I always reply, "About a couple of years". Of course I believe it - it would be too demoralising to admit how long it really will be before the car is back on the road. I planned to write this article then, as a kind of celebration. Eventually came the realisation that it really could not wait 'a couple of years'. So in all humility, the neophyte presents part one of a long story.

"To begin at the beginning", some time in 1929 various bits were assembled to make a Riley 9, chassis number 60.7012; a black, four-door tourer with red wheels (or perhaps burgundy judging from the colour under the rim-tape) and dark red interior trim. A "special series" with twin carburettors (no hot-spot), 4-spoke sprung steering wheel and "duplex" shockers. Registered for road use on 30 September 1929 as UW649, its first two years are shrouded in mystery because the first log book was lost.

The replacement log book of August 1931 shows Frank Outram Hodgkinson of 'Flagstaff', Swanwick Shore, Southampton as the owner. The car passed from one member of the Hodgkinson family to another over the next year: Beatrice Majorie, Col. Charles and Col. John Hodgkinson are shown as owners, the latter with the intriguing address of "Montague Barn, Beaulieu". My first guess was that they might have learned to drive in the Riley before moving on to a Bentley or RR. This theory had to be abandoned when Roger Bateman and the archivist at the National Motor Museum informed me that the twin brothers, colonels in the 6th and 5th Cavalries, "under the direction of John, 2nd Lord Montague (father of the present Lord Montague), set up India's first mechanical transport drivers school at Sohan near Rawalpindi in 1917".

In July 1932 Frederick W.H. Goodwin, of Shepherds Bush, is shown as the owner and, judging by the nice enamelled plaque on the dash board, he sold the car to Chantry Motors of Ealing. And now the story really begins:

My father, Arthur Sidney Pittuck (or Pittock as he spelled his name then), was 23 years old and dreamed of Aston Martins. He had been co-owner of an Austin 7 for a short while and now looked for a car of his own. Not having the money for his dream, he had to content himself with something cheaper. He went back three times to the Ealing show room before he could persuade himself to splash out the £95 to purchase UW649, then with 16'000 miles to its credit. The Riley moved to Bermondsey, London in May 1933.

The correct leather apparel was essential and his tan jacket and black 'Gestapo-style' coat are still in wearable condition. My father claimed a top speed of 70 mph for the car in those days: the image of the 'gay young blade' is hard for a son to come to terms with!

War came, and the car was laid up: the unlicensed period being the calendar years of 1941-45 inclusive. My father was called up, trained as an engine fitter in the RAF and posted to Newark. Double good fortune to be trained in skills useful for car maintenance and, more importantly, to be sent to the place where he was to meet his future wife, Elsie. They married, moved back to Bermondsey and the car came out of mothballs.

Now that we are at the point in the story where I can provide first hand information, there are few significant events to relate! The car was part of everyday life; it had always been there as far as I knew. It was housed half a mile from home in one of a group of lock-up garages around a yard, with a garage workshop at one end. This proved a hunting ground for useful metal bits and advice, but they were never entrusted with a repair; father did it all himself. Reluctant to spend good money on something he could do himself and never having enough for a new car, a bond grew up between man and machine. It is likely that in the hands of richer man UW649 would not have survived.

Not for thrashing to and from work, the car was for special outings, trips to the Sunday markets in the East End of London and holidays. We would start at five in the morning to avoid traffic jams and overheating in the August sun. As the years went by the number of passengers increased and I recall (correctly, I hope) departing for Lowestoft with Mum & Dad up front; Grandma and we three children in the back. Other recollections include sheltering in a straw-filled hut at the side of the road while father changed a punctured wheel in the pouring rain; pushing the last mile when m.p.g. calculations went wrong during the Suez crisis and father bicycling off with a can in one hand when finally at journey's end; coming home in the warm of the evening, the headlights giving a yellowish tint and the leather and hot engine smelling just as they should.

With the passage of time attitudes changed: the car, once an object of envy, became an oddity, then an object of derision, then an oddity and finally an object of envy again. In this time I changed from a boy in shorts to a nuclear physicist and was given the ultimate accolade of being asked to help rewire the car. A week-end standing on my head under the dash board was my graduation ceremony. Then I quit the nest and flew abroad.

Between jobs, I returned briefly to England in 1976 and it was during this period that my father died. The Riley had been his only car for 43 years and together they had travelled 168'000 miles. I can not recall that he ever let anyone else drive the Riley; certainly not me! Expecting that I would return to Switzerland, logic dictated that the car had best be sold. Due to the emotion of the moment, logic did not prevail.

