Upper Middle Petrol Head:

If you remember back to Part 11 of P3P, headlight restorer does not double as 46 year old Fiat 128 gauge lens restorer.  It was worth a try! Above and below:  UV-damaged and cloudy A-F! As I indicated in Part 11, I consulted with The Keeper of The Cache - a well-known local Fiat, Alfa and Mercedes guru - to see if he had anything even vaguely less hazy than was fitted to my car.  He didn't.  However, what he did have money can't buy:  knowledge and advice!  According to this sage of Italian and German marques (come to think of it, he's got a bit of a thing for Citroens and Peugeots, too), the plastics used by Fiat and Alfa in the mid-'70s, just after they ditched glass-lensed gauges, were particularly susceptible to UV damage and no amount of cutting and polishing will have even the slightest effect on them.   Too bad I didn’t think to ask the question before  embarking on my fruitless quest! But that's where the advice kicked in:  The Keeper knew just the man to ma

  I post this lovely circa 1950 Morris Minor "Low-Light" advisedly, knowing that it may well give my mate Cliffy* a st🍆ffie!  What the heck?  We'll give him a thrill, eh! It's certainly not the sole Morrie to grace the pages of uppermiddlepetrolhead.  However, being an earlier - and thus rarer - version, it definitely deserves its moment in the sun.  According to Wikipedia, Low-Lights were produced from 1948 to 1953 and were powered by a piddling 918 cc side-valve engine.  Please refer to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Minor for further details.   For those not acquainted with the side-valve, much of their componentry was incorporated into the engine block - rather than having the valves, tappets, rockers and, sometimes, the cams fitted above the head - as in the case with overhead valve, and single and double overhead camshaft engines.  As a result, a side-valve head is little more than a cast iron lid designed to maintain compression within the cylinders.