RAISING THE RADIATOR ON MY ’33 BOX

My bonnet has never fitted properly leaving a raised front edge of about 1cm. after even a short Run – good for extra cooling but not right.  I’ve tried everything including investigating different bonnets in case there are different styles – there aren’t!  And it remained a mystery until chatting with Gary at a Sunday Run lunch stop who pointed out something I had never spotted – the starting handle wasn’t central in the hole in the radiator cowl. In other words, the radiator was too low down by almost an inch.  Solution? Just raise the radiator and the bonnet will sit comfortably where it oughta.  The radiator just sits in a cradle on top of the front axle and mine didn’t have any packing or spacers between it and the cradle.  Should it? Dunno.

The radiator is fixed to the cowl and it is the cowl that is fixed to the bodywork with 6 bolts – two at the bottom and a pair up each side.  Creating two spacers at the bottom wasn’t any problem – two longer bolts and two rubber bushes made from some gash grommets but my real worry was if I raise the cowl I will then have to drill new holes at the sides necessitating taking the cowl out of the car and the radiator out of the cowl.  Still, start at the beginning and see what happens and, counter intuitively, with the raised radiator on its new bushes, the bottom side holes were still in line – no new holes needing to be drilled there and the upper side holes were very nearly in line and could be drilled out without removing the radiator but I decided they were a bit surplus.  All I had to do was to loosen the hose at each end, find a suitable block of wood to temporarily jam under the cowl to take the weight and get a sore back trying to fit the bushes from underneath the car, getting all the holes in the grommets, washers and bolts in line.  The side bolts were now a tight fit, of course, but a drift brought the metal plate to which the cowl was attached easily into line and, after tightening everything up, job done. 

It had taken far longer to worry about doing it than actually doing it. But will it work?  So far so good.  And thanks to a casual conversation with Boy Wonder, Gary.

David Whetton DA7C