The clutch had just died so my first close contact with the inner workings involved removing the engine, and replacing the errant grub screw in the clutch withdrawal mechanism (many thanks to Bert Batten for his help then). A home-made seal was put at the top of the oil pump, all was reassembled with nothing left to do except learn how to drive a vintage car!

Only just in time. The recall to Switzerland came and driving there, vintage style, was the obvious thing to do. The fact that it was mid-January didn't seem very important at the time. The fact that a bonnet bolt was damaged didn't look too significant either.

Departure day arrived; the snow had arrived a few hours before! Only a couple of inches, nothing to worry about (such faith!). A large wooden box of Riley odds & ends was strapped to the luggage carrier, my suitcases went on the back seat, my long-suffering mother climbed in to the passenger seat and off we set, down the A2 to Dover. The performance was not quite as I thought it should have been. This would give me something to puzzle over during the next day or so.

Then the bonnet started waving in the breeze; luckily the two halves of the rear retaining bolt were still there. What to do? Nothing to effect a repair with, not even some wire or string near the top of the 'useful' bits in the box on the back. The cashier at the road-side service station looked at me

We arrived in Dover in style, and after farewells at the station, mother returned to London by train. There were no particular problems with the ferry and only a moderate sea. I confirmed the supposition of the French customs officer that all Englishmen are mad when I told him I was in transit to Geneva. He laughed this off, "Vous y arriverez?". January is not noted for the length of its days and I left the Calais customs shed in half light and driving snow.

Driving on the right in a RH-drive car, with feeble headlights and doubtful windscreen wipers, it is hardly surprising that I lost my way. Several miles to the north-east of Calais, I realised my error and turned back. The second time I got it right. However the Riley didn't seem so keen, having a total disregard for the accelerator, 25mph with my foot on the floor, and the speed dropping all the time. It looked as if all the doubting Thomas's were right, I was crazy!

The dim glow of a filling station looked very welcoming. I could top up and tinker in the relative shelter of the forecourt. And if the worse came to the worst, this may be a place to leave the car until a better day. After unnecessarily filling up, I took a deep breath and . . . she started like a dream, raring to be off! Very odd!

(You will find it particularly frustrating to learn that I now have no idea of the exact route that I took - sorry!) My nerves and body began to long for some rest and luckily the first hotel I came across had space for me and the car. The Riley was abandoned in the garage after draining the radiator (father did not believe in antifreeze, he drained the radiator after each trip in winter and filled anew with rain water) and I headed for a hot bath and dinner.

The morning dawned bright and cold with only a few clouds; just the thing for some amateur mechanics in the open air after breakfast. The first observation to make was that the bonnet did not sit as well as the brothers Riley had intended and the second was the thin black line down the magneto cap. Snow had blown in through the gap left by the ill-fitting bonnet and had obviously(?) caused the problem. There in the back was a spare magneto! but that was too easy - the caps were not interchangeable and in little more than a stable in the middle of nowhere, I had not the means to transfer the drive gear from one shaft to the other. After an hour's work with a Swiss army penknife and a little scrap of very fine emery cloth, the magneto cap was as smooth as ever. A plastic bag was arranged tastefully over the cap to protect it from further snow and the bonnet retied. A turn of the handle and off we went again. (Note that it was "we" from here on.)

The Riley seemed to appreciate the care received and ran well all day in the cold but relatively dry air; the driver ran less well and required food or hot drinks at least every couple of hours. Some hotel, now anonymous, looked welcoming and provided lodging for two, the Riley getting a wipe-down and check-over before being locked up for the night. I had less of an appetite that night and woke the next day suffering from the effects of repairs carried out in temperatures close to freezing.

We both had the morning off. The weather was less helpful but the odd shower of rain, sleet or snow was interspersed with dry moments to allow me to look under the bonnet and remain puzzled by the return of the performance problem. This seemed to be cured by looking at the engine, only to reappear later.

Given time the penny will drop, or the eyes will open. During a stop by the roadside (I don't know where but I can see it now, the most desolate spot I ever came across in France) I at last noticed drips coming from the carburettors - flooding? The floats seemed free enough, the drips stopped almost immediately and the engine started and ran well after the pause. Curiouser and curiouser. So, half an hour later, when the engine had lost its "get up and go" yet again, my attention was no longer fixed on things electrical and Eureka! There in the chokes of the carburettors were two Polo-Mint shaped pieces of ice that must have reduced the air intake area to 20% of normal. A pause of five minutes was enough for the heat of the engine to melt them and get the mixture back to normal (no hot-spot remember!).

