Lightening Fast!

I had a bit of a rush job on today. I went to Canley Classics this morning to pick up some stuff I needed for the master cylinders. I bought a complete set of mounting bolts, washers and shakeproof washers along with master cylinder gaiters, pivot pins, clips and the pedal pivot E rings. After that I went on to KD Triumph to drop off some wheel embelishers for a mate of Karls that got in touch via the Club Triumph forums. I am clearing my garage out at the moment and have more stuff to give away including a Spitfire 1500 radiator which is available free to anyone who can collect it. It's not the uprated wide type but it works 100%! Get in touch if you want it!

I was also intending to take the master cylinder brackets (and a whole lot of other stuff) into Lap Tab in Birmingham to get them powdercoated. I decided to do it tomorrow instead and spent the evening lightening up a few more bits and peices so they can go off and get coated. Shown below is the brackets that hold the front quater valences on. They are now 20g lighter!



I'm now just left with the smaller quater valance brackets and the battery retaining clamp to drill and then I can relax!

Update

Today I got back to work on the area around the master cylinders. I used a wire cup brush on an angle grinder and also on a drill to clean up the area around the wiper motor and the brake cylinder. This area appears to have been suffering for quite some time and is now quite badly pitted. Fortunatly the steel is still strong and I have no worries about the structural strength of the panel.

Having done my best with the wire brushes, I used Hammerite Rust Remover to sort the remaining rust. I'm not particularly impressed with this slimy green mixture but it seems to work alright and is inexpensive. When its gone I will replace it with the equivalent product from Bilt Hamber Laboratories, which I have heard great things about!

I still have the area around the clutch cylinder to wire brush but I sprayed the rest with primer just to minimise exposure to the air while I finish the rest off. This is how it's looking so far...


Another thing I've been getting on with is the drivers side quater valance. This now just needs flatting down and respraying before abrasive polish and then laquer can be applied. It's looking good so far but I'm not sure how close a match the colour is to the rest of the car!

Continuing the theme of modding the front of the car, I also cut the number plate horizontally so that it is the minimum size allowable by law. This means that there is only 11mm between the top of the letters and the edge of the plate. This gives a slight airflow advantage into the radiator because the area of the plate is reduced by 40 square cm. I think it looks better as well and saves 15g!

Finally, it also occured to me that I havent yet shown a picture of the T handle that I have fitted to the interior. This will eventually be used to activate a plumbed in fire extinguisher system but for the time being the cable remains curled up in the glovebox. I had initially planned to mount this in the dash but I made up a braket and mounted it just under the dash on the passenger side where the driver can reach it as well!

More Weight Saving!

Finally got around to loosing some weight out of the boot! At some time in it's life my car had been fitted with carpet covered hardboard on either side of the boot. Over the years this had gone soggy and nasty along with the black vinyl covering the wheel arches. 2 minutes work to rip it all out and a weight saving of 1.5kg for absolutely nothing!

Amusingly there was also a boot light fitted on the right hand side panel that had been fitted in the past and had never worked. On removing the panel I discovered no bulb and loose wires just hanging down the back!

Quater Valances

I just couldn't bring myself to fit the nice new indicators into the shonky old valances that appeared to have been badly painted with the wrong colour paint! So off came the drivers side to start with and out came the 4 bolts that were holding it on along with the bumper attachment. I then detached the old indicator electrical connections and pulled the whole thing free of the car!

So, after dealing with a seized screw retaining the indicators I was left with just the metalwork. I fired up the angle grinder and stripped the paint off using a wire cup brush. For the edges and finer stuff I used a smaller wire brush in a drill. The reason for the awful cracked paint became pretty clear. It seems that the valance had been crudely painted black before getting a waxy stonechip style coat and then finally a colour coat on top. Naturally a waxy coat like that isn't the perfect base for a colour coat!

When it was in bare metal I noticed a few little knocks that needed fillering so I protected the bare metal with U-Pol Acid primer before giving a few spots a skim of filler. I then gave those areas a good wet and drying afterwards until the areas were super smooth (no perceivable ridge between filler and bare metal). I then recoated with etch primer to give 2 nice and thin coats over the area and when that had dried I smoothed it with fine wet and dry paper and gave it all 2 coats of zinc primer followed by, you guessed it, more wet and dry rubdowns! At that stage it was looking like much better! Check out the spot welds - I could have filled and smoothed them but I like them original!

So I left that to dry overnight and started on it again the next morning. First thing I did was give it a couple of thin coats of regular primer. The zinc stuff isn't very smooth and this helps to give the colour coats a smoother finish. More flatting back followed that and then I could finally get on to the colour! One coat of Tahiti Blue (from a Halfords spray can) and it was now looking like this!

More news next time!

More Brackets!

Not much to report recently. Still looking after my grandma and making best use of my grandads workshop before he comes out of hospital! Spent the past few days lightening a few things. I know it's not going to make a noticable difference but I do want to have a bit of underbonnet wow factor! My favourite mod so far has to be the two small holes in the radiator cap 'ears'!

