... ask a busy man. But it has its limits. What with Project 'X', Project 'Y', the magnetising (when it comes up), digger work and the Riley racing car, things are beginning to back up a bit. Nevertheless, The Great Collector's Vulcan project is getting under way and a hand was needed with the electrics - not my line of country so Awkward came along with his box of tricks to sort things out.

This handsome piece of equipment is the light switch with positions for 'Side', 'Headlights' and 'All'. I trawled the internet for a wiring diagram because on the back of the switch....

... there's rather a lot of terminals but it didn't take long for Awkward to fathom it all out. It seems that the centre bus-bar is 'no-volts' - I nodded my head sagely but later had to ask what 'no-volts' meant: negative. We speculated that the chassis wouldn't have been used as a common earth as all the lighting wiring had two wires going back to the switch. There's no fuse box so I'll knock up a period piece from some wood, metal pins, copper plates and fuse wire.

With the car was this beauty - a Lucas rheostat for, at the moment, we're not quite sure what but it's such a fabulous bit of equipment, it's got to do something and be part of the show on the dash.

More of a poser was the dynamo. After a quick clean up of the commutator, we managed to get it to run as a motor on the bench but couldn't get it to show an output as a dynamo when we popped it back on the car. I suspect that re-polarising might be something to do with it but I'm going to take it to clever chap with all the test gear to have a look at it.

The regulation of the charging is taken care of by this Smiths Magnetic Cut-out. Again, the insides don't look terribly good but we got the points to open and close with the application of a few volts. I'll get clever chap to look at both this and the dynamo at the same time so they can be matched up.

The bonnet line has been established and the original radiator (see 'I Hadn't Noticed') is now a permanent fixture.

Then it was time to get back to the Morris 3-speed box refurbishment. The 4-speed box I rebuilt a few months ago, didn't fit on the car - there are two types of flywheel housing and we didn't have the one to suit the new box but, in comparison to the synchromesh 4-speed box, the 3-speed crash box was a piece of cake to dismantle - the only tricky bit being removing one of the bearing-retaining circlips so that the main shaft could slide out. It was just difficult to get a purchase on the clip without a proper pair of right-angled circlip pliers. I've been given two 3-speed boxes and fortunately, the chewed up bits on one box correspond exactly to the good bits on the other so, with new bearings and careful reassembly, that'll be another job done.