Time to get cracking on the Citroen B2 Caddy replica but first, another trip to the tool shop
I love buying new tools. Any excuse and I am off to the toy shop and grabbing a gadget. I have tools that I bought years ago and have never used, I have tools I bought and have used once…. It is probably some sort of disease, but I am in no hurry to find out.
On those rare occasions when I get to use some new plaything, I get the same thrill that must come from buying a new car, except I don’t really know what that thrill is like, because I have never bought a new car. A brand new one, that is. Of all the dozens of family cars we have owned, (as distinct from my old classics) none of them have been brand spanking new. A dealer demo Subaru Forester is as close as we get to having bought anything new, and years ago there was a Peugeot 307 station wagon that had been traded in with very low ks. But actually new, fresh from the showroom floor? Zero k on the speedo? Never seen that.
Tools to play with, some more than once
But for the 1926 Citroen B2 Caddy replica, in just one busy day, I have been able to use several tools that had to be unwrapped from their packaging. Most exhilarating was my new plunge router, and a few of the assorted router bits that apparently can do amazing things if you only know how.
After years of stop-start progress, the vintage Citroen steel cold-rivetted chassis is all but prepared, and now I am turning to the woodwork for the body frame, upon which will sit the panels that eventually create the boat tail body. The entire structure of the boat tail will sit on two solid wooden rails that bolt onto the steel chassis and form the foundations for the whale-like ribs onto which my yet-to-be-made panels will sit.
Dust collector helps
The base plates (impressive highly technical term) are made of recycled old hardwood, trimmed with the thicknesser and squared. The thicknesser has been a revelation – I love running timber through and listening as the blades rip off another half a millimetre or so each pass. The smell, the shavings, the satisfaction of seeing clean fresh wood emerge – all exhilarating. It would be highly theatrical if I wasn’t sneezing and wheezing from all the dust.
I have a dust collector attached that is supposed to capture all the debris and spin it into a huge bag but even though that works for 99 per cent of the crud there is still enough to provoke me to nearly choke. Top tip from the chemist who thought I was buying industrial quantities of anti-histamine in order to supply a bikie gang; line your nostrils with a thin prophylactic layer of Vaseline before starting work. No sneezes.
After squaring off the new rails, and on trial fitting by lying them onto the chassis, I was dismayed to discover that the domed rivet heads that hold the different pieces of the chassis together, in fact, protrude by as much as three millimetres and stop the base plate sitting flush on the chassis rail. It can hardly form a solid base if it wobbles.
Hence the router! I practised on some scrap first, working out the plunge stop, the depth setting and the rip fence and getting a feel for the movement of this new toy. If it is not held very tightly, the torque of the router bit can propel the machine faster than I want it to move and a very untidy and erratic gouge is the result.
After three or four passable examples on offcuts, I swallowed hard, uttered a prayer to the gods I don’t believe in and scalloped out a gutter from the passenger’s side rail. Bugger me – after two or three runs and starting with a shallow cut and then gradually going deeper, I had a quite respectable and smooth rebate and the bloody thing sat square and flush, just like a bought one!
Jon enjoys shaving and shaping the timber
I am not used to this experience. Usually, either the tool breaks, I hurt myself, the wood splits, the cut is in the wrong place, the measurements are out or the saw horse wobbles and the machine goes off on a tangent. But no – it all happened like it was supposed to.
When I bolted the rail down, I realised that now I would have a reason to use another tool I had sitting waiting for the call. I needed to use my plug cutters to recess the just-drilled hole so as to bury the domed bolt head down flush with the timber. So out came the new and never used plug cutters I bought years ago in case one day I needed them and because they were on special, and whacked them into the chuck of my not-new pillar drill. Carefully clamping the work instead of just holding it ensured proper alignment of the plug cutters, and after a few trial runs – lo! They do the job magnificently.
I could get used to this.
From Unique Cars #473, Dec 2022/Jan 2023