Back home again

I'd hoped to collect the body before Christmas, but with the bit of snow we had, we decided it could wait until the new year. So earlier this week I trailered it back to the workshop. 

I'm aiming to get it back to the bodyshop in the second half of February, but before that there will be quite a bit of finishing to be done. The original plan was to try and get it seam sealed and painted internally before it went for paint, but considering the amount of other welding I need to do and how cold the weather is at the moment, it may have to wait until afterwards.
Think I'll resume by finishing off the radius arm brackets then work my way forward from the rear light panel, checking every joint and seam I can find. 
In the meantime I am looking for a chassis to borrow, as I could do with finding an easy and safe way to transport both the body and bonnet back to the bodyshop for paint.

GT6 Bulkhead reconstruction part 2

With the recent cold weather we have been having I've not been so keen to work on the car recently, but I had agreed to move the body over to a bodyshop this week, so I wanted to get the bulkhead finished off if possible.
I don't have and in progress pictures this time, but once again  the floorpan has been remodelled and the new bulkhead section welded in place, though this time the piece was fabricated.

Back inside the car, one of the radius arm strengthening brackets has been moved across, this is because the body was swing spring and will be going to Jones/Bowler CV.

I've made a start on the other side, unfortunately this bracket has had plates welded over it, but I found a decent one on my other spare GT6 body.

The body is now over at the bodyshop to have the rear light panel, rear wing and outer arch fitted, which they reckon they may have done by the end of the week, then it's back to me to finish the bracket on the heel board, repair both toe boards where it bolts down through to the chassis, patch a couple of holes on the back of the screen frame, put a new lip on the leading edge of the roof and if there is time, seem seal and paint the inside, all ready from paint in February, at least that's the idea

GT6 rear wing preparation

After pulling out some dubious repairs from the rear wheel arch I worked out that the left hand rear wing had already had three repair panel welded on. The trouble with this is that the panels were not very good and had a thick layer of filler over them to cover it up, so I decided to get a new wing.
The complication here is that the fuel filler cap is in this wing and the company that produces this wing do not do the pressing for the fuel filler, but one of their suppliers could do the pressing, so I ordered an appropriate wing from them. Unfortunately it was not quite as I had hoped, the red one below is an original and the black a re-pro pressing.

I asked the company if they could do better and they said no, so the wing was exchanged at their cost for one without a filler hole and I set about moving a filler hole across. I started by marking up all the parts with masking tape to give me reference points of where the filler hole should be.

Then the filler panel was trimmed down and a hole cut in the new wing to allow me to drop the piece in before doing the final cut around, just in case I had it in the wrong place.

Once happy with this, the proper size hole was cut in the new wing before welding the hole in place. 

It's going to need a bit more finishing and possibly a skim of filler before paint, but I'm fairly happy with the result and glad that I should have something that looks right when fitted.  

GT6 Bulkhead reconstruction

A bit more fabricating and welding done this weekend. The vertical closer panel on the passenger side of the bulkhead was cut and folded.

The problem with this is that the new bottom corner of this panel reaches out over the floorpan. Having some spare floorpan parts, I decided to change the shape to make it all fit and look better.
Replacement section in place prior to cutting and welding.

Replacement piece welded in with the top hole filled in and the old corner of the floorpan cut out so not to create a redundant cavity.

And this is how it soon looked, with the bulkhead started to be welded in and some of the holes in the bulkhead being filled in. There is still quite a bit of grinding back to be done and pseudo spot welding between the bulkhead top and the vertical panels, then it's onto the drivers side, which will be more complicated again as the panels have to give room for the starter and clutch slave cylinder.

Later on, the top of the drivers side bulkhead finally buzzed in, which meant I could decide on the final position of the master cylinders, which have also been modified and welded together.

GT6 Bulkhead mods

With a few other jobs out of the way I've started back on the replacement GT6 body with a bit more choppy chop around the bulkhead. 

As you can see from the pics below, I had already started on the drivers side before I remembered to take any pictures. The sides of the area around the pedal box have been boxed in and a new piece put in beside it to give more space for the air box.

As it was a few days ago

Remaining redundant top of bulkhead and front of tunnel cut off

New top of bulkhead positioned for the camera

While I am doing the welding around here I'll fill up the hole for the fuse box and all of the redundant holes also. At the same time I am thinking of re-positioning the wiper motor, as I have seen done before. This should make for a slightly less cluttered bulkhead and while I'm at it, I'll see if I can fit a more modern wiper motor, you know, one of those which actually go fast when you put it on the second speed, unlike some of the Triumph offerings.

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.