CoachBuilt Prams | Perfect Elegance

Wilson Egremont 1969

Restoration on the Egremont

This section of the site is still under construction - I apologise for any inconvenience.

This Egremont was bought for me by my Mum in 1969 when I was expecting my first baby and I have treasured it ever since. I could never bear the thought of parting with it. It has done very well but there were things which needing sorting out. The hood and apron had gone very stiff and hard and even though I washed it with fabric conditioner and all of the other things that are recommended for such things, nothing really changed.

It also needed a new lining because it had become discoloured in places. The paintwork on the body was fine but the chassis needed re-spraying. I put new tyres on it a couple of years ago, so they were all right.

Last summer I decided to sort out my pram. I found a sprayer locally who could do it for me, yes, he could match the colour, that was a disaster, as I will explain later.

First thing to do when I started the restoration was to take the hood off the pram. This is a much more simple job than you may think. On the Wilson, there is a small screw just underneath the edge of the hood fabric, next to the canopy knob which needs to be undone.

It is advisable to have two people when you are removing the hood, it would be very easy for the hood frame to fall and scratch the body of the pram unless there is another pair of hands hanging onto it. Once the two screws are removed the person holding the hood from the back of the pram just needs to pull the hood backwards so that the two metal 'lugs' at the back of the hood frame come out of the two corresponding holes for them in the top rear edge of the body.

Saving my hood securing screws so I wouldn't lose them!

Next on my list of must do's was the hood and apron. If you want to try to redo your own hood and apron on your own pram at some point the best thing that I can tell you is to take lots of photographs, really look at how - in this case the hood - was made and then fitted each step of the way as you work towards deconstructing it. You need to know which was the last thing to be done to your hood and when you really look, it is plain that the hood lace was the last thing to be put into place.

First things first, I carefully started to snip the stitching holding the hood lace in place and as I undid that the lining also becomes detached so I carried on around the hood until the hood lace had gone and gradually the edges of the lining was unpicked all around the hood. Once the hand stitching is undone you can see that the lining is held in place by two little tucks or pleats which make the divisions in the three part hood. These tucks are hidden away between the lining and the hooding and they go across the back of the hood lining, from the inside of the pram they just look like two seams running across the hood.

Above you can see the lining 'hanging' from the original hand stitching which anchored it to two the fabric covered middle 'struts' that make up the hood frame. In the photograph below, you can see the hood lining once it is removed so that you can see the 'pin tuck' that is made in the hood lining main piece. There are two of these 'pin tucks' which are used to anchor the lining in place.

Notice on the pintucks that where the seams with the sides of the hood lining goes across the 'pintuck', it is clipped. This is so that that section of the side seams will lie nice and flat, to stop it sticking out and spoiling the flat finish to your lining.

I marked the lining as I was taking it out, so that I could work out what went where when I was putting it back but also so that I could make sense of the pattern pieces and where they each went and what they connected to.

The corner protectors are fastened on with tiny rivets which have to be drilled out with a very small drill bit. Be very careful because once the drilling finished and the corners have gone, there is often a VERY sharp edge left in the hood frame strut that will cut your fingers very easily. They can sometimes be removed or filed down somtimes they just fall out with a little bit of persuasion, but you must remove them or your new fabric will be ruined as well as your finger tips!

These two photographs show how the old hood fabric was fastened onto the frame originally. These photographs will help me fix the new hood into place once I have made it hopefully. You can also clearly see the remains of the old hood corner protector rivets here that are so sharp and need removing.

This photograph shows the corners of the hood main fabric and the way that it is fixed in place.

The frame with everything removed except those pieces of fabric placed across the two hood struts. the lining for the new hood will be fixed to these pieces of fabric and the corners of these struts are where the hood out fabric will be anchored into place.

Here I have unpicked all of the fabric pieces which made up the old hood and lining and I have rolled them up quite tightly inside out, so that the pieces will gradually begin to straighten out. I know that at least one person I know presses her pattern pieces and that works for them, but I have never tried it yet. I will be trying it one of these days though I can promise you.

In this photograph you can see how the exposed parts of the hood frame have become very distressed over the last 40 years of use. I clean these up and then hand paint them with aluminium paint. If the rest of the hood frame is also dirty or rusty, you will need to rub that down well to and paint it also. No good putting a nice new hood onto a filthy frame.

Looks a lot better now doesn't it?

Now we have to start cutting out the new hood.

Place your pattern pieces wrong side up on the reverse of your hooding fabric. Use something heavy like cans of food to hold the pattern pieces in place and draw around then carefully with a gel pen. I tend to use silver or white to show up on hooding fabric which is normally a dark colour.

I do the same with the hood lining fabric. If y ou are using vinyl (not a cotton backed fabric) then a gel pen mark won't stay on the fabric so I would advise using a very soft pencil to mark the pattern out. You can see here that I have marked this pattern on the bottom edge, you can't see that I have also marked the pattern for the front edge and the back. It is amazing how confusing you can find a simple looking piece of the pattern. Mark everything, where there is a fold, front, back, top bottom, everything. You can't have too much information I don't think.

Remember the 'pin tuck' I was on about on the main pattern piece for the hood lining? This is how I mark mine out.

