Well its been a while since I last posted. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. Big events are that I've written two new books - one on the Bertelli Era Aston Martins from the 1930s (the sublime) published by Herridge and Sons and one on the ADO16 - the Austin Morris 1100 / 1300 cars. The Aston Mattin book is one of my best works and is lovely - although there are a couple of period photos of MGs at Le Mans in the 1930s in it which I stupidly mistook for Aston Martins (and were sold to me as such and lesson learned) but otherwise I'm really pleased with the book. Here is the book cover:
and a couple of shots of Tom Wood's Hedgehog - a 1934 Mark II:
and Dr Tom Rollason's 1937 2 litre saloon
The ADO16 book covering the Austin / Morris / MG / Riley / Wolseley / Vanden Plas 1100/1300 family of cars book is great - the cars had come in for a lot of undeserved stick by the classic scene some year ago but in real life the cars are in not in any way ridiculous and are in fact very good little cars, innovative, technically advanced and very nice to drive - and of course were best sellers for BL through the 1960s and deservedly so. Its a lovely little book, published by Veloce and is on Amazon as I type. And here are a couple of ADO16s
Jim Hills' very original MG 1100:
A Trio of ADO 16's - left is John Norris' Blue 1300GT, centre is Roy Robinson's 1300 Traveller and right is David Haycock's Beige Riley:
I'm now writing a book on the Aston Martin DBS/DBS V8/AM V8 and Lagonda V8 alongside a book on Lotus Road cars. Both books should be finished and published around late 2025. So watch this space!
Other news is that I eventually finished rewiring the Plus 2, and have now sold it so I can concentrate on completing the rebuild of my Plus 2S which has now staggered back into life. After my experiences of rewiring the Plus 2 (which included getting a professional auto electrician to finish the job off) , I'm concentrating on building up the dashboard of the Plus 2S - so I've put a couple of pictures in of the dash on the bench below. Here is the front looking nice:
and here's the back - just shows how much work is needed to get these cars looking good. Sorting out the switches was fun - not only did I have to renovate the surface of the rockers but I also had to work out which switch was which, test their operation. clean all the internal and external contacts and then lubricate the switch internals before attaching them to the dash. Now I just need to update the tacho with the clocks4classics kit and fit the all new amient temperature gauge and I'll be ready to fit the wiring loom:
For the new books I'm currently hunting down AM V8 and Lagonda owners to feature, and trying to understand Lotus' models post the M100 Elan! So to lighten things up here is a shot of the DB9 which has just had its plugs and three out of twelve coil packs changed at great expense, but is now running smooth as silk and looking really good!
Hopefully I'll be a bit quicker with the next update!
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