Back on the road again

A couple of weeks ago I had the MOT booked in and it passed with no advisories. The car is now road legal, but there is still plenty of finishing to be done. For some reason the reverse lights are not working, so I'll have to find a new switch for that.

A couple of days later, with the tracking done and the right pressure in the tyres, the car was running a lot better, so I took it out to the Gloucester TSSC meet on the following Monday, which is about an hours drive each way. I'm glad to say the run there and back was without incident, so I am happier to start re-fitting more of the trim and taking longer journeys with it.

A week ago I had a new silencer fitted, which required some alteration to the exhaust pipes under the car. Until recently it had two 49mm od pipes, which had to join together to fit into the standard type silencer. The new silencer now takes the two 49mm pipes straight in and exits through larger pipes also. The nice thing, for me, about this silencer is that it looks just like the original one, but is now quieter and allows the engine to make more power.

As mentioned above, I've decided to start fitting more trim, the door cards, complete with plastic screen behind them, were fitted once I'd adjusted the hinges, quarter light and glass to ensure a good seal all around.

Further inside, the handbrake was disconnected to fit the centre carpet, a better looking handbrake cover and the carpets to fit under the seats. I ended up with two sets of under seat carpets, one of which had been fitted the wrong way around, evident by the holes cut in it for the fasteners, and the other set did not have a hole for the seatbelt, peculiar eh?

With the good weather we have been having this week I treated the car to it's first wash after the re-spray, which was then followed up by being clayed, lightly polished, glazed and finally given a few coats of wax, though I admit there are still a few more fiddly areas of the car which still need to be waxed.

Getting ready for the MOT

Over the past month I've been quite busy recommissioning the GT6. The latest iteration of my fuel system is all together and has been pressurised successfully. The major components are the same as before, but I am gradually doing away with the basic rubber hoses held on with jubilee clips, in preference of braided hoses and JIC fittings.
You may be able to see in the pic below the two fuel return pipes in the fuel tank, these 1/4" pipes were welded in, once I has happy there was no vapours left in the tank.

To keep the fittings low profile and ensure good flow, the connection to the outlet of the fuel tank is now on a banjo fitting.

The main power cables are back in, this time the cables have been run through the sills where possible to keep them hidden away and away from the seat. The cables have been covered in spiral wrap as it passes through the sill to prevent chafing, before heading into the boot area, where the battery will be sited.

I had a couple of issues recently during the rebuild, first off was the master cylinder bracket. I could see while bleeding the systems that the bracket was flexing slightly more than I would have hoped, so I have added some extra strengthening pieces to it, which seems to have solved the problem.

The other issue I had was when I went to fit the silencer, for some reason the brackets on the underside of the boot floor pushed it too far over to the passenger side, this could be due to the brackets being in a different place on this body or that the body is in a slightly different position on the chassis.
To get around this, I cut a couple of spacers to keep the silencer in the right place. The plan is to do away with these when the new silencer is fitted.

Some time later, after lots of small jobs had been ticked off over, I was been able to start run and move the GT6 under it's own power. The list of jobs is starting to get smaller, but the trouble is that I keep having to add to it as I notice other things that need doing before the MOT.

Not the best of pics, but here you can see the new gearbox tunnel which follows the lines of the original one much more.

I know for sure that the tracking needs to be done as I can feel it crabbing as I went along the drive.
A couple more problems made themselves known though, the speedo was not working, this turned out to be the pick-up sensor position and once it was wound in a bit it was working fine. The other issue was that it was a little tighter than I would like to get in gear. Since it was last used on the road, the car has had a new gearbox, clutch and the gear linkage has been re-bushed also, but driving up and down the drive through the gears has loosened-up the gear linkage nicely.

Before the MOT I have to get some new wiper blades, replace the brake light switch, stop a blow on the silencer join and replace one bulb. With this in mind, I have booked it in for a MOT towards the end of the week.

And here it is out in the sun, a bit dusty and dirty, but it is getting there.

A new tunnel and parts back from the welders

Work has been a bit slow on this car in the recent months due to other commitments, but I have been able to chip away at a few jobs. One thing I was not looking forward to was making another gearbox tunnel as it takes a lot of fitting and re-fitting to make sure the fit is right, which involves a fair bit of time on my knees.

Just to complicate things, I wanted to make the new tunnel look more like the factory version, which means I should be able to fit the radio/dash support.

I started off by fabricating the rear-most section first, which needed relatively small diameters and a quick step up between them to give space for your hand to use the handbrake.

Than I moved forward to cut the piece which will hold the tunnel onto the bulkhead and welded a section onto this, along the inner profile and then carried on fabricating back along the passenger side.

And here it is in place for yet another trial fit.

With all the welding on the gearbox tunnel I set to painting it, here you can see the back piece is separate to allow removal of the tunnel without having to disconnect the hand brake.

This was finished over the course of a number of weekends, finally being painted and the inside covered with my perfered sound deadening and heat reflective material.

Eleswhere on the car, the surge pot has returned from the welders with the bosses I turned-up to allow me to use banjo bolts in the end of the pot, instead of the JB welded in 90degree fittings. The banjo bolts should be a lot easier to work with and seal better also.

Also coming back from the welders was the airbox, which I had cut the previous 50mm inlets off from and had them tack on one of the new 75mm inlets. It's only tacked on for now to let me work out where the second inlet, which goes further back, should be positioned.

