I am not a car designer’s bootlace. Nor am I even the swarf falling from the cut-offs of the tooling of an engineer, nor do I resemble the makings of the most incompetent of apprentice panel beaters.
I am a less than mediocre mechanic and a complete novice as a coachbuilder. In fact, I have no idea why I pretend to know what I am doing about anything, while I tinker with my old rattlers.
Imposter syndrome is real.
About a year ago, I enthusiastically and confidently inscribed in these pages (Unique Cars #484) that the proportions for the coach building of the boat-tail body on my 1926 Citroen B2 were slowly coming together.
I thought I was flying along, my workspace adorned with lasers and string lines propped up by cardboard templates and brackets made from old Dexion shelving angle iron.
I confidently asserted that I had levelled the chassis, squared off the baseplates and body floor, finished cutting and gluing the scuttle frame pillars and was ready to conquer the world, or so it seemed.
Progress came shuddering to a halt when I decided to move the project from one part of my shed to another so as to free up space in the crowded workshop. I know it is exceptionally rare to have a large garage in the inner city but of course, no matter how big, it is always just that little bit too squeezy.
So one quiet afternoon, I took a deep breath, a double dose of antihistamines and started cleaning and moving machinery that had been sitting in the same spot for more than 20 years. If cobweb clearing was an Olympic event, the gold medal was all mine.
With a thin layer of prophylactic Vaseline lining my delicate and prominent nasal membranes, I avoided asphyxiation and survived the move and got the B2 into its new home, swapped around with the bandsaw, thicknesser and assorted other bits of second-hand wood-working machinery.
Once normal hostilities resumed – me wrestling the ash frame timbers and trying to precisely chisel clean and precise dovetails, mortises and tenons and so on – it soon became apparent there was something fundamentally wrong.
If the front of the scuttle was level, the rear of the chassis was not and if it was square and stable on the driver’s side, it was drooping on the passenger’s. And vice versa. Yet I had devoted hours to ensuring that the chassis was true and square.
So I checked and double checked everything – even the tyre pressures, the leaf-spring loadings, and measured the distances between all the available key points. In isolation every key dimension was as it should be.
I stared, glowered, swore, walked away and came back several times – it was still all wrong. Frustration crept in – so as all prize-winning dummy-spitters do, I pulled a sheet over the whole project and got on with other things.
A few weeks – oh, alright, it was months – later I summonsed the energy to take another look. I started with the basics and remeasured everything. It was all correct and every key data point aligned with the drawings. I was stumped and sought some expert advice.
My brains trust – who for his own reputation must remain anonymous – talked me through what I had done.
I explained that the chassis was square, the suspension was all aligned, the tyres were brand new and had equal pressure, the springs were even, the timber base of the body was exactly the same both sides of the frame. I was totally mystified how the scuttle could be discernibly higher on one side than the other.
As it transpires, there was one critical measurement I had failed to take in to account. The car was square within itself, as I had verified, but – of all things – it was the garage floor upon which it sat that was a tad out of kilter.
There was an undetected but slight slope in the floor in the back section of the shed to where I had moved the car. Thus the chassis had decided to adopt a slight twist in its new home.
The solution, my mentor explained, was to forget trying to level the car on its wheels – as I had laboriously done from the beginning of this project four years ago – and to instead jack the chassis up on to four sturdy and preferably identical telescopic stands, level it in every dimension with spacers and adjusters and to start again with the work isolated from any impact caused by the distortion embedded in the wonky floor.
An hour later, the twist in my project was gone and the scuttle and ‘A’ pillars aligned, although some minor and manageable remedial adjustments will be required.
I have forgiven the almost centenarian Citroen for its sleight of hand and betrayal, reacquainted myself with the blueprints, sharpened my chisels and now that the shed is not as cold as an igloo in Anchorage, I can reassert my will on the remaining lengths of rough sawn American ash waiting to be transformed into the rest of the timber frame.
The ambitious target of having the 1926 car running again by its one-hundredth birthday is back in my sights. What could possibly go wrong next?