Tricks

Producing a *new* Austin Princess has led to a few tricks; to restore original appearance, and to go beyond, to include more, to better fit the contemporary mould... Here are just a few smaller items...

Filler Cap

The coolant filler on top of the thermostat housing has a simple sealing cap - it looks like a radiator cap, but the pressure cap is actually on the expansion tank. The radiator is a modern crossflow design; it has no cap. Anyway, looking down the chart shows more than 50 'Radiator Pressure Cap' designs covering every type of car; one stands out as 'Special Non-Pressure Sealing Cap only for BL applications' - inside the pressed-steel a simple rubber disc - that'll be $19.25, thanks.

But what about the original label? 20 minutes with a scanner, a printer and - yes, the original is on the right.

Tachometer

The instrumentation includes a nice, large, noisy clock-with-hands (digital clocks were probably expensive and unreliable at the time.) What's the point of knowing how late you are, or how long it's taking to get anywhere? What you really need is a tachometer - to prove that the engine is only doing 4000 RPM, when it sounds ready to pop. Or that it's idling so slowly the needle's on the zero... anyway, it's debatable whether the best instrument maker is VDO of Germany, or my favourite (as used on Ferrari) - Veglia Borletti of Italy. On the Princess the clock is a seperate module from the main cluster, so it's a simple matter to remove the housing (with green backlight filter) and use it for something else. You could put a photo frame or a flower vase there if you felt like it.

A spare Fiat 128 Coupe cluster provides an 8000-RPM unit, the redline at 6800 representing peak power of 75bhp for the 1290cc SOHC engine - of course, the Princess peaks at 93bhp / 4900RPM, so it's questionable whether you'd ever go over 5000RPM...

The tachometer dial was trimmed down to the shape of the Smiths Industries clock (made in W. Germany) and the hole in the housing enlarged slightly to get the Veglia Borletti electronic module through. The components look like what we'd find in a cheap Chinese radio these days. Old BMWs actually run on stuff like this. But I digress... Three aluminium legs are needed to hold the module centrally, and these allow accurate centralisation. I used one of my favourite tools for these - a Monodex sheet metal cutter. Much quicker and neater than a hacksaw. The dial must be located at the same depth for the backlighting to work. The spindle is very fragile and the needle is aged from the sunlight. Clearance problems with the lens were overcome by sanding down the needle boss.

Tailights

The fashion for 1999 is totally-clear taillight lenses. I developed a way to achieve this on the Princess (of course. I'm always right up with the latest stuff. :-) Unfortunately there's a requirement to have red reflectors, which prevents the use of clear lenses and red high-intensity LEDs. Therefore I settled on a fairly easy option of taking a spare set of reverse light/reflector lenses and installing them as rear light/indicator lenses with the existing reverse light/reflector lenses. Effectively I now have twice as many reflectors. I bought some orange bulbs to keep the indicators orange, however these $2.50 ponies have offset pins, therefore proving very difficult to fit (and prone to shorts when you do.) So I prefer wrapping orange Nitto insulation tape around a regular bulb - worked on Fiat front indicators. The problems encountered were a small peg to prevent fitting the lenses 'the wrong way around' - sidecutters fixed that. The seals (four in total) had to be crafted from black foam strip, V-notches cut for the corners, secured with Ados F2. Then there was a LTSA regulations compliance issue with the tail light bulb shining through the adjacent clear indicator lens - this was solved by creating a mask with insulation tape stuck back-to-back. The result - real class, no nasty orange or dull red, just two bright red crystal panels and the sparkle of four clear lenses...

Auxillary Lights (Look-at-ME lights)

Gotta have these - less dazzle than headlights, more visibility than sidelights, good for heavy rain, fog or dusk - or according to the law (sometimes), only for use with high beam (i.e. all four lamps blazing - two little extras aren't gonna do much.) Anyway, you don't want an additional, budget-looking ON/OFF rocker switch, you want the blank space occupied by a coordinated switch - simply use a spare heated-rear-window switch (with the green pilot light), pop the legend out and replace it with the headlamp legend from a spare headlamp switch... Try doing that with modern Japanese switchgear! The light source for the fibre-optic illumination (yes really!) has a spare slot - push in a spare fibre and your headlamp legend is illuminated too!

Warning Lights

I can't think of any other car from this era that still has totally unmarked warning lights... Let's say (like me) you've just fired up a Princess that's sat idle for five years, and there's this yellow light on. Do you: a). Drive off anyway assuming it's the choke, or windscreen-washer-empty or whatever, or b). Stop the engine immediately, find a wiring diagram, identify the wire colour and hence the function?

Turns out that yellow light was for low oil pressure. Now what would you have done? Fortunately the sender was faulty. (And later models do have another yellow light, for the choke - more correctly the 'enrichment device'.)

To update these, some legends were designed and printed on inkjet transparency. The bezels themselves have a restricted 'window' - this was enlarged with a craft knife, the legends super-glued in place between the coloured filter and the bezel.

The crude lighting arrangement (shown beneath the instrument cluster) uses some lengths of white plastic 'garden hose' as light pipes... length is +/- 20mm...

Wood Dash

The dark brown wood-effect dash of the early Wolseley variant and the later Princess 2's is actually real wood veneer (both sides) on plywood - the dark stain and super-smooth varnish makes it look like plastic stick-on wood... Some sandpaper and proper polyurethane (with genuine brush-marks) greatly improves the appearance (in my opinion anyway.) What is that wood, Teak or something? (And no, skeptics, it is NOT pine...)

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