Rootes Archive in England - Part I

ZZZZZZZZZZ

Again, thanks to those of you who have made donations to the Rootes Archive. It's great to see members of the marque step up to financially support it.

As to visiting the Archive in Banbury, or even volunteering there, anyone can make arrangements with the Archive's Secretary, James Spencer.
JamesSpencer@RootesArchiveCentre.org.uk

Yesterday our California team concluded our visit to the Archives.

After leaving Banbury, we then drove north, and as suggested in an earlier post, visited the former site of the Rootes Ryton factory where earth moving equipment was preparing it for its next life.

Archive President Gordon Jarvis, who has had a life long association with Rootes, pointed out where various Rootes facilities had stood in earlier years. The original gate house entrance will be retained in the new development. Gordon explained that local roads sometimes served as test tracks and pointed out some trees still having paint markings visible today including a marked quarter mile.

We visited various locations around Coventry and even TAC'ed a local Tiger before traveling south to spend the night in Surrey.

Today... Brooklands.
Tomorrow... California.

bt

Get some sleep guyzzzzzzz . . . . . .
 
Brooklands

We spent today visiting Brooklands. Since I had not been there before I was quite surprised by the size of the Sunbeam presence.

Tonight we'll be wrapping up with another pub visit. Most of us are heading home tomorrow.

I'll make a later post about another "discovery". The local Sunbeamers have come up with a very stock looking electric power steering for a Tiger that fits under the dash. The Tiger steering column is removed and stored then a donor Alpine unit takes its place. The engine compartment is clean and stock looking.

bt
 
We’ve now returned to California.

Over the last ten days we’ve traveled nearly 10-thousand miles, supported the airline industry and left a few dollars as our contribution to the British economy. We tasted the exact same hotel free breakfast too many days in a row but could stand a few more tastes of 70 year old brandy courtesy of our STOC host.

We made new friends, TAC’ed a few cars and learned quite a bit more about our marque.

However our biggest accomplishment was helping the Rootes Archive.

We organized a major portion of the Tiger related sections of the Archive but more work still needs to be done.

We located and digitized hundreds and hundreds of Tiger drawings. Now, if something catastrophic were to happen to the Archive, at least our copies would survive.

We purchased, refurbished, transported and donated a wide format digital scanner to make scanning the large paper engineering drawings economically feasible for the Archive. The Archive Trustees quickly had it up and scanning. (BTW, the Archive is thrilled at the high quality of these scans which are frequently more legible than the original paper drawings.)

Our donation just opened a new phase for Archive scanning, so a huge amount of work remains. Hopefully other Tiger owners will continue the work. More files need to be organized, large drawings need to cataloged and more scanning can now be done.

In the next months, our original team will compile a catalog of the Tiger drawings we've found and turn it over to the Archive.

In the future the Archive will decide on a policy about requests for copies. These decisions are theirs, not ours. They manage the drawings for Peugeot and have some restrictions that have been placed on them in their agreement. However I'm confident that the Archive Trustees will be reasonable about releasing copies for a reasonable fee. However at this time I don't know any details and I doubt they do either.

I again want to thank those members of this forum who have already made donations to the Archive. This includes donations from both CAT and STOA.

I want to commend those members who have already committed to travel to the Archive in Banbury to continue the work.

I'd like to thank the Archive Trustees and the STOC for the tremendous support they gave us.

And I'd finally like to thank the members of our team who traveled at considerable personal expense to Banbury where they worked their fannies off to help our marque.

A job well done that surpassed all my expectations!

Buck Trippel
now back
at the beach
 
What Buck was too modest to say was that he was the one who purchased the scanner, had it shipped to SoCal, had it repaired and refurbished, had it shipped to the UK, collected it from LHR and helped to install it at the Rootes Archive Center as a donation. The maintenance kit was inadvertently omitted from the crate and he is having that shipped over too. It will make it possible to accurately digitize almost all the drawings in the Archive benefiting not only the Tiger community, but anyone else with a Rootes vehicle and we owe him big time. The scanner can be seen in some of the images he posted above. Prior to that the only digital scanning capability was for microfiche. Bravo Buck
 
With Appreciation

Thanks for all the efforts on our collective behalf . . . . . . .
 
US Team Visit - Rootes Archives Centre

Massive Contribution to Discovery & Preservation of Sunbeam Tiger Engineering Drawings by US Team Visit!

On behalf of the Rootes Archives Centre and the UK Tiger community I would like to put on record our grateful thanks to Buck Trippel, Tom Hall, Darrell Mountjoy, Patrick King and Bill Rogers for coming over here and working tirelessly for 5 days at the engineering drawings conservation 'coal face'.

Also to convey our gratitude for their generous donation of a large scale flat bed scanner that is capable of scanning the very large drawings (12' x 3'). Digital preservation has taken a great leap forward!

We all of us have to thank two Trustees of the Archive - James Spencer and Matt Ollman for the tremendous efforts they made in re-housing the Collection (first handed over by Peugeot PSA Ltd 8 years ago) at the new Banbury Centre and smoothing the way for the US Team visit.

Earlier research work by the STOC revealing around 1500 Tiger microfiches & drawings and Matt's Alpine work (2000) was considerably added to by the Team effort and a whole lot of sorting & re-filing was invaluable. It will take a few weeks to sort out the latest discoveries but the cache of drawings for the Alpine & Tiger must now be in excess of 4500. A massive catalogue of the design and build of the two marques in the making!!

A decent bit of research into English pubs was also achieved!!

Graham Vickery
STOC Editor
 
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