Stripping & Modelling

Yep our weekend involved stripping and modelling. You never know what's going on in the Willis garage...

Now, by stripping and modelling I was referring to the car. Of course.

So, after the last blog we were down to a chassis with a dash. It looked something like this.

First up, I attacked the wiring. I labelled as much as I could, but there were a few wires that had me scratching my head. I'm sure that won't bite me in the future..... much.

Mid-way through the de-wiring

Here's what the back of the dash looked like after I'd unplugged everything. Fortunately, the previous owner had put plugs on most things so I only need to snip a few wires. Champion! Here's what the dash looked like after "de-wiring" and here's the loom I removed.

It was at this point in the day that my mate Jim Groutsch sent me a text saying "I'm on my way with my computer. Set up a desk for me". Now Jim is a Process Engineer who is also a self-confessed petrol head and has his own Porsche-powered kit car. Over the course of the week, Jim and I had been discussing chassis design. We came to the idea of creating a 3D model of our GT40 that we can use later for chassis and suspension development. Fortunately, Jim is an experienced user of Autodesk Inventor which he has used for years for work at MetEng.

I figured Jim was bringing his laptop, so I got out a camping table for him. Little did I know, he would show up with a 30" monitor and a full desktop! This necessitated a quick desk solution.

Now we're looking serious

OK, so Jim plugged away with his computer and tape measure, while Dad and I got stuck into the car.

Soon the dash was gone.

Like the "temporary" storage location for the dash?

Next we attacked the side panelling and floor. Before we knew it, we were down to a raw chassis. Horray!

This is how far Jim had got after a few hours. The chassis is pretty much finished. He has started working on the rear trailing arms. The ones below are not exact. Just a test.

3 degrees body roll.

So that's where we are at the moment. Things are coming along nicely. It's now time to clean up that chassis. Oh yeah, another fantastic thing happened to me last week... I received an original manual for the car. More on that in a few days. I'm sick of typing and you're probably sick of reading.