What has changed
A dated record of substantive changes to this archive: new pages, corrections of fact, restructuring and new photographs. Small tidying is not listed.
Interior guide: seat runners and floor mounting
The interior care guide gained a section on seat runners and floor mounting, drawn from an AC Owners' Club forum thread. It covers the wood fillets fitted to the door side of the runners only, the adjuster lever sitting on the left of both seats, and the lack of a current source for replacement runners now that the specialist who supplied reproductions has died.
View the page →The single-car articles now have an index
Three pages on this site follow one particular car, and two of them could not be reached from the menu at all. The Featured menu item pointed straight at one specific car, UBR 135, while /featured itself did not exist and returned a not found page. There is now an index of the documented cars at /featured, and the Featured menu lists all three. The footer had also been quietly dropping History from its list of pages, the result of an off by one in the way that list was built; History now appears there.
View the page →New article: AC Ace Bristol BE 232
A new page records AC Ace Bristol BE 232, 593 CPC: an ex-works development car with a lightweight aluminium body, raced by Geoff Wilson and Vic Hassall at Goodwood, Shelsley Walsh and Chateau Impney, laid up in a barn for forty years under Victor Yates, and restored by Kevin Kivlochan. The page is drawn from a single named magazine source, "Aced It" by Ivan Ostroff with photography by Laurens Parsons, Classic Cars, April 2017, and credits its author and photographer plainly. What the article records as thought rather than fact is kept as such, and its 2017 valuation is not reproduced.
View the page →Solex float levels corrected, and a new page on removing the Bristol camshaft
The Solex float levels page said that owners who had used both setting methods reported they arrive at the same place. In fact one specialist stated that the two methods agree and then asked publicly whether anyone who had used both could confirm it, and no confirmation came. The page now records that the two have not been compared in practice, and invites anyone who has used both to get in touch. The discussion is now cited directly. A new page on removing the Bristol camshaft has also been added. It records a single owner's account of the job, including the correction he later made to his own conclusion: that the oil pan can be dropped with the gearbox in place and the timing cover taken off with the engine still in the car.
View the page →Horn and indicator wiring page corrected
The horn and indicator wiring page reported mixed owner experience of replica Lucas horn and indicator switches when in fact a single owner had raised a doubt about them and his question about whether anyone had used them went unanswered. The page now records this as an open question and invites anyone who has fitted a replica to get in touch. The discussion the page draws on is now cited directly.
View the page →Overdrive fitting section added to gearbox page
Added a section to the gearbox and freewheel page on fitting an overdrive to an Aceca Bristol. It records that a Derek Hughes overdrive uses the existing gearbox mounts, while a Bristol 405 type overdrive gearbox, the BWCR12, would require the mounts to be altered. The question of whether the fibreglass gearbox tunnel must be widened is recorded as open, because as of September 2026 no Ace or Aceca owner has answered it publicly. The only forum response was from an owner who had fitted a Derek Hughes kit to a Bristol 400, a different car with a different tunnel, and his experience is described as an informed guess rather than an answer.
View the page →Front disc brakes page records a disagreement it had resolved
The front disc brakes page presented a contested point as settled. It stated that an earlier belief about caliper mounting spacing had been corrected from the Girling master catalogue, and instructed the reader to relieve the caliper rather than machine the disc, calling the alternative wrong and unsafe. The evidence does not support that certainty: one experienced owner stated one thing from handling the parts, another the opposite from a printed catalogue, and the discussion ended without independent verification. A third owner account had been missed entirely, that converting to Girling 16/3 calipers required the AC discs machined down slightly in diameter, which contradicts the page's main instruction. The page now records the disagreement rather than resolving it, and makes the practical point that what has to be machined appears to depend on which caliper is being fitted. An unattributed master cylinder number and two rear shoe numbers were cut, because their source could not be established. A section setting out what is still not established has been added.
View the page →Classic Dashboards entry corrected
Corrected the Classic Dashboards entry on the parts and specialists page. The archive had cautioned readers to confirm the firm was still trading, but that caution rested only on the age of a blog post and not on any evidence that it was not. Owners recommended Simon Lorkin on the AC Owners' Club forum in 2026. The entry now records the French address, the UK telephone number and the fact that parts must be removed from the car and sent rather than seen in situ.
View the page →Registry transcription errors corrected
An owner wrote in to report that his car's entry carried a history note belonging to the chassis above it in the register. He was right, and the fault was not confined to his car. The April 2014 AC Owners' Club Aceca register was transcribed from a two-column PDF that lost its row boundaries, so a note could attach to its own row and bleed onto the next. 48 rows have been repaired. Where a note contained the preceding entry's note as a prefix, the borrowed prefix was removed and the remainder kept. Where a note was wholly duplicated from the row above and specific enough to belong to one car only, it was removed. Nine rows had the trim colour welded onto the end of the original colour, for example a colour reading "Black PearlRed" where the car is Black Pearl with Red trim. Those were split. The 2023 Bristol register records the same colours correctly in separate fields, which confirms the split. Three rows where the two PDF columns had been interleaved character by character carried the same text in both columns and were recovered exactly. Six rows remain damaged and were deliberately not guessed at. In those the two columns interleaved irregularly and the original text cannot be recovered with confidence. They are left as they are and marked unconfirmed, because inventing a plausible note would be worse than showing a damaged one. The 2023 Aceca Bristol register and the 2009 Aceca 2.6 register are essentially unaffected. The fault is specific to the April 2014 document.
Prompted by the car's owner.
