's shape ?
How did they prevent water getting into the side "beam" from the gutter (and I presume that the success varies) ?

[Chris_R]

As far as I know on coachbuilt cars where there is a wooden frame the wooden frame is made first and then the metal is fixed to it. The wood dictates the shape of the metal rather than vice versa. A friend is restoring a car from the very late 1930s and this is the way it is built. His first task was to get the wood shapes correct including the supports for the roof. Only once that was done was metal (in his case aluminium) put over it which (I think) is simply screwed down.

[Brian-H]

That's a possibility that I'm concerned about. However, the roof on the Consort is steel , so, looking at the photos on the previous page in the thread, how did they shape steel over an "open" structure ? I've also managed to get my hand in behind a section of the main side-beam on one side, and the wood is curved more than the roof along the gutter i.e. the curve of the roof onto the gutter is slightly larger than the curve of the wood onto the gutter. It all seems a weird way of building a roof which soon went out of fashion in the 50's.

[Chris_R]

The steel would have been shaped over a buck and then placed on the car already shaped. Which is perhaps why the two curvatures don't exactly match. I'm not saying this is how Daimler did do it, only commenting on what I know of (some) coachbuilding techniques.
Daimler certainly did do odd things in manufacture at that time. I met a chap at a show who told me how they made the Majestic Major Limousine. Standard bodies would be trucked to the plant where they made them where they would be cut in half. Each half mounted on a lengthened chassis and the additional section then welded in. To do the roof the welder usually stood on an oil drum. Once the body had been welded up it was taken off the chassis, loaded back onto a lorry and trucked back to the factory to be remounted again on a production chassis. Sometimes the boot lid wouldn't match up with bodywork behind the window so they simply laid as many lead sticks across the body beneath the window as they needed until it lined up. And this was right up until 1968.

[Brian-H]

Speaking as someone who knows as much about coachbuilding as cats know about the function of computer keyboards, I'm grateful for any insight into how various models of cars were made before Unibody became ubiquitous.

The only other car that I ever owned that bore any similarity in construction to this Consort, was a Citroen Dyane, which I took apart when the body became too rotten to use. As with the Consort, the Citroen A series body (2CV/Dyane/Ami) was only secured to the chassis with a few bolts, and it was incredibly easy to undo those and roll the body off the chassis (and then disassemble it using a lump hammer, taking the pieces to the tip afterwards).

In those days I also assumed that the Consort body had similar rigidity to the Citroen A series body, in that the body of the latter did have some structural integrity (well, only before rain got to it). But in view of the way the Consort body is constructed, it is worrying as to what would happen if the wooden structure in the roof were removed (after firstly removing the trim and central pillars).

[Chris_R]

You might like to watch this series of YouTube videos (I think there is 50 episodes so far) on a DB18 Consort restoration. Very detailed.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_ ... ion+part+1

[Brian-H]

Yep I've seen those already, but they don't really show anything about the wooden structures in the car. It is interesting to see how he reinforces the body with cross-bracing before removing it from the chassis (which you wouldn't have to do with a Citroen A series unless the rain had rusted the sills and pillars) but otherwise I didn't learn much from the videos as I've been under/over/inside/outside the car many many times since 1975. It's the wooden structure inside the body which is strange to me, I can understand that there was a shortage of steel for several years after WW2, which might explain why they used wood to some extent, but whether the roof would maintain its shape with the wood removed (body still on chassis) seems to be an unknown.

What I'm saying is that the roof is steel, its shape doesn't seem to rely on the wood, and as long as the car is not driven with the central pillars/doors removed and the wood removed, surely it should maintain its shape because it's welded to the front and rear of the body, which would be held in position on the chassis. So as far as I can tell, the wood is there to prevent "drumming" and to give support to the the central pillars and doors.

[Sydsmith]

Brian we are way off subject here but as that seems to have been allowed here is my two penny worth.

I had a similar problem with a 1937 Austin 18 York which I rebuilt the wood was rotten in places all round but only at the places where water had penetrated and where the dreaded woodworm had made a meal of it.

My approach was to strip out the body of everything, remove the doors and boot lid and headlining then replace the rotten wood sections bit by bit.

I carefully removed rotten parts and made copies from what was left of them guessing the missing bits over size and trimming them down as regularly I tried them in place. It was very time consuming and I have to admit where the timber was difficult to remove fairly sound but worm eaten, I treated the wood and used a thin mix of epoxy resin worked into the holes and left to harden, layered up to provide a solid finish.

The body will not fall apart as long as you do not take out too much at a time.

Of course the right way to do it is to strip the roof off and rebuild as needed, I have seen that done on a coach built Bentley but it is a major task, not for the feint hearted. It is possible to remove the shaped metal roof top without distorting it and to put it back on, but it needs great care skill and time

I cannot see how you could repair a roof structure without removing the head lining, it is fixed to the roof structure in most cars so it has to come out, in my experience that means a new headlining as it is very difficult if not impossible to remove it without damaging it. Hope that helps. Syd

[Superfly]

Hi Brian

Just a heads-up with the Consort project.

You might want to check out the cost of the bureaucracy involved with the DVLA before you convert the Daimler to electric,as it will come under the 'radically altered vehicles’, catagory.
You will have to factor in the cost of this which is considerable,a lot of form filling, potential inspections and you could also end up with 'Q' plate.

Although,not quite the same situation,I have personal experience trying to register a 'radically altered vehicle' with the DVLA in 2019,it took the best part of 4 months and my instance it was a fairly straightforward case

Unfortunately the day's have gone here in the UK where you can 'radically alter' even Classics without having to deal with the relevant Government bodies.

Thanks,be safe
Stu