Doug Cody's Journal

So now on to restoration.

The first step was to remove the interior and dash as seen in the prior post. As an interim to keep everything organized, a temporary dash was fabricated out of grill mats. This way the wiring has a stable ground during testing. I had to buy a new turn signal switch, pigtails for the headlights and a dip switch for the high beams. Turns out the dipswitch wiring emerges from the harness in the engine compartment above the passenger footwell, a confusing turn of events, but not the last! I constructed a 6ft extension set of wires that cross over to the driver side so all good.

Rewiring the horn should have been a simple endeavor. The wiring was easy, but to get it to work was a challenge. After verifying the horn worked via directly hooking it to the battery, a problem emerged that stopped the horn from working. I hooked it up to the brown wire side of the fuse box, and it beeped. I moved the jumper to the fused side and it failed. Turns out the fuse had a solid connection, but lots of resistance. Testing with a volt meter, I lost a 3rd of the voltage across the fuse. Simple test of swapping the two 20a fuses and voila! A honking horn! Got bit by the Ghost of Bad Fuses. I expect many more ghosts will need to be chased out.

If it weren't hard enough to be debug British wiring, the Moss Motors wiring harness has some non-standard connectors installed rather than bullets or blade connectors. Take a look at the black square blocks. In the picture of the turn signal bullets on the left and block on the right, the color coded wires tell me this is for the turn signal, but the connector is completely unknown. These didn't appear in autos until the 80s so why is it on the harness? There are no devices that plug into this connector. I found two more on the rear harness for the turn signals. Moss Motors, what's up with your Q/A? Still waiting to hear back from them on why 1980s style connectors are mounted on a wiring harness for a car produced in the '60s. I passed a pic thru Google Lens and even Google can't identify it.

So, after running a continuity check on every wire, every connection, every switch position, I finally hooked up the battery and got lights! Had to chase away another ghost, no idea what I did, but the lights are working! Woo Hoo!

So now comes the hard work. I've tasked myself with the rewiring, body work and interior restoration. You can see what she looked like before and after gutting the interior. Rust is present but only a couple thru-metal holes, so I've dodged a bullet! That was my first question to Bill @ BAW, if Ruby was a rust bucket or salvageable. Turns out she's pretty clean, but does have some repaired frame damage.

I ripped out the interior, dropped the dash for the inspection. The crash bar is out to be recovered. The cockpit has a lot of thick rust scale. There's a couple thru-metal rust holes in the footwells and ripped metal around the seat rail bolts. All this is going to require welding later on.

So on to rewiring. The shop did all the heavy lifting on installing the wiring harness. They handled all components under the dash, the generator, voltage regulator, and converted the car to negative ground in the process. Converting to negative ground wasn't expected, but a good thing, I just have to roll with the punches with the wiring. One of the things I discovered on the old harness, besides the vitamin bottle and 120v household circuit breaker, was a burnt blue cable that goes from the light switch down to the foot dip switch. So, that was the impetus for all the hacked wiring and hardware. I have no idea why a vitamin bottle was installed! It covered a dash light, must have been an irritant. One discovery was the PO cut the wires to the right headlight and turn signal. Again, no idea why. Maybe it was to solve shorts in the burnt wiring.

Just by off-chance, I discovered there was no thermostat in the engine. When pulling the dash, I had to remove the engine temp sensor as it was mounted on the engine, not the radiator. Had to remove the thermostat housing to free the sensor, and found it vacant. So officially, my very first restoration on the car was to install a new thermostat. One giant step for me, one small step in a long journey for Ruby.

July 12th 2024, Ruby came home. Here I am in the driver seat, backing her away from the flatbed to drive up into the garage. She started on a half crank. No victory laps yet. She has a long way to go.

Wow, so much time has gone by since the last post, so much work has been done. I'm going to break this up into multiple posts.

Ruby spent 3 months at British Auto Works in North Plains Oregon. They replaced the transmission, radiator, fuel tank, pump and sender, new rotors and drums, rebuilt the brakes, master cylinders, new clutch and throw-out, tie-rods, new wheel bearings, all soft rubber hose connections.

The Prior Owner (PO) installed a kill switch as well as a myriad of toggle switches. The shop found the wiring harness to be unusable, so they ended up installing a new harness under the dash and converting the car to negative ground. I was supposed to do the rewiring but the kill switch had to go. Turns out, there was an electrical fire years ago, and all those toggle switches were functional replacements of the switches on the dash. The speedo is missing and the other gauges broken.

Oh, BAW did a compression test and found good pressure across all cylinders so the engine is solid, just needs the SUs rebuilt.

BAW saved me about 5 years of work in that 3 months. First thing I noticed upon inspection were new freeze plugs in the block, something they did on their own. I highly recommend them if you're in Oregon. Now I have a platform worth rebuilding.

She looks good, but underneath is a lot of worn out parts. Fortunately, there's no thru metal rust, just some surface rust in all the common places.

'Ruby' has sat for almost 6 years due to transmission failure. All the hydraulics, fuel system, brakes, clutch, wheel berings need to be replaced. That leaves the radiator, guages and full interior in my lap. Oh, and the shop says the wiring harness needs to be replaced.

Not intimated! This is my retirement project so one piece at a time. Having British Auto Works up in North Plains doing the mechanics is going to save me about 5 years of work.

She'll be a road warrior soon!