The last job on The Great Collector's Crossley was the refurbishment of the Autovac. I had an old and rusty one in store, so I took it apart to see how it worked.

I won't go into the details as they're easy to find on the web. Fundamentally, if the springy bits were free and appeared to work in the correct sense, the Crossley's problem could be only that the gaskets were shot, and an air leak was stopping the vacuum chamber from doing its bit.

That proved to be the case. Whilst I was at it, it seemed worthwhile to completely overhaul my own example and I'm wondering if I might fit that to the Special instead of a fuel pump.

Getting back to the clutch; after doing the research and the calcs, I needed to turn the idea into a cardboard template. The two holes shown which attach the plate to the bell housing go into the alloy sump, so I've extended the bracket to get at least one bolt in the iron block.

The first job was to drill and tap the existing release bearing shaft so an extension would be centered for welding. I took the time to turn up a drilling jig because this is exactly the sort of thing which goes wrong from the outset.

Success! Once the bracket is made, I can shorten the extension to suit. The bracket needs to come as close into the bellhousing as possible, so the bending moment produced by the action of the slave cylinder is minimised.

This is the basic setup and to get an idea of the dimensions to allow for the piston travel, I attached an old slave cylinder which came off the first version of the Hillman's hydraulic assist front brakes (now replaced with discs).

The assembly is as close to the bellhousing as I can get it. Having decided on the Landrover Series II combination of master and slave cylinders, I had a few days wait for them to arrive....

... so what better plan than to break out the Scotch-Brite...

... dust off the engine-turning machine and work up the panels for the engine bay. I was a bit rusty on the method (and I notice that Scotch-Brite is a lot less robust than it used to be) and it took a while to work out the spacing - and then keep to it.

By the time I've added oil pipes, louvres, and a bracket for that vital spanner, the inconsistencies will be invisible.

Similarly, once the coil block and louvres are added to the offside, nobody will notice where things might not have gone quite according to plan. Some stiffeners will be rivetted to the underside and maybe even a couple of rubber grommets attached to a sump bolt or two will provide adequate support for the inner edges.

The switch on my angle grinder broke earlier in the week so I wasn't able to cut out the clutch bracket until I'd fitted a new one. Once the bracket was shaped out of 5mm steel, I slipped off to a chum's workshop where I knew that a brake-press big enough to make the right-angle, was lurking. Unfortunately, it being POETS day, staff had gone off with the keys and wouldn't be back until Monday. So that didn't happen.