1964 Lancia Flavia Coupé

[vulgalour]

Hi, I'm Vulgalour, you may know me from such other inspirational build threads as See My Cars and for my contributions to the excellent Artists Unite thread. Here I am again with a more different car. Right, that's enough Troy McClure impersonations for now.

While my day (and sometimes a good portion of the night too) job is creating artwork for people, I do occasionally offer my time and services to JMP Restorations. Find them on Twitter @jmpclassicresto and see what's been happening. Had a natter with the owner of JMP and he's happy for me to put up a blog on one of the long termers, a car that's been shoved to the back quite a few times as it's not a customer's car but one JMP is restoring to enjoy and promote the business eventually.

Lancias aren't exactly commonplace to begin with, the Flavia coupé is even less so and that means finding some parts is going to be difficult though not impossible. Things started off with what looked like a promising survivor in an unusual colour scheme, the reason for this two tone would become all too evident as you'll learn over the course of this thread. Here's a couple of pictures from the advert, I've not been able to find any others of the car when it arrived at JMP but it looked the same as in these shots.




It looks quite nice really. What you can't see are the scores to the paint on the roof, bonnet and boot lid, the bubbling around the edges of things or the very tired interior. Nor can you see that the only brake that works is the hand operated one. That said, the car had been in regular use for much of its life and it was only the failure of the braking system that saw it taken off the road... or so I'm told.

[duncanmartin]

Cool car - can't wait to see more of this!
Cheers
Duncan

[vulgalour]

With the interior removed - more on that at a later date, got to seek out some pictures - so that it could get retrimmed and repaired it was possible to get a look inside the cabin. The Flavia is front wheel drive and the floor is almost completely flat with some box section for strength. That means plenty of space to get around and do any repairs. It's surprising how good the floor and arches appear to be too, especially so for a Lancia of this vintage.

Front passenger corner is probably the worst.


Driver's corner is pretty solid.


Driver's rear corner needs a little attention but again, nothing too complicated by the looks of things.


Passenger rear corner isn't great either and you can see the signs of a replaced arch (more on that later), there's a bit that looks slightly fiddly where the wiring loom attaches too.


Then the car got sidelined for quite a while when the garage got busy, as happens. With the arrival of some new polishing gear I was set the challenge to see what I could do with the tired looking paint. It became clear quite quickly that the dark grey is likely original while the pale grey is definitely later and didn't respond as well to being polished. The brightwork, while dirty, is still in really good condition which removes a lot of the potential expense of restoring this car.


There's enough paint that some of the scratches from poor previous storage (not JMP, I hasten to add, it came with the scratches) actually polished out.


The roof is the worst panel, there's a couple of bits of damage in the paint that need touching in with a matching paint. Easier to see in person than in pictures.


Left is the after and right is the before, really did come up well.


The grille badge needs a polish and repainting, an easy job.


There's some neat features on the Lancia too, like the central boot ram. The boot itself is cavernous.

[vulgalour]

Again, the car got put away for a while.  I managed to take the dirty and dry steering wheel off, strip and clean it back and then apply a few coats of Danish Oil to refresh it.  Terrible picture, but the wheel looks and feels far nicer now.  It may get more work when the interior is retrimmed and fitted, depends how it looks against the new stuff.



A couple of days later I got some work in on some of the fiddlier brightwork.  The petrol filler flap lock and the windscreen washer jets had both been painted badly, unfortunately the chrome isn't perfect on these items but they look better for being cleaned back.  No picture of the filler lock.


Made a start on the grille too which came up surprisingly well.  When the car arrived it had the remains of a badge bar and the clamps have crimped the grille surround which will need some gentle persuasion to be smooth again.  Nice that the dirt and rust stains clean off to reveal more shiny, pit-free brightwork.  Likewise the bumper which is surprisingly excellent.

[sciclone]

Cool, I don't think I've seen one before.

If it was in much worse condition, with missing floors, you'd almost be tempted to convert to RWD. Well, I would.

[vulgalour]

With this post I bring you bang up to date because today the messiest job was undertaken on the car.  Since the car arrived at JMP some cracks in the pale grey paint had begun to appear on the arches.  It's no great surprise that someone might have used filler on the arches, it's a known problem on just about any old car.  There was nothing for but to get stuck in!  If this were a customer's car it would have been sent away for shotblasting to get everything cleaned back but with this one we have to keep the costs as low as possible and do as much of it as we can in house.  It's a slow project, but it also has to be the lowest price it can be without overtly compromising the end result.  Besides which, we didn't expect there to be enough filler in this car to warrant shotblasting it... how wrong we were!

Between bouts of flapwheel work the floor was wet down to try and keep the dust down and I was, of course, wearing eye and respiratory protection which was absolutely vital.  I still ended up white from head to foot, the amount of filler in this car was astonishing and unnecessary.


Late in 2014 a start had been made on the rear driver's corner and a large chunk of filler came off.  It was rather worrying because the car looked superficially sound.  Today I finished that job and found some interesting repairs and an approach to panel beating that bore more resemblance to that episode of Father Ted with the Rover than actual repair work.  Most of this will panel beat out because the metal is fundamentally sound and while there will need to be repair work to the bottom of the wing, it's a relatively simple shape.  After stripping off the filler and rust, grey primer is applied to make it easier to see the condition of the panel, this will mostly be removed when the remedial work is undertaken and reprimed before paint.


