Friday 15 March 2013

Front body back on!

Well this update comes from my couch where I've been parked for the last 3 days straight. I just had a hernia operation, which means I can't do much for a while. Fortunately it's Melbourne Grand Prix weekend. Unfortunately this operation means that GT40 work is out of the picture.

So, it's been 3 months since an update, what the hell has been going on? Well, personally, lots has been going on. My wife now has a baby on the way, I've spent about 2 out of the past 3 months on a drilling rig in Thailand, Tim has finished studying Medicine and is now working full-time and Dad's been busy in and out of India and working on the house. Unfortunately, this means that not much has happened on the car.

Anyway, enough excuses, with this much time off the car, we are all itching to get back into it. For the last 2 weekends Tim and I have finally managed to squeeze some GT40 time in. We've decided to focus on getting the radiator in and mounted and to run the coolant lines. In order to mount the radiator correctly we needed to reinstall the front bodywork. This was seriously an exciting and motivating moment. It really makes the car look like a GT40 again and damn it looks good :)



This photo really doesn't do it justice (plus it shows that we badly need to reorganise the garage). We decided to throw the doors back on since we don't have anywhere better to store them. In order to get the body work to fully close we had to remove some of the fibreglass as it was fouling on some of the new chassis bracing we've added.

Next up, we put the radiator on. We're seriously happy with how well this radiator fits within the body. The only problem is that it's a little too tight. If it's not in precisely the right spot, the front won't fully hinge open. After spending some time trialling different positions, we ended up with the framework tacked in place. We've decided to make the front-end fully bolt in. That means we can easily remove the entire front end back to the K-frame if major suspension work is required.


Radiator in place. We will bolt through the top brackets with some rubber mounts in place.


When tidying up, we put the nostril panel back in. Only one words sums this up.... bugger!


It hits our new steel work. Fortunately it will be easy to shift the horizontal bars outwards an inch or so.

Anyway, so that's about it for now. Unfortunately I'll be doing 'supervisor only' work on this for the next 4-6 weeks, since I can't do heavy work. I'm sure Dad and Tim will continue. We've just ordered new shock absorbers from the UK, so soon she will be back on 4 wheels. Horray!