1931 Morris Minor Folding Head Saloon PL 8343

“An Unpretentious Car” “The £100 Car”

Little is known of the car's history, registered new on June 4th 1931. She was taxed in 1965 and then off the road until 2003. At some stage in the mid 1990's she was undergoing a chassis up restoration but the owner died. She then languished in a barn until the present owner bought her in 2000.

As the main purpose of any vehicle is to be driven the owner decided to finish the restoration and get her on the road as quickly as possible. A secondary goal was to learn bodywork and brush painting skills. As you can see from the results, this needs years of practice, so she was painted to the best of the owner's ability and reassembled with the intention of taking an item off at a time and making a better job with each new attempt. However, the lure of driving her proved too enticing, so this is taking much longer than estimated.

Over the years until 1965 she had been kept on the road by the process that was usual at the time, namely cannibalising any vehicle that would provide donor parts, so she was a strange beast. The former owner was removing the extras that had been added but on his death some of the original parts were lost. These are mostly the parts that are least available, so the current owner decided to use commercially available parts even if not original specification while searching for originals.

At restoration she was fitted with oversize tyres (400x19) instead of the correct size for the year (350x19) and the crownwheel and pinion was too high a ratio. When the tyres began to perish and some teeth were broken in the rear axle, the correct sizes were fitted. This gave a 5% reduction in the gearing but has resulted in an amazing improvement in acceleration, top speed and fuel economy!

On National Drive it Day 2009 Penny was distressed by a loud bang while negotiating a roundabout. She slowly rolled to the nearest exit and into a layby.  She was 40 miles from home and feeling so alone.
My first reaction was that she had a puncture, but when I inspected all five of her wheels their tyres were still pumped up.

I climbed in and turned the ignition on and saw that the warning light was very feeble. Aha - a loose connectio!? Start at the battery and work along from there. So I climbed out and lifted the driver's seat, opened the flap in the carpet and removed the floorboard covering the battey box.

The problem was immediately obvious - see the picture and guess what had happened.

I shouldn't have laughed when this turned up for a modern car at the starting point of our drive

So it wasn't so much a Drive it Day as Piggie Back Home...