A little further on some string was purchased, pieces of cardboard box "borrowed" from a general store and an untidy lash-up served to restrict any air flow from beneath the engine, ensuring that any air at the intake had at least passed through the radiator, and blanking off the bottom third of the radiator. So we finished the third day, stopping now and then (but no so frequently as before) to de-ice and once in Nuits St Georges to scrape the snow from the windscreen when the wipers could not deal with it.

Now all I needed to do was to arrange my route through warm, dry air - sleet on mountain passes at 3000 feet was not advised. However Geneva is in a very attractive location, almost totally surrounded by mountains. I had planned to go in through Bourg-en-Bresse and Nantua, but the thought of struggling along with not much power and all those lorries (no autoroute in those days) pounding along at twice my speed, turned my stomach. Inspiration struck while looking at the map: I would follow another means of transport that is adverse to climbing - the railway. So it was via Culoz and Seyssel that I approached Geneva from the South.

Finding that my favourite back-way route had not been ploughed (only 3 inches of snow, but I had had enough adventure) I was forced to pass via Bellgarde with all the lorries I had tried to avoid. This was the scene of the only potentially serious incident in the trip; probably led on by the traffic around me, I was travelling downhill a little too fast in foul conditions, in the dark, and I braked. The rear end moved ever so gently to one side: right foot up, left foot down, steer and pray - and she behaved beautifully.

It was dark and getting very late when I arrived at the Swiss customs where to my great embarrassment the inside door knob fell off as the douanier approached. Frantic hand waving got him to open the door and he did not seem too surprised that I was more interested in finding a little bit of brass on the floor than talking to him. He was of the same impression as his French counterpart in Calais.

I used the Riley as daily transport around Geneva for about seven months, hosing down the underside frequently in "salty" weather. All the time discovering the car's little ways and how incompatible they were with modern traffic conditions - for example, St. Vitus dance in the front-end when braking. At the same time the deadline for registering the car under Swiss regulations approached and, with that, the dreaded visite (or inspection). For the un-initiated this is streets ahead(?) of the MoT test: to give you an idea, the engine and chassis must be steam-cleaned before the inspector will even go near the car. UW649 was put to bed and remained there for more years than I am prepared to admit.

Our heroine is a Mark IV, 4-door fabric tourer, "special series" i.e. duplex shock absorbers, 4-spoke sprung steering-wheel and twin Zenith 26 HAK carburettors. Everything else seems to be standard e.g. 42-to-8 back axle, normal cam-shafts. For those who like numbers: chassis 60.7012, engine 17432, crank-shaft F7038, silent 3rd gearbox 6192, front axle F7767, back axle R7717. First registered for road use 30th September 1929. I remember my father saying that this was a 1930 model i.e. built to the specifications that would be displayed at the London Motor Show in October 1929 (this sounds right, see below), and that "only a hundred like it were made" (any comments? I'm coming to the conclusion that they never made two the same!).

I think it is unlikely that my father "tweaked" the car, but anything may have been done to it before he bought it in 1933. He was responsible for some non-standard, period repairs, notably a horn from a wartime aircraft, possibly a Spitfire (he was in an air-force salvage crew, stripping useful bits from crashed aircraft) and RM(?) bonnet catches in the 50's. I regard these as "authentic" repairs, so I intend to keep them as they are.

Several modifications were made to keep within the law and to pacify the MoT inspector: a second "number plate bearer" was constructed to carry near-side rear light and reflector, the vacuum-dip head lamps were converted with twin filament bulbs and a windscreen washer added (yuk!).

Looking back at Riley Register Bulletins, Keith Stimpson's article, pp 44-47 of issue 146, shows UU1599, five months and almost two thousand chassis numbers earlier than mine. My untrained eye can only spot a few differences, most of which point to mine being the 1930 model: UW649 has the head-lamps on a tie-bar between the wings, an apron that comes over the front dumb-irons, a wide radiator filler neck with female thread, provision for a second wiper-blade (though during most of the car's life only one was mounted, the second hole being bunged up with a piece of rubber) with a vacuum operated Trico wiper motor. There are small differences in instrumentation: the Hobson Telegauge is at 6 o'clock (as in the photo on page 85 of David Styles' "As Old as the Industry") and at 11 o'clock is a combined oil-pressure and temperature gauge. I suspect this is a replacement instrument as there is no evidence of a "hole" for a temperature bulb in any part of the cooling circuit.

