car restoration

Some time after my grandmother died we had an enormous job cleaning up her house for sale.

I ordered four new tyres and tubes as the old ones had perished over the years. But I had no idea how to fit them. I also had no idea what to do with the car.

After a few phone calls and a bit of research, it turned out that the man that knows the most about 20HP Rolls Royces lived around the corner from where the car had lived for 30 years! Without hesitation he offered to help get the car out of the garage and to show me how to change the tyres, and tell me a bit about the engine etc.

GF1 spent a few months dormant (again) in a friend's shed, and eventually I made it down to get it running... with the help of a few experts that is.

We changed all the oils, drained the fuel tank, cleaned the filters (I should say meshes - it only has course wire mesh where we have filters these days!)

Eventually it was time to bring GF1 home to Sydney. We rented a trailer and drove the car back to Sydney.

All was going well until the trailer started to fishtail as we went down a long incline. 

Remembering the advice of my father, I put my foot down to accelerate and pull the trailer into line. Unfortunately the 1.5 tonnes of GF1 and the 500kg's of the trailer were too much for the commodore. All that happened was that we got faster and faster, with the trailer dragging us in wider and wider swerves across both lanes of the freeway. Thankfully, there was no other traffic and it was dual carriageway.

I realised that acceleration wasn't going to work, and instead I'd have to break. The problem was that I didn't want to jack-knife the rig. So with trepidation I focused on the rhythm of the trailer and touched the break lightly as the trailer swung past the rear of the car ... and we slowed down.

We were speechless for about 10 minutes!

The rest of the trip was quite a bit slower but uneventful!