Brackets

So I've been pretty bored over the last few weeks and have devoted a fair bit of spare time to making up a pair of brackets to hold my CD Changer in the boot. I know that it's heavy and that I really should do without for the benefit of performance but it's still a car I use on the road and I like having a wide range of CD's to choose from!

So I made them from 1mm steel and drilled them to fit the CD changer before bending them in a vice and spraying them with zinc primer, silver wheel paint and then lacquer. I will mount this on the panel inside the boot on the left hand side (to offset the drivers weight and as low as possible to keep the centre of gravity low!)

While I was there I also gave the wiper bracket a lick of the same paints. I know it's getting more publicity than it really deserves but here we go with a picture!

Also while I had the drill out I reduced the weight of the overengineered bracket that attaches to the chassis to the front and holds the plastic grill on. I may well drill out the horizontal parts of the grill in the future. Believe me I have a lot of time on my hands!

And finally a picture of the indicators. This was just a test fitting to see how they would look on the front of the car. Readers opinions are most welcome but I personally think they look great. The US light units are lighter than the standard ones, give me bigger indicators and will raise the sidelights up into the headlights. Hopefully this will mean more people will see me and should make driving it a bit safer!

Viva Las Vegas!

I always try and do different things with my Spitfire and to do modifications that most people maybe wouldn't think of! One of the ideas I had whilst looking through Custom Car Magazine is to change the look of the front of the car by removing the 'white and amber' lights that are under the headlights and replacing them with the 'US spec' all amber models. Of course that would leave me without pilot (side) lights, so in order to get those back I'm going to change the headlights to the type that include sidelights!

Halogen conversions with the sidelights built in are very common from all sorts of places in the UK because they are the same fitting as minis but the 'US spec' indicator is all but impossible to come by in the UK. Thats where I had a bit of help from GT6 Steve in the US, who very generously gave me a set for free and all I had to pay was the postage from Las Vegas. The postage was pretty hefty but worth it for a part that you just can't find in this country. Believe it or not I had been looking for 9 months! Quite some time for a part that I thought would be shipped over with all those 'rust free' US bodyshells and available for peanuts!

Wiper Motor Bracket

I've recently been spending a lot of time looking after my Grandma while my Grandad's been in hospital so I've spent the time making the best use of Grandads workshop. Inkeeping with my lightweight theme (and whilst I had it off to strip the bulkhead) I whizzed up this lightweight wiper motor strap (15g). Okay so it only saves a few grammes but it looks pretty neat!

There is also good news on the clutch pedal. I dropped it into a small garage in Caldmore where the chap it going to weld up the hole so I can redrill it. Should save me fractions of a second with every gearshift!

Clutch Pedal

Trouble always seems to come in threes and my Spitfire is no exception! I pulled back the rubber gaiter on the clutch master cylinder and was greeted by the unmistakable slimy feel of brake fluid. It seems the clutch cylinder had been leaking as badly (if not worse) than the brake cylinder. All this leaking fluid had stripped the paint off the bulkhead and the clutch pedal, which now needs repainting.

As I was cleaning up the clutch pedal I spotted that the hole near the top was worn oval by the pin that links it to the master cylinder! You can see in the photo how years of use have worn the hole out of shape. This is a setback as I now need to find someone who can weld the hole up so that I can redrill it and refit the link pin. At least it explains why the clutch pedal was so crap though!


I've also been thinking of upgrading both master cylinders rather than getting straight replacements for them as Wilwood do decent ones that are a straightforward fit and are a bit cheaper than most of the Girling ones I've seen about. This is getting expensive though and the budget is tight so we will have to see. While the cylinders are off I want to repaint the bulkhead, get the brackets powdercoated and upgrade the lines to braided hose.

This is as well as pulling the engine out and replacing the rear oil seal and the clutch and upgrading the rear engine plate to the alloy one I purchased from Davesideways. Sadly though the engine plate is lost in the post at the moment and I haven't had much luck finding an engine crane to borrow! At least the clutch I bought of ebay has shown up. Another bargain - a genuine AP clutch plate for just £6!

Christmas Brake!

So I rolled the Spitfire out onto the drive, opened the bonnet and got a christmas suprise! And not a good one!

I was lacking a huge amount of clutch and brake fluid. So I topped up and had another look today and the area around the brake master cylinder is damp. The paint was flakey before and it's not going to get much better with fresh fluid pouring all over it! My plan is to rebuild (and possibly replace) both cylinders. I had previously replaced all brake and clutch parts except the clutch pipe and the master cylinders so I guess its about time! I thought I'd also take the time to repaint the bulkhead and sort out the pedals. I've finally managed to separate the 'Cross Shaft' and wasn't suprised it was so difficult to drift out - it had been put in dry and had just rusted in solid.

Of course I thought I'd improve things while I'm tinkering. I plan to replace the clutch pipe with a braided flexable version and to paint the finished cylinders black to aid heat dissipation. I have also chucked out the worn out pedal rubbers (60g) and replaced them with griptape. This is the stuff I used on my wakeskates and it's super hardwearing, waterproof and weighs so little I couldn't measure it on the scales! Not the biggest weight saving in the world but it all adds up!