This is an original arch.  It needs some localised repairs on the lip and has had one in the distant past to the leading edge.  There's some rust damage to the juncture between sill and rear quarter too and there may have been a replacement sill on this side.  Without investigating further I shan't know.


The other rear arch has been replaced, as suspected, but in a very strange way.  There's additional patches on the trailing edge that carry on the bottom of the rear wing, there's more filler to remove but the black underseal needs removing separately first.  This arch is much worse too and ideally needs chopping off and replacing.


At this point I took a well earned break to let the dust settle, have a clean up of the garage and myself and something to eat.  I was determined to investigate the serious bubbling on the bottom of the front passenger wing so I did that when I came back.  The filler was almost all 1/4" thick, the bottom of the wing where the bubbling was most obvious the filler came off in massive flakes revealing a very rusty repair and some water.  In places the filler was up to an 1" where it had been brought up to and well past any sensible body line.


Large chunks just came off, I was very worried at one point that there might not actually be any metal underneath and, in the case of the sill, there wasn't.




I got this far before having enough.  There are traces of a Lancia teal colour on this repair so I think it was actually cut from a donor car a long time ago, the same could be true of the rear arch on this side.  The welding on the repair is very solid, if ugly, but the technique is horrible.  They've cut out the bad on the original wing, bashed the wing inwards then step-joined the new patch in from behind.  To finish they've filled not to the line of the original wing but to some point about 1/8" beyond it and then smoothed it down to give an approximation of the original bodyline.  Because the whole side of the car appears to have had this treatment you don't notice it until you start digging.


In places there are inexplicably big patches of pink fibreglass resin.  They're not hiding joins or dents or flaws of any sort so goodness knows why they bothered.


Everything bar the last thick patch of filler primed ready for another day.



I suspect I'll have to cut out that front wing repair, clean up and straighten as much of it as I can and reweld it along a more proper line.  I also suspect the other wing is going to be just as bad and I'm not looking forward to that.  There's no sign of welding that I recall inside the door skins so we may be lucky and just have a lot of filler to remove from them, we shall have to see.  It's very likely that everything painted pale grey is going to be stripped to bare metal now to find the extent of the problems before we begin to think about final paint colours.

That's you brought up to speed.  Any time I have chance to work on this I'll update you.  There is no timescale or deadline for this car and it's something I work on in my spare time.  I should be doing the panel beating, welding, paint prep, interior retrim (apart from the seats), carpetting and brightwork restoration both to improve on existing skills and to save JMP a lot of labour costs.  The end result will hopefully be stunning.

[vulgalour]

duncanmartin: watch this space. I'm going to try and get some time in every weekend while the garage is a bit empty with cars being sent out of house for things like new soft tops and paint, certainly want to get this messy filler stuff out the way! Updates are probably going to be a bit sporadic after that so be sure to bookmark this thread.

sciclone: Until I met this one I didn't know they existed. Not common or popular, bit of an oddity over here and not much less of an oddity in Italy these days from what I gather.

[79cord]

Classy tourers & I knew Lancia rallied them but didn't expect to find a record like this:
Italian wiki

Another car to blast some conceptions of fwd...

Though I must admit driving fathers Lancia 2000 berlina (facelifted Flavia) does feel rather like driving a living room around with its upright seating, big flat windows, vertical pillars & factory pastel green rear curtains (1974!), Coupe should be a bit more purposeful.
Really carefully & expensively built, nice tight panel gaps. Checkout the big impressive lumps of cast alloy for frt suspension mounting & steering column.
Should look much nicer without the two-tone whatever colour is chosen. Seen them grey, teal, red, burgundy, lavender, navy, silver & maybe even pastel green & all looked good.

[charliecroker]

I do like these, look forward to seeing you progress.

[vulgalour]

It does have a quality, almost handbuilt feel to it rather than the flimsier feel of many 1960s cars.  The above photograph demonstrates just how tough a thing they are, I would have expected far worse for rolling one than that.

[grifterkid]

Apr 25, 2015 20:31:14 GMT vulgalour said:

That is a great angle... Numberplate above the signal lights?! Superb...

Vulg', is there no way you can smuggle the Lancia out and creep the Princess in...?!?!?!

In all seriousness though, this Lancia is a real treat...

BELLA, BELLA...!!!

[vulgalour]

It's a joy to work on, it really is. There's a chance that I can get the Princess in while working on the Lancia, we shall have to wait and see what happens. If I can make time and space every weekend to work on not-customer cars maybe I stand a chance. Hope so.

[PhoenixCapri]

Wow that's lovely, properly rare beast.

[goldnrust]

Flavia's are very cool. I'll be watching tho thread closely, while missing my Fulvia! When you get stuck deeper into the mechanicals you'll find some real nice engineering touches, and a real hand built kinda feel to it. Not to mention when you drive it and feel how great it'll feel for a FWD car from the 60s! The transverse leaf spring front suspension is great.

