The first paint!

Well we just had an awesome weekend of GT40 activities. Saturday was a good working session and on Sunday we met up with the guys from Club GT40 for their monthly cruise.

OK Saturday first.... This was a turning point for the GT40. It saw its first paint!! OK, it was only some chassis parts, but for once we were not pulling things apart. The plan was just to test out the chassis paint that we have purchased. It was a good feeling to make some progression in the forwards direction.

The paint we are using is from KBS Coatings, which is a 4 step preparation and painting process. We have purchased the Chassis Coating Kit from their website. It was highly recommended on the Performance Forums.

Tim at work with the paint (step 4) after prepping the front chassis, which we have named the Cow Catcher. Being a med student, it was only right that he should be the one nominated to wear the rubber gloves...

Cortina uprights came up pretty good. A couple of minutes on the wire wheel grinder and then off to Tim for the KBS treatment. Before shot (right) was taken a few weeks back.

The cow catcher hanging off the garage door. We are very happy with this paint. It forms a thick protective layer and is self levelling, so looks fantastic once it's dried. Word of advice, IT DOES NOT COME OFF SKIN. I didn't do any painting, but somehow I got it on my hands. It's still there today, nearly a week later.

Tim had night shift the night before. 

Meanwhile Dad started to attack the brake master cylinder. Here's the pedal box. Judging by the stamp on the fluid reservoir, this has come out of a VW of some sort.

Hmmm rust inside. Imagine that...

So that's about it for Saturday. I also managed to do a much needed oil and plug change on the Stagea in time for the GT40 cruise. It's going much better now :)

GT40 Cruise
On Sunday we met up with Club GT40 for their monthly cruise. This one started out near Ipswich and meandered along the inland roads to Somerset Dam. Here's a couple of pics from the day. My mate Raj came along and will probably send me his SLR pics to put on the blog soon. In the meantime, here are a couple of pics...

The quality of these cars in absolutely top notch. I believe some of the cars have taken up to 6 years to build, but the end result really speaks for itself. These guys were very keen to give us much appreciated advice. Mum and Dad also came along. I think it was an eye opener for both of them. These cars certainly give us something to aim for...

1967 Le Mans Print


Last week marked 10 years since my wife and I first met. Check out what she gave me! A framed photo from the 1967 Le Mans race. Can't complain about that. Thanks Bella! You're awesome.

I've already put it up. It looks great.

What's going on?

I just realised that it's been a long time since my mast blog post. So what the hell is going on?

After a few trips away, we're back and getting stuck into the GT40 once again. The team are motivated and it's time to get on with it. The past few months have been a bit crazy for us. We all headed to the UK for Christmas. Tim and I and the girls spent a few weeks in Japan on the way back. I won't brag too much, but since this is an automotive blog I thought I might mention that we visited the Tokyo Autosalon and saw the Mazda 787B quad rotor Le Mans car in action. :)

Tim and I managed to get front row for the warm-up procedure. It is probably the best car I have ever heard and possibly the best automotive experience I have had. I took this video of the warm-up. If you watch when the car starts up the camera jumps. Yep, that was me crapping myself...

Anyway, what do we care about dirty rotaries, right? What about the GT40?

OK, well here's how it was looking a weeks ago. Yep, nothing left on that chassis whatsoever.

We've spent many hours with wire-wheels and have come to the conclusion that this is an endless task and we should send this thing away to be sandblasted, so that's the plan for the chassis.

Dead Welder

Unfortunately my Rossi stick welder blew up last weekend. It was just idling and suddenly went pop. It was 18 days out of warranty! It was an ebay purchase from AGR Machinery. I contacted them in the hope that they might offer some sort of compensation, instead their reply went along the lines of "Your product is out of warranty. You can purchase a new one on our website". What a joke! I replied with "I will be buying a new welder, but not from you guys. Thanks for nothing". So does anyone have any recommendations for a new welder? I'm thinking I should upgrade, since I'll have plenty of work for it on this project.

Front Suspension

In the mean time, Jim and I have been investigating the front suspension. When Jim developed the 3D model a few months back, he looked at the screen and said "this isn't gonna work". The model predicted that the camber would go positive under compression and negative under droop. This is not good for handling. Jim convinced me to remove the springs and do some tests.

I think I'll go into the technical details in another blog entry, but just briefly... Our suspension is from a Ford Cortina, but has Ford Granada stub axles. This is recommended in the original KCC build manual, since it gives you ventilated brake discs and larger calipers. What we discovered is that the Granada stub axle has different geometry to the original Cortina one. Here are a few tests we did last weekend. The tests confirmed exactly what the model was telling us. Not pretty...

We trialled some modifications and discovered that adding a spacer below the top ball joint pretty much fixed the geometry. We were measuring slightly negative camber through the normal operating range. 

I got on to the Performance Forums and put out the call for Cortina stub axles. Thankfully, an absolute legend by the name of Nathan (Ferdie) had a set lying around and donated them to the project. They turned out to be unused and also came with a set of blank hubs and brand new ball joints. You can see the difference between the two units here (the Cortina ones have light surface rust).

During the week Jim bought a fancy digital protractor (any excuse to buy toys). Thanks Jim! Here you can see the new protractor in action measuring 0.6 degrees negative camber.

Jim also bought a laser chalk. We used this to measure bump steer and found that bump steer should be fairly negligible at normal ride height. We also measured the steering angles and I calculated that it should have a turning circle of roughly 10m. Not too bad.

The only downside to switching back to Cortina stub axles is that we will need to find new brakes. Not really a downside, I think an upgrade is necessary anyway.

What now?

OK, now that the front suspension is solved, we got cracked into it and stripped it down. Some of bushes looked a bit average. Tim is now back in Brisbane and can finally do some of the dirty work. He got stuck into removing the loose surface rust.

Here's how it came up after an hour or so of work. Not too much more before we can test out the new chassis paint.

Last weekend Dad repaired one of the rear brake calipers and then decided to have a crack at polishing the inlet manifold (since this thing will be seen through the back window). On Sunday, Tim's girlfriend Renee was looking for something to do, so we gave her the inlet manifold to carry on with. It's looking pretty good.

So that's where we're at now. Jobs for the next few weeks/months:

• Add some bracing to the chassis.
• Find some seats and build seat mounts. Anyone have any recommendations for seats? We're stuck on this one.
• Sandblast and paint the chassis.
• Sort out some front brakes.
• Rebuild the front suspension.

Hmmm that should keep us busy for a while....