A brief history of how a group of over 60’s chaps meet on a Friday morning each week have a coffee put the world to rights, then have another coffee and do a bit of restoration on various old pieces of equipment belonging to the Waterwheel Historic trust. Anyway this short story is about an old Bradford, which was found by a young girl by the name of Eunice, who happens to be the daughter of the founder of the trust, it was in a hedge beside a bridge not far away.
It was a bit of a wreck and suffered from the dreaded rust. It was brought
back to the yard and given a coat of paint of various colours.
Several years later the trust moved from its home in Thornton to a new home in
Kawerau, over the years she moved to several sites until a
workshop was set up at an old school that is now called the Life Konnect centre.
By this time it had been dismantled and rust treated by various people,
The Friday gang managed to collect most bits and started looking at what we had.
After a lot of head scratching and coffee drinking the bits were put in an organised
heap and put to one side, after about 6 months we moved again and the Friday gang
ended up at Mal’s large garage in Edgecumbe and work and coffee drinking started in earnest.
The first major job was to fit the cab which needed a bit of panel beating and
knocking about to make it look something like we think it should.
Then Stew started on the deck, after he found some wood he made the whole thing
and stained it. Next job was the engine - this had been seized,
with all the bearings shot and the whole thing basically past its sell-by date,
so we joined the Jowett club in Auckland who have a
vast stock of spares, so we acquired a second hand engine and some other parts
and a lot of technical help. When the engine got to the workshop
it was stripped and checked over, all ok, we stripped the gearboxes and managed
to make one gearbox out of two. The chassis was painted, the
brakes stripped checked over and adjusted, the engine and gearbox with a lot of
fiddling were fitted then Bill completely rewired the van as well
as repairing switches and lights.
The fuel tank was looked at and
put to one side while we worked out we could stick the rust holes together
so it didn’t look like a colander in the end Mal found a boat fuel
tank so we made a frame behind the rear axle to mount it with a door to hide it.
The bodywork was now rubbed down, filled and painted - the doors were hung then adjusted so they shut, then adjusted again so they would open,
and then taken off so we could fit the windows. The wings were fitted along with the radiator and grill. We then thought it might be an idea to
see if it would go, so the battery was fitted and Bill’s electrics worked well now to see if we could find some sparks, despite looking everywhere
we couldn’t remember where we put them, In the end we managed to find some and the old girl started, after some adjustments and a lot more
starting we got it all sorted so we thought it would be good if we took her for a spin, so the next thing was to find a driver, have you
noticed how people seem to have got larger over the last 80 odd years because the cab on the Bradford seems to be made for someone of a smaller stature.
So Phil volunteered to drive it, the rest of us waited for him to come back, after half an hour I jumped in the Ute and went to look for him, he wasn’t
far away but he had come upon a small technical problem, apparently there was a loud rattling and knocking sound and the engine stopped, the fan came off
and apart from putting a large dent in the bonnet it also broke the distributor cap he stuck the cap together and we got back to the workshop, upon
examination we found that the fan which is mounted on the dynamo someone had decided would work better if it was nearer to the radiator so they had the fan
fitted on a block of wood on the pulley and it seems that the one wood screw was not strong enough to hold it on. Well that’s about it, after a couple of
transfers on the door along with a ‘Eunice’ name, we have decided not to put her on the road, as going through all the bits and pieces to get a
VIN (vehicle identification number) in order to register for the road, then a WOF ( MOT) every 6months.
While all this has been going on we have restored several tractors, a maize sheller, several stationary engines, etc,etc.
