My apologies to the neighbours

My sincere apologies to the neighbours, Saturday was a very loud day. It was the day of cleaning up the chassis. It just so happened that Tim finally returned from a few months out bush to lend a hand, too. About time...

So all up, we had Dad and Tim on angle grinder and "Rapid Stipper"on drill. Plus me welding and angle grinding on the workbench and yet somehow, Jim managed to continue work on the model despite all the noise.

Jim at work on the K-frame model

Chaos in the garage

This is how the chassis is looking after a few hours of work. It looks 100% better, but there is still more work to be done. Tim reckons that everytime he turned around he found something else to attack. We've managed to destroy one of those knotted wire wheels on the angle grinder and have pretty much disintegrated the drill-driven "Rapid Stripper" disc.

Get this, Tim finally returns from out bush and we catch him sucking back on a stubby. Just can't get the staff these days :)

In the mean time, I finally managed to finish welding the workbench. This has seriously taken me months, since I have been busy with work and enjoying GT40 stuff instead of workbench stuff in my spare time (plus I suck at welding). I'm actually really happy with how it turned out. It's been a good lesson in metal fabrication.

A coat of fresh paint makes any crappy old steel look professional.

On Sunday I got stuck into the bench tops. I soon put saw dust through the whole house. Unfortunately Jim's makeshift desk has now been turned into the bottom shelf of my bench.

And here it is in it's final resting place. I had to get my mate Jarrod around to help me move it. My wife Kristen couldn't lift it. I guess that's what you want in a good workbench...

The engine block is back!
Now in other news, you're not gonna believe this, but the engine block is back! We dropped around at the engine shop on Saturday and got the normal response (it's not ready). To make up for it, the guy dropped the block around to our house that afternoon. Horray! It's nice to have it back. The downside is, that it's one more thing that's waiting for us to work on.

Believe it or not, the cylinder on the right is the one that was sleeved. It looks excellent now.

"No Bella, I have no idea what happened to all the Cling Wrap" :)

The model is progressing
Jim has done an awesome job with the model. First up on Saturday, he finished measuring and modelling the chassis, next up he modelled the rear semi-trailing arms. Following that, he hit the intricate K-frame. It took a fair bit of remeasuring to get that modelled correctly. The main problem being that the model gave too much negative camber. It wasn't til we took to the K-frame with some straight pieces of timber that we discovered that there actually is a fair bit of camber there.

On further thought, I remembered reading in the KCC GT40 manual that when you change the hubs to Ford Granada 5-stud type, you must move the mounting hole of the lower control arm outwards by 12mm to compensate. We trialled this with the model and it made it worse. Moving it inwards, however, gives close to 0 degrees. Maybe they got this wrong or maybe we have made a mistake. Either way, we'll leave it to a wheel alignment shop to get baseline measurements before we mess with it.

Jim at work

Here are some pics of the model and how it looks now.

Jim has now started looking at steering angles and bump steer (which don't look great) so far. A few guys on the various forums have been trying to convince us to convert the rear to GT40-style suspension. In fact, one guy has even sent me plans of an exact GT40. What a legend! How far we go with the chassis is a tough call to make. The chassis is currently in the prime state to do these sorts of mods, but it's gonna add considerable time and cost to the project. There really is a lot we can do at this stage in the form of rear suspension, front suspension, bracing and roll bars. We're a bit worried that the extra time and money will cause us to lose motivation. What are your thoughts?

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.

"What have we done?"

Dad's comment yesterday summed it all up "What have we done?" Hahaha. As you can see from this photo, we carried out some pretty drastic work to the car.

I dunno what Ben is doing with the light here. Starwars light sabres?

So yesterday was quite a productive day. My mate Danny came around to help Dad and I out. We got stuck into removing the body and interior. First up, one door was gone. 4 bolts and that's sorted..

Next up, seats..

It was probably a good thing we removed these. The seat mounts are not in great shape. Of course, it's always interesting to see what random stuff has made it's way under the seats over the years. We discovered a 1/4" socket (I wonder how long the previous owners searched for this?) and 3 South African Rand (about 35c Australian). Why could it not be some gold bar from South Africa?

Anyway, so after pulling out the seats and the doors, we attacked the windscreen. Attacked being the operative word here... inevitably we cracked it, despite being careful. Doesn't matter. It was an SA standard windscreen and needed to be replaced to meet Australian regulations anyway.

Next it was time for the body (commonly referred to as the Spider). Once we unscrewed a whole load of screws, it came off pretty easily.

Danny looks like he's having some serious fun here

These spiders are pretty flexible once they are off the car. We knocked up this rack to hold it firmly. The garage is filling with GT40 stuff again..

So all that's left now is a chassis, floor pan and dash. The random guy in the back is my mate Ben. He arrived from Townsville at about he time we were lifting the Spider off the car. As soon as he arrived he got in his work gear. Thanks Ben :)

What's going on with the engine?

