Stripping out the rear

Saturday was a day of crappy rain so the shed will have to wait. Despite this, we still had a good day of work on the GT40. 

First up, removed the brake calipers - front and rear. We'll need to rebuild these with new seals and hone them out if required. Dad noticed one rubber brake line was completely rusted out and one of the steel ones was broken. Plenty of work to do here.

Rear brakes (Alfa Romeo according to the previous owner)

Next, we started attacking the rear end.

Removed the rear suspension and moved all the wiring etc. Dad started cleaning it up with degreaser and it's already looking heaps better.

One Granada rear control arm 

GT40 stuff is taking over the garage, so I've decided to knock up a workbench with an under-shelf to go in front of the garage window, where the toolboxes are below.

I was inspired by this Autospeed article, so decided to knock up the workbench myself out of scrap metal and an old kitchen bench top. It should do the job. So far, it's cost me $70 for scrap metal and $15 for the kitchen bench, so I'm pretty happy about that.

Unfortunately, I ran out of time to finish it off, but will hopefully knock it over on a week night.

Building the shed slab

 OK, this blog entry is not strictly GT40 related, but building a shed does mean that stuff is removed from the garage to make more space for GT40 parts :)


So yesterday I cleared this space out the back for the house and knocked up the slab frame. Any want gravel? I've got a big pile of it left over now.

  









Today I went and picked up 14 x 30kg bags of concrete. Of course, at the end I discovered I needed 14.5 bags, so went back and picked up bag number 15.

Lugged these suckers all the way down to the back of the house. For some reason the dog thinks the wheel barrow is enemy number 1. No idea why, but it's pretty funny.

And 15 bags of concrete later. The finished result....

Oh yeah, a box with "KBS Coatings" on the side arrived today. This stuff is for tidying up the rust on the chassis. Can't wait to see how it turns out.

No Lamborghini drive, but work is progressing on the GT40

Well and truly time for an update. I've been away for the past few weeks and finished my previous job on Friday. I had lined up on Sunday to do a Ferrari and Lamborghini driving day. My mates are absolute champions and gave me a ticket for my 30th Birthday a few months back. Not all went to plan though. The skies decided to open up on Sunday for about the first time in 3 months. The driving day was cancelled. Damn Brisbane weather!

Oh well, at least things are progressing with the GT40...

While I was away, Dad continued stripping the engine down. He removed the crank and started trying to sand the stuffed bore to see if it could be fixed with a hone only.

We measured the piston clearance and it came up at around 0.014", which is way more than 0.008" that is regarded as the maximum according to the Chevy book. By the way I had to order a new version of the book mentioned in an earlier blog. I never found the old one that Tim brought around. The roof of a car is not a good place to leave books it seems...

On Saturday we had a fairly busy day: Disassembled the heads and cleaned them in kero, cleaned the valves, wire-brushed one head, removed marks on the crank and re-arranged the garage.

It took me many hours with the wire brush to bring the head up to scratch. You can see from the picture below that there was a fair bit of the rust behind the valve.

You can also see the pitting which was caused by the rust. It's cleaned up reasonably well. We will need to get the valve seat reground though.

Before

After

Tim cleaned up the valves and found one of them will need replacing due to rust.

Dad worked on removing some markings from the crank. It's good to have many hands with this tedious cleaning work.

We're starting to find that GT40 parts are taking over the garage and we are falling over each other. Therefore, we spent a fair bit of time re-arranging the garage and trying to clear a parts shelf.

I've decided that this is a perfect excuse to build a lawn locker. I've ordered a small 1.8x1.0m shed (it's all I can fit out the back). I spent a while today preparing the site for it and knocking up a timber frame for the concrete slab. It's rained nearly every day this week, so I'm waiting for a clear day to do the slab.

Yesterday I finished cleaning the other head....

Today I also finished stripping the block (welsh plugs, etc) and dropped it into the machine shop to be bored and honed. Lets hope they can save it. 

The wagon comes in handy once again.... 

Sorry for the large blog. I'll try to do regular smaller ones in future. On the plus-side, I start a new job on Monday. It's much closer to home than the previous job and I won't need to go away for a while. More GT40 time!