Get your motor running

Robert with the old Fiat 501.

When Robert Lovell pulls the covers off his work in progress, a 1925 vintage Vauxhall 23/60, and you see all the polished metal and hear him talking about the blue leather interior that will one day complete the car, you just know there has been a lot of time and love poured into it.

We’re in what he calls “the intensive-care bay” of his garage, the place where major work is carried out, but in another part of the garage are another four vintage cars and three motorbikes that are all either finished or nearing completion.

It’s a passion (some might say an obsession) that started in 1978, soon after Robert moved to Lismore and bought a 1922 Fiat 501 roadster. The car had come from Harwood Island (near Maclean) where it had been rescued from a paddock by another Lismore man, Ron Burns.

“I’ve always had an interest in cars but that’s when it got serious. Apparently it (the Fiat) had been through floods and the engine had been used as an irrigation pump and Ron dragged it out and started to do some work, but didn’t go on with it and that’s when I acquired it,” Robert said.

It took him five years to complete and the car has been on the road since 1982, doing numerous rallies around the country.

He said mechanically it is all original, along with the bonnet and the cowl (where the windscreen and dashboard are fastened), but everything from the windscreen back had to be made new as the body had rotted away.

In order to do this Robert was working from a picture he found in an old catalogue.

“It was about postage stamp size and I took it up to The Northern Star, back in the days before everybody had photocopiers, and they were able to blow it up to about an A4 size. It was getting pretty fuzzy but I got the general dimensions and then I scaled everything from that by using the distance between the axels on the car… That’s how I got the heights and the lengths and the shapes.

“The body is a wooden frame and at that stage I could do the woodwork, but I couldn’t do the metal work, so an ex-panel beater from Alstonville did all that, shaping the mudguards and so on…

“The way the old cars were built was you had a wooden framework and then you wrapped it in sheet metal by cutting, shaping and welding it and then nailing it onto the wooden frame… so you just follow the old methods, that’s how people restore all these cars.”

Robert was a chartered accountant by day, but once the vintage car bug had bitten him, he enrolled himself in evening courses at TAFE to learn some metal working and engineering skills.

“I went for years. On Wednesdays I’d tear home from work about 5.30, get out of the suit, put on the overalls and get back to tech by 6… I finished up doing full trade courses in oxywelding and electric welding and then machine shop fitting and turning. After you become proficient at that you can do more and more work yourself... I spend hours on the lathe in my workshop making parts for all the cars and bikes. But I never mastered the painting and I thought they had to look nice, so I leave that to the skilled tradespeople,” he said.

Luckily for Robert, his wife Meryl and their three sons all share his love of cars and motorbikes. They have been members of the Northern Rivers Vintage and Veteran Car Club since 1982, when they did their first rally. Their youngest son, Mitchell, who is now 27, says he has been in the old Fiat at the Lismore rally every year of his life, the first 17 as a passenger and the last 10 as a driver.

In fact it was the expanding family that originally inspired Robert to start work on the Vauxhall.

“We’d built the Fiat as a little roadster and it had a little dickie seat in the back (the boot opens up to become a seat) and two of the boys used to sit in that and one up the front with us… As the family grew we thought we’d better get a bigger car and I had this fascination with the big English Vauxhalls, so I started collecting.”

He started with various 14/40 models and had enough parts to build three cars, but then changed his mind because he wanted a bigger, more prestigious model. They found the 23/60 in Western Australia and decided to buy it and abandon the ones he’d been working on for years.

“Effectively it’s been a 21-year project. The original motivation was to get a bigger car while the kids were young. But now they’ve all grown

up and left home and the project is still going!” Robert says with disbelief.

It’s not like he’s been slack. In between he has restored two Jaguars, a Mini Cooper S and a couple of Ford Escorts (for his sons to learn to drive in).

In fact it was Meryl who taught them to drive and instilled in them good road sense and skills. They were all encouraged to get their motorcycle licences as well, which taught them further defensive driving skills.

But the first time Meryl ever climbed onto the back of a motorbike was about four years ago when they did a 16-day rally around Tasmania.

“I’m hooked now,” she said.

Robert retired from the accounting firm in 2004 and the couple now spends their days travelling around the country with their cars and their bikes participating in rallies. They have recently designed and built a caravan that not only functions like a normal caravan, but it can also carry one of their vintage cars or a couple of motorbikes.

One of the cars that gets a lot of attention is a 1907 De Dion-Bouton, which is a single cylinder French car that they bought fully restored five years ago. Robert said often at rallies they dress up in period costume to go with the era of the car.

“I’ve got a full set of caps and goggles and Meryl has a big hat and an old style dress and people just love it,” he said.

In between those bigger, interstate rallies, the Northern Rivers Vintage and Veteran Car Club has monthly events where they go on social outings and they regularly get invited to show off their cars at fetes and rural shows around the region.

The club recently celebrated its 50th year and held its 50th annual rally, attracting 132 cars to Lismore, with 80 of them manufactured pre-1930. It was an impressive display and Robert and Meryl said their lives are only just getting back to normal because they took on the role of being rally directors and, together with a keen rally committee, it took a huge amount of time and organisation.

“But we’ve had emails from people saying they’ve been going to rallies for 20 years and it was one of the best-run rallies they’ve ever been to,” Meryl said proudly.

So what’s next?

A Velocette Motorcycle Club national rally coming to Lennox Head in a few weeks. It sounds like a tough life, but somebody has to do it.