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From the Rolls-Royce experimental archive: a quarter of a million communications from Rolls-Royce, 1906 to 1960's. Documents from the Sir Henry Royce Memorial Foundation (SHRMF).
Component issues with Delco shock absorbers and Lucas lamps, and initial road tests of the new PII suspension.

Identifier  ExFiles\Box 19\4\  Scan317
Date  25th May 1931 guessed
  
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hesitation in saying this is still the best riding PI that we have ever had round here.

The only real trouble that we have had with the Delcos is to keep the ball joints lubricated. When these were installed, owing to the complications of parts that would have resulted, we left these off the Bijur system altogether and lubricated them with separate ale-mites - and this has been done on all sets that have been fitted in service up to now. Under these conditions it is only a matter of a very short time (two or three weeks) before the balls begin to squeak, which squeak is instantly cured by lubrication. Service still swear by them, and look upon them as the last resort when we get trouble on our own that they are not able to cure. As a matter of fact, I have had quite a lot of difficulty persuading our people here not to stnadardize Delcos for the last few cars of our PI production in place of the Rolls Royce shock absorber, and only the fact that we are now having very little trouble with our own made it possible to get an agreement to carry on with them, the argument being, of course, the great difference in cost, coupled with the apparent improved riding with Delcos.

We are very interested to hear that you are giving up the magneto and using only battery ignition. I suppose you will use twin distributors, or do you propose to revert to a single unit? What we can't understand is why you have not done this a long time ago.

We had some of the new Lucas lamps over here and rigged them up on a car, everybody was very pleased with them and thought we had got some-thing till we put them up to the Registrar of Motor Vehicles for ap-proval. From this point of view they are quite impossible, as they do not conform in the slightest degree with the requirements for illu-mination as laid down by the Registrar. These requirements are some-what as laid down by the S.A.E. in their handbook and I am afraid that if Lucas want to sell any lamps in this country they will have to mod-ify their lense and reflector till they conform approximately to this.

Of course, our great interest just now is PII and I have left all about that till now. We have just handed over the first finished job to Sales. We took this out one evening last week and covered 280 miles just to see how it was. We must say everybody was deeply impressed with the quality of the riding. The finished weights were:

Front 2615
Rear 3080 Total 5720

The springs fitted were:

Front 1155 - 1155
Rear 1235 - 1338 (Chassis 202-AJS)

With a load of six passengers this was considerably overloaded at the rear, yet in spite of this we did not get any noticeable amount of bottoming. We did get striking on the rubber buffers on striking bad holes in the road, but did not consider this unreasonable.

We honestly believe that with this new suspension we have once more re-gained the smooth low frequency swing, which has been looked for in
  
  


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