New project Austin Ten captivates Andy’s son
To most people, owning more than three cars is excessive. When someone asks how many cars I own and I say nine, they sometimes recoil in horror and befuddlement. But then I point to Practical Classics magazine, where such things are the norm and Danny buys a car each issue. This makes me look less like a car obsessed nutcase and more like an environmentalist, trying to preserve our heritage in my own little way.
I can claim to have saved most of my cars from scrap, literally. Pretty much everything I own that’s old is something that was at the end of its life, worn out, rusty, damaged and without exception a car that nobody else wanted to restore, but I did anyway. It’s just time, money, and parts. And love, quite honestly. Too many people needlessly scrap classic cars, even in 2024.
We all know restoring, fixing and making stuff work is the greenest of hobbies, as is extending the design life of a thing designed for transportation. Something that has something about it that makes us do this work. My son, Sam, is also a keen environmentalist when it comes to cars. He has completed some excellent restorations and is currently engaged in another one on his Mini Clubman, a car built 19 years before he was born.
In a ‘sensible moment’ recently he sold one of his Mini projects to a keen restorer, but almost immediately made an impulse buy of another old car, this time one built 55 years before he was born, a sad 1935 Austin Ten that needed a new home. He is perhaps not representative of such a car's typical demographic, but like Matt Tomkins in Practical Classics with his epic Austin 7 project, is interested in looking at, driving, and more importantly fixing something different. And that also is good, in that having young people interested in old stuff will keep that old stuff alive.
So, here is ‘Neville’ the Austin Ten. It’s a nonrunner (of course), has a hideously bad paint job (looks OK from 50 yards away), some awful wiring full of nasty plastic crimped connectors, (shudder) and many other issues. On the plus side, someone has retrimmed the interior and it has decent tyres. So far, Sam has welded a new bottom in the spare wheel well, removed the fuel tank to find it full of silt and very rusty, plus we started to investigate the lack of oil in the gearbox. The chap we bought it from said, ‘it lost all its oil’ which to us sounded strange.
