Fred’s driving force
by
Charlotte Knottenbelt
Fred
Stace likes making things work. Whether he's creating scientific
instruments as part of his work as a technical officer at UniSA's School
of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences, or restoring old cars in his garage at
home, the satisfaction upon seeing the end product is what drives him.
When it comes to restoring old vehicles, it's Rugbys all the way for Fred. He first became interested in the Rugby (a cheap and reliable automobile manufactured by the Durant Motor Company around the 1920s) as a schoolboy when his dad would drive him around in the car his grandfather had bought back in 1928.
That particular vehicle – a 1924 Rugby Tourer with a rare California hardtop – is today still in the family, after more than 70 years and countless hours of restoration.
“I took it out of my grandma's shed when I was 18 and decided I was going to drive it,” Fred recalls.
“The brakes had rusted and the motor was in pretty bad shape, so I did some work to free up the brakes and bought a motor from a guy at Myponga for $20. That motor's still going today.”
With spares for such an old vehicle virtually impossible to come by, Fred has had to be creative over the years.
“A lot of the parts have been degreased, sandblasted, repaired and painted … I've done everything on it from the mechanics to the panels to the upholstery,” he says with pride. (To fix the upholstery he even used the same pedal-powered sewing machine that was used by his grandfather, a vehicle trimmer who worked on some of the first Holdens to come off the production line at the Woodville factory in the late 1940s.)
Fred has taken the vehicle to Broken Hill and back – it survived a hailstorm on that trip – as well as to Stawell in Victoria, and over the rugged terrain of the Flinders Ranges (where Fred was amused to notice a four wheel driver's jaw drop as the little Rugby crossed a rough creek-bed that had stopped the larger vehicle in its tracks.) It was even in the inaugural Bay to Birdwood run in 1980.
Fred has now restored “one and a half” Rugbys back to their former glory and though it's not the most lucrative hobby he could have chosen (he recently sold one vehicle upon which he'd worked for thousands of hours to a fellow enthusiast for $5,000) there's no doubt that it's all been worth it.
“I've learnt a lot from the cars over the years and I can now apply those skills at work,” says Fred, whose day job has seen him build everything from a wind tunnel for mosquito research to a giant Chinese lantern for an international students' party. “It's about keeping alive skills that would otherwise die out.”