Attention to Detail(ing)!

Having a car that actually works and dosen't require constant rebuilding of parts is quite a wierd feeling! Possibly that is the reason that I have become a bit more obsessive about how my car looks over the past few weeks.

Detailing is the very thorough cleaning of a car and the basic stages can be broken down into steps. Firstly you need to was the car using a proper car shampoo and a sponge to get all the dirt off the paintwork. Then you need to use soapy water to wet the paintwork while you slide a clay bar over the surface to pull contaminants out of the paint surface. Then you polish and then you wax!

So I started off by giving it a clean with some proper car shampoo and a sponge. Without the encrusted mud up the sides it looked a whole lot better! I then used a Sonus (medium) clay bar lubricated with soapy water to clean the paint until it was perfectly smooth. I then used Autoglym Super Resin Polish and overcoated it with Poorboys World Natty's Blue Paste Wax. The heavily oxidised boot and bonnet were polished using Poorboys World SSR2 which is a compound polish.

I was very impressed with the difference the clay bar and the Poorboys World products made. The bonnet and boot really do have paintwork in poor condition but the improvement was immense. The only downside to the whole process is that the thorough cleaning has highlighted a fair few bits of bodywork that need doing!

Update! (Carbs and Bodywork)

I thought I'd better just update my blog. I've had a busy few weeks working on the car. Firstly, I took the carbs off and rebuit them with new throttle shafts. I took time with the Dremel to thin them out to about half the normal thickness (as recommebed by Kas Kastner and others) but I didn't bother thinning the butterflies for the tiny difference they'd make.

With it all refitted to the car I set about setting the carbs up. One of the most important things to get right is the same amount of air must be sucked in by each carb. In order to check that you need a carb balancer. So after trying out a Gunson Carbtuner and finding out it was absolute crap I got on eBay and bought a decent flowmeter from Eurocarb (who I can highly recommend for their excellent customer service).

So with balance set using the flow meter and mixture set using a Gunson Colourtune it was all good and sounding better than ever. Unfortunatly whilst it revs beautifully and cleanly on the drive it's a bit stuttery on the road. I haven't got around to sorting yet but I will!

I've also been sorting out an unsightly rust scab that had been lurking around on the drivers side of the windscreen frame. I was pleasantly suprised to find no deep structural rust and can happily report that the area has been rust killered and primered and the top coat is drying as I write this. It's looking better already!

Breakdown!

I had a particularly unlucky day today! Seeing as the weather was decent I pulled on a jumper and scarf and got the top down and hit the road. Filled up with another tenner of Shell V Power and took a tour around the local fast A roads. Lovely!

I got home and agreed to have a coffee with a mate in Birmingham so I hopped back in the Spit and headed over there! Stopped to let a particularly nice Mk1 Escort pull out in front (and gasped in awe as I heard his dump valve and realised he was running the Cosworth lump) before getting caught up at the lights. Then I noticed I was idling quite high so I blipped the throttle to try and close the butterflies more firmly but to no avail and subsequent stops showed the problem was getting worse! Eventually I gave up and called the AA.

When the guy showed up he had a good look over it but was just as stumped as me. So I got him to tow me home and, after my first ever towing experience, I whipped the carbs off.

So far I'm still pretty stumped but I'm going to replace the really quite badly worn throttle shafts (see photo) and then put everything back together and hope I come across the problem when refitting!

Core Plugs

I thought I'd replace the core plugs while I had the head off and I'm beginning to regret that now! I first tried drilling a hole and putting a self tapper in there before using the claw hammer to try and lever it out. All it did was pull out the self tapper and make the hole bigger! So after trying a bit more with larger screws and the same results I realised I was in for a long slog. After copious amounts of levering, grinding, bashing and swearing it came out looking like this and the hole it came out of is completely undamaged which is great because if you damage the seat they never seal up properly again!

More Cylinder Head Porting Stuff!

Just a quick update on the cylinder head! Basically on the Triumph 1500 head the valves are recessed into pockets in the port to give a flat surface for the original makers to drill the valve guide holes into (according to David Vizard's book) and this has the effect of really messing up the airflow through the port. His book mentions using 'chemical metal' style filler to fill up the pocket but I wasn't keen on a chunk of that falling into my newly rebuilt engine to say the least! So, I ground out the pocket as much as I can and smoothed the ports as much as possible without enlarging them. At the moment the inlets are all nearly done, the chambers are half way to being polished and I've made a start on the exhaust ports, which were simply dreadfull. Huge chunks of metal were lurking about where the casting was just appauling and there were more small pockets for the valve guides to grind out. The water jackets run closer to the exhaust ports so I have been more convervative that the inlets but it still looks a lot better!

Check out the nasty casting marks in the exhaust port! This is one of the better ones and some were far worse than this!

The nearly finished inlet ports looks a whole lot better than they did to start with!

And I'm also about halfway through polishing the chambers!