Yes Robert, as Jim says, those are castings from originals. The correct material is bronze. My own support huge Marchals and had been relocated forward so the lamps did not foul the radiator. I have had their angle of rake altered so they sit correctly and the marchals clear the rad by about 3/4-inch.

I appreciate your comments about my headlight mounts and further confirmation that they are not originals. I still need to figure out how to get the wires up through the mounts instead of around them. They sit over the hole and there is no hole through the mounts to put the wires through.

I realize that each situation is fairly unique and that I will have to figure out my own particular way to do this. I was hoping that someone had made an assortment of mounts and that I would be able to choose the one that was right for my arrangements. But I guess that was too much to hope for. Am not looking forward to having to cast my own mounts.

What's happened is that somebody's cast those off of originals and they can't cast them hollow. They had to cut a hole for the headlamps. But on the early ones, because when they first did the 3-Litres they had a different headlamp. And then they had a different type of mounting on the top. So there were two different types of stanchions. One with a cup on the top - and half hollow bowl. And the other one had a section across the top with two holes in it. And there was an extension that moved forward to put the headlamp out front of the radiator. Because when they made some of the headlamps they hid the radiator. So there were two lots of stanchions. And then, which most people don't know, the extension that came out front, they made some that were handy. They lifted out - a little to the right, a little the left. You very rarely see those.

Click on thumbnail for larger view
Stanchion	Stanchion	Stanchion drawing

I've got some pictures, I think, of the bits that go on the top, but I don't have a pair of original stanchions. They are the same shape as what you've got in the aluminium, but somebody used them and, just cheaply, took them to an aluminium caster and they cast them and then they drilled all sorts of holes in them. I think that somebody used those and drilled a hole right down the middle. And what they did, they put a piece of steel tube down the middle so they didn't break in half. A bit of a botch, but that's what they did. They put a steel tube in and cast around it so it came out the bottom and out the top and they cut it off.

From memory, the originals were made out of bronze, it might have been brass, but much the same thing. And where the flat piece lands on the chassis, the center section was cut out of it so you only had to shave the two ends. If you imagine the bottom half is a big oval and they just milled out, very lightly, about an 1/8" across the middle of it of each end with a hole in it, when you came down on it you could just file it a bit because the chassis were never flat. Well, it's basically flat, but sprung steel so you could just file them a bit. You didn't have to file them all the way across.