The very first entry (June ’21) in my workshop diary for the Hornet was to replace the cups and boots on the brake slave cylinders as they were leaking and at the same time I inserted modern oil seals on the rear axles as the rear brakes were covered in oil. As it happened this was a complete waste of time as there were parts missing (parts 6 & 8) so the brakes continued to leak

Times have moved on so now you can use the following instead of the the spring and the two missing bottle caps. Also I have found that the first series of Chevy Corvette rear wheel cylinders have the same diameter and piston arrangement plus they are very cheap I bought some ($17 each for a complete wheel cylinder) and ratted the springs, cups, boots and pistons.

Also the modern oil seals placed in the rear axle tubes had been running on what I realised later were wonky axles so they still leaked and destroyed another set of brake shoes. Luckily Hornet’s very close relative MG has a community that had a solution.

What were originally a weird castellated nut (first pic) that held the rear hub on became a hex nut (second pic) with an oil seal in the centre and the now new axles and hubs (again MG) had a stainless steel sleeve (marked blue) epoxied in place for the seal to run on.

So after about a year the brakes and the back axle don’t leak but the brakes are still crap at their actual job of stopping. To be continued.

Four years have passed since the last entry and a fair bit has happened including moving twice in that time, but the one thing that has not changed is that I’m still working on the Wolseley Hornet Special. In the last entry I had just bought it and was going through the usual (for me) stuff of modifying the car so that I could drive it, usually by finding an extra 100 mm of legroom this and some roadworthy stuff was all done. But that was not the end of it.

The main problem was that the car seemed to be trying to kill me.

• Terribly vague steering
• Brakes pulled one way or the other
• Brakes had no bight
• Bump steered
• Didn’t like going straight
• Hated right hand bends

Lesser Problems

• Gearbox ratios were all wrong with a huge gap between 3rd and 4th and 1st only good for removing stumps.
• Oil leaked out of anything that had oil in it.
• Made a weird noise when braking, I thought it was the starter pinion hitting the ring gear (it wasn’t)

Things I liked

• The engine was smooth and it sounded great.
• The car looked good so I could forgive all the above.

So where are we today?

All the stuff above more or less was sorted except for the oil leaks and the weird noise and the handling wasn’t quite there yet…but better. So the thing I really liked was the engine, but it broke it’s crankshaft so I thought I’d start the blog back up and record that event and I may go over some of the work done to make the car drivable while I wait for the crank and rods to be made, which will be a while yet.