View the page →Owner address removed from two registry entries
Two entries carried a named individual's full home address, which had come across in the club register transcription and had been published on indexable pages. The registry pages state twice that owner details are never published. That promise was not being kept. The name and address have been removed from both entries. The acquisition date was kept, because the date is registry data and the address is not. All 335 rows were then searched for any other personal address, telephone number or email address. None was found. Names of previous owners remain, because ownership provenance is what a register is for, but no contact or location details do.
View the page →Confidence badges corrected on the 2014 register
Every one of the 334 published entries carried a green Confirmed badge, including the ones that were demonstrably wrong. The owner who wrote in read his entry as authoritative partly because of that badge. 86 of the 155 entries drawn from the April 2014 register are now marked unconfirmed: every row that was repaired, every row still carrying damaged text, and every row whose note is identical to another entry's, where there is no way to tell which car the note belongs to. 69 entries from that register keep Confirmed, as do all 171 Bristol entries and all 8 of the 2.6 entries. The badge now means something.
View the page →Lucas wiring diagram reference page
A new reference page lists the four known Lucas wiring diagram numbers for the AC Ace and Aceca (W29340, W29340A, W31520 and W31520A), their dates and where to obtain copies through the AC Owners Club archives and forum.
View the page →Wiring and the loom, the clutch, and a Morgan correction
Two new how-to pages: the wiring loom, covering who still makes harnesses for these cars, the Lucas colour code and why a wood framed body needs so many separate earths, and the clutch and its hydraulics, which records that the master cylinder differs by engine while the slave does not. The gearbox page has been corrected: the Morgan interchange in this clutch is the carbon faced release bearing, Borg and Beck 46890, not the slave cylinder.
View the page →The AC Light Six servicing set completed
Two further pages for AC's own engine: valve clearances, where the 0.020in hot figure is unusually well supported and the job doubles as a wear diagnosis, and spark plugs and ignition, which records conventional 14mm plugs rather than the Bristol's 10mm, the contact breaker gaps by distributor, and two published ignition timing figures that cannot both be right. The conflict is reported rather than resolved.
View the page →Servicing pages for AC's own Light Six engine
Roughly half of all Acecas have AC's own Light Six rather than the Bristol 100D2, and every servicing page here was written for the Bristol. Two new pages begin to correct that: cooling the AC Light Six, which explains why coolant choice on a mixed metal engine is a structural question, and engine oil and filter, which covers the factory monograde, normal oil pressure and the bypass filter. The servicing hub now asks which engine you have before anything else.
View the page →Parts and specialists, and clubs and records
Two new pages. The first sets out who actually supplies parts for the three engines and who works on these cars, and separates the AC-specific parts from the many that were bought in from suppliers serving the whole British industry. The second explains that there is no AC heritage certificate, what the AC Owners Club's DVLA V765 role means, and where a Bristol engine's factory records now live. Nothing on either page is paid for and nobody asked to be listed.
View the page →Registry titles now carry the registration
Chassis pages for the 177 cars with a recorded registration now show it in the page title alongside the chassis number, so a search on a number plate finds the car.
View the page →Year added to 324 registry cars
A year is now shown on registry chassis pages, derived only from the recorded ex-factory date. 324 of the 334 cars carry one. Nothing was inferred from the chassis series, and the ten cars with no usable date show no year at all.
View the page →Sister-site block removed from the footer
The block of links to related sites was taken out of the footer. A single author credit remains, and the full list of sites now sits on the author page where it belongs.
View the page →Storage, humidity and dehumidifiers
A new page on storing a car built from three materials. Steel, aluminium and ash each decay by a different route, which is why one storage regime does not suit all three.
View the page →Winter driving
A new page on using the car through the winter: salt, cold starting, and what to do afterwards.
View the page →Driving without synchromesh on first
A new page on double-declutching and getting first gear cleanly on a gearbox that offers no help.
View the page →Production figures corrected on the buying guide
The buying guide stated roughly 320 AC-engined cars, about 150 Aceca-Bristols and a handful of Ford cars. The verified figures are 328 in total: 151 AC-engined, 169 Bristol and 8 Ford. The correction was carried through every page quoting a production count.
View the page →Gallery cut back to real photographs
Twelve empty frames were removed from the gallery, along with the captions written for photographs that did not exist. Five photographs of UBR 135 were put in their place: side profile, the triple Solex installation, the walnut dashboard, the rear luggage deck and the tailgate open.
View the page →What was the first hatchback
A new page setting out the four competing claims, the Aston Martin DB2/4, the Aceca, the Renault 16 and the Citroen, without settling the question. The Aceca is not claimed as first here.
View the page →Thames Ditton, the works
A new page on the factory: the Weller brothers from 1911, the years of AC production at Thames Ditton, and the redevelopment of the site in 1986.
View the page →Image rights wording corrected
The wording on photographs was rewritten to match actual practice. Photographs are the archive's own unless stated otherwise, and where a source is still being confirmed that is said plainly rather than being glossed over.
UBR 135 provenance record expanded
The featured car page gained its specification table, the engine rebuild photographs with technical commentary, the AC Cars correspondence of 25 August 1966, and the section on the car being supplied through Ken Rudd. Personal details in the documents are permanently redacted.
View the page →First journal entry, Mathewsons Live 2026
A first-hand report from the Mathewsons sale at Thornton-le-Dale, with photographs taken on the day.
View the page →
Found something here that is wrong, or know of a car or a document that would improve the record? Get in touch.