Yesterday morning we also paid a visit to the machine shop. Before we left, I said to Dad "Do you think we'd better give him a call to make sure it's ready to pick up?". Dad's reply, "Nah, he's had it for months now, he'll be ready". Surprise, surprise, we rocked up and it still wasn't finished. The shop is run by an old guy, who's obviously an engine enthusiast, but not so enthusiastic about job cards, etc. So  the cam bearings have arrived, but they haven't got around to pressing them in yet. He said he'd do it Saturday arvo. We told him no hurry. We're certainly not ready for it yet anyway.

Dad also spent a few hours working on the crank journals yesterday. One more job done. Thanks Dad.

So next weekend, we should finish stripping this thing down and now it's time to start tidying it up and rebuilding it.

Stumpy GT40

So the GT40 is now a lot stumpier than when we bought it....

Yep, we finally found some time to get stuck into it. My Father in law, John was down for the weekend, so John, Dad and I spent a few hours in the garage on Saturday (no better way to spend your weekend). This time we attacked the front end. We've now removed the front suspension. We removed it as a whole. It wasn't overly difficult, just a bit fidddly to get all the bolts out. First we had to remove the panelling in the footwell to access bolts, then we had to cut off the 25mm RHS holding on the front clip and then cut one of the bolts at the front of the crossmember. After that, we were able to lift the crossmember and suspension as a whole. When it goes back together, we'll redesign it so no cutting is required next time.

Done and done

Much to our surprise we found an old mouse nest under the front crossmember. On the munched up bits of newspaper I saw an ad for a real estate place in Hervey Bay, so they are obviously Queensland mice.

So, as you can see, there is quite a bit of tidying up to do in the front end. The wiring is pretty messy. I can't wait to tidy that up (hey, I'm an Engineer). This thing will look schmick once we're done with it.

So I think the plan from here is to keep on stripping it down. We've come this far, so we'd may as well go all the way. Having the front suspension out as a whole is very handy, we can fully tidy it up and rebuild it on the bench and then bolt it back in when we're ready.

Speaking of the bench..... while John was down he gave me a few welding tips. I think this will help immensely and I now know where I was going wrong and why the bench took so long to weld. We had a crack at the bench on Sunday and it's just about done (FINALLY!).

A fork in the road...

Yesterday we were able to get stuck into the car again. We were at a bit of a loss yesterday as to which aspect to attack first so we took the option of tidying up the garage. It was certainly needed. Now we can easily move around the car. Ah, much better...

After finishing the tidying, we took some time to reflect on where we want to go with this car and what should be the plan of attack. Our original plan was to get this thing on the road ASAP, but that goal is slowly slipping away as we discover more and more things we need to do. As you can see from the photos, in its current state it is not far until it is complete stipped. It really is the front suspension, wiring and cabin section that are left. We deliberated for some time as to whether we continue down the path of stripping it down entirely (and add considerable time to the project) or do we tidy it up from where it is now and ignore the cabin section. What do you guys think?

The interior is not too bad, but we don't know what lurks beneath the carpet. What we do know is that the coolant lines, wiring and chassis down the sides need some attention. I think we are now of the opinion that we will continue to strip this thing down. We have come so far, we'd may as well do the whole car properly and then we have no worries about the car in the future.

OK, so with that thought in mind we decided to start ripping out the front suspension. It's quite a funny design. Bascially, all they have done is ripped the front cross member and suspension off a Cortina and bolted it to the box-section chassis. Not much to it really. It looks heavy, but being a dual control-arm setup, hopefully it has reasonable handling. It's amazing how much little front collision protection there is. Haha

We were  able to undo all of the bolts apart from one (yes there's always one). It was jammed in between the cross-member and the panelling behind the pedals. Impossible to get at without removing the pedal box and panelling. This caused us much grief. I was lying upside down under the dash for several hours. Not fun.

We eventually removed the pedal box. There were a few painful screws and bolts on this one. By this time, we'd yelled a few profanities and Dad had to head home. I decided to plod on and attack the panelling. My wife, Kristen came out to the garage and couldn't find me until she saw this...

Nope, that's not photoshopped. Hilarious...

There was one bastard of a screw in there that was near impossible to get out and just about threaded. Damn flat-headed screws. Worst idea ever! In hind-sight, I should have just drilled it out, but I was determined to get it out and ended wasting 45 minutes (and my sanity) to get it out with vice grips.

In other news, we visiting the engine shop yesterday with the intention of picking up the block. Unfortunately the engine builder had forgotten we were coming in and hasn't progressed yet. No hurry. We have lots of work to do.

Unfortunately, I'm away for the next 2 weekends, so not much is gonna happen for a while :(