Master cylinder mods

I've been able to make a bit more progress on the replacement body over the last few days, the replacement rear light panel is now fully trimmed back and I've made a start on trimming back the area it has to go into.
Meanwhile at the front I've been looking into the bulkhead mods again, with the benefit of hindsight and more time I'm going to try and make a neater job of it and try to make it look as factory spec as possible. This will mean putting the lip back on the top of the bulkhead shelf, keeping the factory size radii on the corners of the new parts of the bulkhead and replicating the detail of how the bulkhead finishes to join onto the tunnel. So far there has been a fair bit of head scratching and wandering between car bodies to work out how best to do it, but hopefully it should be worth it.

The area I looked at next was been the master cylinders, last time I just put the two master cylinder brackets next to each other and cut a new hole in the bulkhead, but that looks somewhat scruffy. This time I plan to do something like Dave has with his K series and fabricate a new bracket for the master cylinders, with a repositioned reservoir for the brake, then cut out and re-weld the pressing for the hole in the bulkhead.

I'm hoping I can find an appropriately size brake fluid reservoir to be able to keep it somewhere on the bulkhead and at the same time put the support/brace/bracket next to the master cylinders on the bulkhead.

A few days later I received a new master cylinder reservoir, the good thing about this one is that the outlet of the reservoir is offset, so it gives me enough space to open both master cylinder caps.

The problem I had is that it still sat a bit too high. The height can be reduced a bit by cutting down the thread, but that's not going to be enough. As I will have to fabricate a new bracket for the master cylinders I will change the angle of the bake master cylinder, making them more horizontal and giving me more space.

So this is what it looks like now with a mocked-up brake master cylinder, the reservoir should go down a bit lower again.

GT6 rear end damage &starter heat shield

I spent a bit of time having a look at the dent in the rear of the new GT6 body, making a start by removing the lights and other trim. The rear deck, valance and light panel are all damaged, so at present I plan to replace just the light panel and try to straighten out the other panels.

I've also been out to the long term storage area to retrieve a few parts from a mostly rotten bodyshell. Much easier to carefully remove the light panel in the workshop in the dry and on the bench. It'll also give me a at hand reference of how the rear deck should sit.

Decided the first job was to remove the old light panel, I was going to carefully drill out all the spot welds, but soon gave-up on that idea and just cut the whole panel out. I've been able to make a start on smoothing it all out again, but I'm all too aware of my lack of experience and the risk of making things worse if I spend too long hammering in the same place, so I'll leave it for now and concentrate on panel preparation before getting some professional advise.

A problem I had with the GT6 last time it was out was that when hot, the starter would refuse to go and just blow a fuse. I've since been told that this is quite common with the modern type starter motors as they really don't like getting too hot. So rather than fit a heat reflective type blanket over it I decided to make-up a heat shield.
The CAD (cardboard aided design) was cranked into action before transferring to aluminium to produce a heat shield, which to pleasantly surprise me, fitted first time and was still easy to get into and out of position. While doing the job, I decided to replace the pozi-drive screws with allen-head screws to make for easier servicing of the starter as it is a pair to remove the whole unit, though I hope I won't need to again for a while now.

It has survived a quick run to the shops and seems to be doing it's job so far, so I can't complain at that really.

A new body

Since getting all despondent about the condition of the GT6 body I'd been on the look-out for another one, so I put a few feelers out, contacted some of the Triumph traders/breakers and eventually found something which was reasonably close, solid and had not been bodged too much by a previous owner. Unfortunately there were a couple of obvious issues with the one I found, it came with the rest of a almost complete vehicle, so I would have to separate it and find a home for the running gear and the body had sustained some rear end damage, but again this was not too much of an issue as I already had a second hand light panel which could be fitted.

A deal was soon done and a couple of days later it was in the workshop

It took a couple of hours to prepare it for removal of the body and another hour to lift it off , not too bad as I was doing it by myself with jacks and blocks of wood.

With the body removed I gave the running gear a quick wash, took some pictures and put it up for sale on a few websites and within 24 hours I'd received a deposit for the running gear, at least that went quickly and smoothly.