Gerry Dick's article on his Brooklands rebuild, pp 24-30 of issue 145, shows inlet and exhaust manifolds of the same design as UW649 (no hot-spot). This surprises me since the spares catalogues show the twin-carb manifolds with a hot-spot. (Gerry, do you ice up when racing in snow?). Was this part of the "special" specification that year? The article "10,000 Miles on a Riley Nine" from "The Motor" of 30 October 1928 in the Register reprints, seems to show an unheated twin inlet manifold (I would guess that the tie-bar on which the head-lamps were mounted was not standard).

The Riley languished for a long time in the communal, but locked, underground car park of my rented apartment. (This being in Switzerland, the vandalism suffered over many years was limited to two smashed head-lamp glasses.) I attempted to start repairs to the steering but rapidly found that I could accomplish nothing in a public place with practically no light. I oiled the bores and turned over the engine at the start, but did not keep this up when serious outside concerns took my time and energy. Returning to the neglected machine, I found that jumping on the starting-handle only bent the handle, oh ****!

Showing my usual impeccable judgement, I decided to buy my own apartment just as the property market reached its peak. Even better, I chose a very nice place with two outside parking places. As usual, when crisis threatens, it is the lady in my life who sorts me out. One of her colleagues "did things with old cars"; this turned out to be Keith Wynn who has about eight restorations to his credit (no Riley yet) the last being a 1914 Rochet-Schneider. Keith had just acquired a quadruple(!) garage and would be freeing up a few he had rented, so after some juggling involving a low-loader and a trailer, UW649 had a new home, with a half share of a second garage to act as a workshop only 20 yards away, both within 15 minutes drive from my new home. Neither have electricity, this means wire brushing by hand and, for half the year, work during the evening is not possible due to the lack of light.

And now the story really begins. Dismantling was fun and very educational, though a lot of the news was bad. Not having a place to store the body, the dismantling and reassembly processes were unconventional. First all the mechanical bits were removed from the chassis, the body was roped up to keep the doors under compression thereby keeping the whole thing rigid and sheets of heavy-duty ply were slipped between the body and chassis. The ply was supported on axle stands and finally the chassis was dropped away from the body. The result was a garage occupied by only the body, everything else crammed into half a garage and two basement storage areas, with the wheels on the terrace and the radiator on top of a cupboard, just above my head as I write this.

Expecting that my readers have forgotten more than I know about restoring a Riley 9, I will only mention my mistakes and anything out of the ordinary. My objective was to dismantle, clean, paint and reassemble, only repairing as necessary, leaving the body in its original but very tatty condition. When looking at worn bits I bear in mind that 50% more wear represents 90'000 miles of motoring which leads me to be lazy! The safety systems are an exception to this rule.

The exposed wood of the body, I saturated with a product to keep worm etc. at bay and then put on three coats of glacis, a very thin varnish that the Swiss use to preserve their chalets - must be good! - which penetrates very well. All metal bits (body and mechanical) were treated with an anti-rust preparation and two coats of household synthetic paint from the local equivalent of Tesco. This is proving to be very resistant to my bashing around as I reassemble. Two spots of rot in the rear corners were filled with about an egg-cup full of f*br* gl*ss r*s*n mixed with a little carbon black to make it less obvious.

Thinking it unlikely that the Riley brothers wanted the rear shackle pins to run in slots in the dumb-irons, these were opened out to take a bronze spring bush. Local conditions required the dimension to be 19mm (3/4" is 19.05mm), the bushes being turned down to fit. The day I have nothing better to do I will reamer these out to 3/4"! The chassis was sand-blasted and two coats of matt black were stove-enamelled on. I added two coats by hand, partly to have a less brittle top surface and secondly to have a finish I could match on the rest of the components (you know: runs, bristles, brush-streaks etc.).

A broken leaf in a rear spring and its opposite number were replaced with ones made from 6mm material, the originals were about 4.5mm (3/16" ?) I've yet to see what difference this makes. UNC cheese-head bolts with a hexagonal socket were used for all four spring centre bolts; they do the job of locating the spring and can still be undone if needed.