On each side of the pattern piece I mark my   pin tucks out like this.   Then   when I have   cut out the pattern piece I   can   hold   each piece on the reverse, put the    sets of   three    dots together and pinch the fabric so that the solid line is between my   fingers and thumbs on each hand.    Then I use some little   metal pegs   that I have (or   paper   clips can hold the fabric in place too)   until I can sit at the sewing maching   and   sew that pin tuck into place.

Sewing the   pieces together.

I have an industrial sewing machine that I use   for my    hoods and aprons.     I have tried using a domestic sewing machine but I have yet to be pleased with that method, I   always   go   back to my old   faithful.   I bought my   machine from Ebay and I have been very happy with it.

My lovely Singer industrial.

Do you like my coffee cup?

The two feet that I would expect to use most on my machine. The one on the left is the Piping foot, the other is the running stitch foot.

When I started to sew with the vinyl lining fabric (without a cotton backing) I found that the fabric puckered as you can see in this photograph. I found it almost impossible to sew properly with a normal foot.

So I looked around on Ebay and found this weird and wonderful contraption. It has a Teflon finish so that the vinyl fabric doesn't stick to the bottom of the foot and the green tracks actually turn around like the tracks on a tank and feed the top layer of fabric through at the same time as the feed dogs feed the bottom layer of fabric. It works at any rate, although you still have to take some care I do admit. If you have an ordinary sewing machine, you may have no problem at all sewing this fabric and if you do have difficulties then you can get alternative feet for your machine, such as a roller foot perhaps. Go to your sewing machine shop and ask their advice.

These are the little 'pegs that I use to hold my fabric together when I'm working. You can't use pins or anything for obvious reasons. I have tiny ones of these that I can use to hold pattern pieces together before I start to sew too.

To be continued......

Next it was time to Remove the lining from the body of the pram.

I used the back of this old knife to prise up the little pin/studs which hold the lining in all around the sides of the pram. Most of these clip/studs have a white cap on them (making them look rather like a white drawing pin. As you prise up the top of these pins though, it is very likely that these caps go pinging off into the sunset and you will be left with this sort of thing that you see in the picture above. These things are sort of spring loaded and the easiest way of getting them out is to use a pair of pincers and squeeze the stem of the pin together when they will come out easily. It takes a little trial and error though, until you get the hang of it.

Here you can see me using pincers to squeeze together the sprung stem of the holding clips, which makes it possible to pull out the clips/studs or whatever you want to call them.

At the corners of the foot end of the pram there are two little right angled chrome brackets and they are held in place with two more of the clip/studs. Remove these in the same way that you removed the others, this picture is taken from above when I had already loosened the clips and was about to start with the pincers.

These are the studs/pins, can you see what I meant when I said that they are sprung? The two parts of the clip 'stem' open out when they are inserted into the body of the pram and hold everything tight, so you have to squeeze them together when you are trying to get them out. These look really rusty don't they? They were in the bottom of the pram, holding down the bottom edge of the interior walls and fastening them to the white plastic base that the Egremont had. This was the only place that there was any rust and I can only assume that it was because it was in the bottom of the pram and normally covered with a plastic covered mattress, so any condensation or any other dampness would have had no chance of being able to dry out.

Once I removed all of the clips holding the top and bottom edges of the side walls of the lining in place, I could just lift the whole thing out and discard it.

I was then just left with the hard white plastic base of the pram with the foot well and the backrest.

The Base also seemed to be held in place with our old friend the spring clips which all had to be removed. Only I found that they weren't the usual clips, these were plastic sort of plugs which went through the plastic base and secured it to the metal cradle which supported it above the base of the body itself. I found these things harder to deal with than the spring clips. I had to start to prise them up in the same way and then had to resort to the pincers again but there wasn't really any easy way to remove them with except brute force! These plug things (a bit like a wall plug) just seemed to stretch forever until they finally gave up the ghost!

Next I had to remove the fixings for the backrest because they were also fastened into the metal cradle ~ but they were only common or garden screws, I could cope with those ok!

The D rings were attached with rivets and my husband had to drill those out for me before I could remove the backrest and finally the bed base.

Can you see the crack in the base which is where the D ring rein fitting was? The plastic on this base has become very brittle over the years and there were about three of these cracks in various places.

Now you can see that I have lifted the base out of the pram and now you can see the metal cradle which has supported the pram bed for so many years.

When the pram chassis was picked up from the sprayer who had agreed to respray it for me (and to colour match the paint to the original) I had a lurid green - a sort of metallic teal coloured chassis! I cried I don't mind telling you. They hadn't bothered to even try to match up the paint, no matter what they told me that they would do.

In the end I took the body along to Halfords in the back of the car and I stood for ages going through the manufacturers paint catalogues until I found what looked like the the right colour. Each colour has a little swatch with a hole in the middle of it which can be removed from the catalogues. That means you can take your swatch outside into the natural light and see if it matches whatever paintwork you need matching. I placed the chosen swatch over my pram body and hey presto, I had matched my paint better than the experts had! The nice people at Halfords then mixed my paint up for me and put it into an aerosol can, cost was around £10. Then I went home and sprayed the chassis! I couldn't wait to get rid of that horrible yucky green that they had put onto my lovely pram!