pre war rolls parts

For prewar Rolls Royce parts, your best bet is to join the RROC-Rolls Royce Owner's Club. They have a great website at: http://www.rroc.org

You'll find lots of information and parts leads on their site, however, you do need to be a member in order to use their website. If you are going to take on this project, it is certainly worthwhile to join this club. They produce a great magazine and their club store sells tools, manuals, build sheets, chassis cards, service records, etc for most models. You will find information through this club that you will not find anywhere else. They also have technical advisors for the different models. They are a very helpful and enthusiastic group. When I bought my Phantom I, joining the RROC proved to be a very valuable resource.

Good luck with your project.

First off... all of the pre-war Wraiths were coach built, so body and trim parts are a product of the coach builder, not RR. The good part of that is they were all one-offs so it may not even be noticeable if you change something.

As for mechanical parts, there never were many Wraiths in the first place... if I remember correctly, it was less than 1,000. The Wraith was the final version of what started as the 20HP — with pushrod operated overhead valves. The post war cars, like the Silver Wraith, have a completely different engine. Presumably some chassis parts interchange between the other late pre-war small HP cars (like the 25-30) but exactly what, I hazard to guess.

Added to that, a good many of the original spares were destroyed during WWII — the result of one of the few German bombs that actually hit the RR factory. Years ago there was one in my neighborhood that belonged to a car-hire firm and I got the job of replacing the exhaust manifold. It was a poor design to begin with, very prone to cracking. The one I worked on was broken in about 6 places and literally held together with asbestos tape, tin cans and hose clamps... The consensus at the time was that even bothering to look for a replacement manifold would be a wasted effort and that even if you found an intact example, it would probably break. I made a new manifold from scratch — one that didn't look like the original (it looked more like a Silver Ghost manifold) and it worked perfectly but if you are aiming at AACA or CCCA judging, this type of issue might be a problem.

That is probably an extreme example and, for all I know, someone is reproducing them today, but I hope you are going into this with your eyes open. RRs are not just different looking old cars. Personally, I am very fond of Ghosts, PIs and the 20HP (not so much the later versions) but they all exhibit a level of complication quite unlike any of the contemporary American automobiles.

EDIT: I've since found the correct number. There were 491 Wraith's built.

In addition to RROC, you should join at least 2 societies within RROC, The Phantom III Society and Goshawk.  Both cover the pre-war Wraith.  You should also join the British club--the Rolls-Royce Enthusiasts Club.  These are, as noted by others, very rare cars and many parts are NLA at any price.  Good luck as they are, as are most RRs, fine motoring cars.  Al