That bodywork brings back memories too, my Fulvia was exactly the same, looked smart enough bar the odd crack in the paint when I got it, but it had been over filler well past the original lines, with acres of fibre glass and bodged in patches below it all. I guess it's repairs that were done back in the 70s/80s, when these were cheap old bangers not the real classics they are now.

[vulgalour]

I'll be helping with a Fulvia 1.3S too when the customer gives us some direction.

I found one picture of the interior as was.


I also found a couple of pictures of the carpets/mats and seats.




The interior is going to be a lot of work, it needs completely redoing. Originally it was the colour of Morning Coffee biscuits. The front seat foams have dessicated. The carpets were given to a trimmer to make new ones who then discarded the originals and didn't provide replacements. The rear seat bench was given to a trimmer who only redid the base in red leather, and not brilliantly, so needs redoing in places. The parcel shelf and door cards need remaking and retrimming. The headlining was literally torn out of the car (by someone who no longer has anything to do with JMP) so I need to remake a new one from what's left. The dashboard foam has dessicated and the vinyl covering is fragile so that needs redoing, ideally in the original thermo-vac method of vinyl over foam. The dash veneer was broken by the same person that ruined the headlining.

But other than that, the interior is complete and not missing any of the difficult to find rare bits, as far as I know.

[camerashy]

Wow. I'll be following this. What are the plans for this from JMP? Original or restomod?

[vulgalour]

Mostly original.

Mechanically it's in reasonable order, the engine does run and the car can be driven though it does smoke (I've not seen it running so this is just what I've been told). The brakes don't work apart from the handbrake, failed master cylinder if memory serves. Everything else seems to be perfectly fine so no need to modify or upgrade.#

Paint is either going to be the factory dark grey, the two tone it arrived in or jet black. It may also be something completely different, but these are the options that we keep coming back to. The interior has already had the rear bench base retrimmed in a nice mid-red leather and there's enough leather bought to do the rest of the seats, all being well. Door cards and parcel shelf also likely to be red with the carpet colour to be decided. Wheels to be returned to Lancia cream with the missing beauty rings/rim embellishers replaced to finish them off properly. Dashboard will be redone as per the above picture because it works really well.

[79cord]

The 'keyboard' of rocker switches certainly is unusual, though not as much as that of the early sedans:


The foam in the dash of fathers '65 Fulvia had completely dissolved as well, leaving only the thin veneer of vinyl over the top. His 2000berlina seems much more over the top by comparison with its thick green (edge bound)carpets covering an inch of foam insulation, curtains and ginger velour lightly striped almost making it look like smoothed corduroy. Even the wiring harness had been routed through the closed sections of the roof pillars and front frame rails from A-pillar to bumper.
Presumably much of the brightwork would be stainless-steel, even the bumpers, so not too much risk of pitted chrome except for cast bits like door handles & light mountings.

Father gets some comments regarding smoke from his even though the engine has only done about 66,000km , possibly since Lancia didn't fit exhaust valve seals originally.

[vulgalour]

That's a fabulous bit of dashboard design and the interior you describe sounds quite appealing. Apparently, this one creates clouds of smoke which is probably something a little more than just a lack of valve seals. It could also be really old fuel, the sort of smoke that can kick out can be quite impressive.

[vulgalour]

Mike and I got to the unit this weekend and we had a few hours of dry skies so I could crack on with more defillering. This is very much an outdoor job, I've made a right mess of the place doing the first stage indoors. First thing was to finish off that front wing I'd got most of the way through. I need to drop the front bumper to finish off the job fully. It's not too bad overall, the arch is at least in good order, but I'm under no illusion that there's a lot of work to put this right properly, there will be as little filler going back in as possible.


Started on the bubbles on the front door. I was hoping this would just be rust needing a repair but no, it's more filler and a tacked on repair that is undoubtedly running the whole length of the door and hiding more bodges. The other door is going to be just the same. This is hidden from the other side of the door skin by the soundproofing so I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to discover when I've dug out the rest and removed the repair.


Got underway on the other front wing and was pleasantly surprised that there was, on the whole, much less filler and a better quality of repair work. It's more that the weld is proud of the panel than the step between the pieces is too severe on this side.


Still, it hadn't stopped them trowelling enough filler in to try and eliminate the shape of the wheel arch flare so that has taken a while to dig out.


The mangled rear wing did get some dressing out on the worst of the dents. This needs a lot of work, ideally I could do with cutting it off, smoothing it out on an English Wheel, repairing the missing bits and welding it back on. That's not true, ideally I could do with a replacement rear wing but that's not really an option, so I have to do it the difficult way.


Some filler on this back corner is inevitable, though that repair has to be cut out and replaced properly, the profile of it currently is an absolute mess.


All of the bashing around on this panel dislodged a good amount of debris and revealed more repair work needed in the boot. Nice flat piece to let in at least, cutting it out for repair might give me better access for repairing the rear wing.


By the time I'd finished digging all this filler out the light was starting to go. Swept up, gave the car a proper dusting off and put it away for the day. I may get some more done tomorrow, we'll have to see.