Glass, loom and dash in

Between taking the Bank holiday weekend off to play engines at the Cambridge Museum of Technology and preparation for the external audit, I have been able to get a bit more done on the GT6. Both the front and rear screens are now in, making it almost waterproof. In the end I decided to have my (relatively new) clear windscreen moved over from the old body and fitted in the new body, as none of the windscreen fitters I contacted could supply the tinted glass.

The wiring loom was carefully removed from the old body an transferred over with minimal fuss, which meant I could also fit the dash and steering column.

The loom has been altered again slightly to tidy it up and to allow the EDIS unit for the megajolt ignition system to stay within the car, behind the passenger glove box.

Getting brave, I decided to confirm the position of the header tank and coil pack on the bulkhead, drilling into the fresh paint. Extra length fasteners will be used here, so the EDIS unit and megajolt unit can be mounted on a plate underneath. Now I've fixed the position of the coil pack I can measure-up the length of the plug leads and consider getting a set of Magnecore ordered.

I had to move the car out of the workshop for a couple of day, so it gave me a good chance to get a shot of the rear, with the refurbed lights and new number plate. It really does look quite funny to me with the skinny tyres and the rear wheels hiding far within those arches.

In other news, the BMW E21 has passed it's MOT again first time, with only a couple of advisories, which I shall see to in the next week or so.

GT6 rebuild continues

Over the last week I've been able to crack on with the GT6 rebuild fairly well, getting the driveshaft assemblies put back together and fitted on the car, the adjustable rear radius arms serviced and fitted. This means the car could go back down on it's wheels to make it easier to move around.

The rear bumper was removed from the old body, mounting threads cleaned up and re-fitted to the new body and the number plate light serviced.

The number plate light was a case in point of how a simple job can take quite a while if you are trying to do thing right. The hole where the number plate light wires go into the body is smaller in the new body, so I needed to fit a smaller grommet, simple eh? It should be, but someone had put some nasty replacement bullet connects on the light fitting, which did not mate well with the rest of the loom. So I ended up carefully removing the wires from another light fitting to make one good part, which all of course took time.

Armed with a tin of strong adhesive I made a start on the headligning, with the strips of sound deadening going in first, followed by the headligning. There are a few ripples in the fabric, but not much worse than it was before I removed it.

Meanwhile, the bonnet was refitted, along with the door glass, fuel filler, door handles and some smaller fittings.

I'd like to get the windscreen fitted soon, so I can start moving over the dash and wiring loom, but at the moment I'm having a bit of a job trying to find someone to supply and fit a Sundym (green tinted) windscreen. I know they are available as I have seen them listed by three Triumph parts suppliers, but none of the fitters seem able to find one.

Start of the rebuild

Last week after the paint had cured on the chassis, I made a start re-assembling the GT6. The front suspension has been removed as complete units, so ten bolts later and both sides were back on the chassis, closely followed by the steering rack and differential.

In-between work on the chassis, the main body of the gearbox was swapped out for one I had rebuilt some years ago and fitted with a new old stock AP Borg-Beck clutch and then re-united with the engine before being refitted to the chassis as one unit.

Next up was the body, as before, it was carefully moved into place using trolley jacks, axle stands and lumps of wood until it was in position. Thankfully it all lined-up and all the bulkhead modifications were in the right place, giving the appropriate amount of space all around.

Then last weekend I started fitting some of the smaller parts back on the front end of the car, such as the front quarter valances, bumper, spoiler and inlet manifolds.

When I removed the driveshafts, upright and lower wishbone from the rear of the car I noticed the wishbones seemed a bit tight against the uprights, not letting them rotate very easily, so I wanted to check these over before fitted them back on the car. An hour later and one side was separated, but I had destroyed the bushes and cut the bolt in order to do so. The problem here was that the metal bush had seized onto the long trunnion bolt.

After getting psyched up ready to tackle the other side, it came apart quite easily, just as it should have, though I will replace the bushes for good measure.

It was suggested to me that for awkward parts like this, which have a habit of seizing up, there is something better that the usual Copaslip type anti-seize compounds, which is Chesterton 785. I have ordered a can of this, though I probably won't know for some time now how effective it really is as I don't plan on stripping these parts down again for quite some time.

While they were out, the rear uprights, wishbones and brake back plates were all given a couple of coats of Rust Bullet Black shell and the CV joints were cleaned out and re-packed with molybdenum grease for good measure.

Chassis time

A couple of weeks ago I made a start on the chassis by chopping off the outriggers, there was plenty of strong metal in them, but they were somewhat home-made looking and they would not have lined-up properly with the replacement body.

Cutting them off revealed the remain of the previous ones and a couple of holes in the chassis to be delt with.

The old and thinned metal was cut out and replaced with fresh 2mm plate, butt welded in. It's a shame I had to grind the welds back so much, but as the outriggers fit over this, it needs to be quite flat.

The replacement outriggers went on quite easily, with only a couple of milimeters needing to be removed from each outriger for them to fit in the right position on the chassis rail. Because I was fitting the outriggers without the body in place, quite some time was taken to make sure they were to be welded in the correct position, mainly by taking lots of measurements from the chassis I had borrowed to move the body to the paint shop.

I'd spent quite a bit of time stripping off the old paint, but I realised I could not get into all of the area to clean it as well as I wanted, so I decided to get it shot blasted. Luckily for me, I'd found someone fairly local, who could do the job while I waited.

With the chassis back, there was a little more welding to be done, the shot basting having revealed some thin metal in the bonnet mounts and the front crossmember. The chassis was then painted using Rust Bullet Black shell for added protection.