Yep, a few months ago was my 30th and my mates are absolutely legends and bought me a gift card for a super car driving experience. I was lucky enough to drive a Ferrari Modema 360, Lamborghini Gallardo and Nissan 370Z through the Gold Coast hinterlands for 3 hours. It was absolutely awesome fun. To sum up my thoughts on each car:
- The Ferrari was unbelievably quick at 0-100 speeds, but the flappy-paddle gear changes were slow.
- The Lamborghini was great fun to drive, but geared unbelievably tall. I was doing 80-90km/h in first at 8000rpm :) I imagine this thing would be insane at 200km/h+
- The 370Z was the surprise package. The flappy-paddle gearbox shifted faster than the Ferrari and it was able to keep up with the Lamborghini to 100ish.
Anyway, enough talk of Supercars, what the hell is going on with the GT40?
Well, since the last blog we have finished off the shed. This has meant that we can clear some of the stuff out of the garage to make space for the GT40. The garage is still a mess though...
The workbench is still a work in progress. Unfortunately I am painfully slow at welding. Plus, I'd rather be working on the 40.
As for the GT40... It seems it is slowly but surely being disassembled. First up, we decided to inspect the fuel tanks. This turned out to be a wise move. We discovered lots of crud inside and one tank had a small hole caused by rubbing on the chassis. The level senders were completely rusted out. Here's one of them. Not pretty.
Once the tanks were out, we removed the rubber sheeting that's attached to the chassis behind the tank. This revealed the coolant lines and wiring. As expected, the coolant lines are quite badly corroded, so we'll be looking at replacing these.
Whilst following the coolant lines up to the radiator we decided to remove the front-end of the car. Once again, this was a simple proposition of unplugging the head lights and undoing 4 bolts. Without the front, she's certainly not a pretty.
It's not all bad news. We took a trip over to the engine machinist on the weekend. The block is pretty much done and we should be picking it up this weekend. He has sleeved the one dodgy cylinder and it looks really good. By sleeving it, we have been able to keep it at +30 thou and retain the pistons that came with it. As mentioned in one of the early blogs, this engine only had a few thousand kilometers on it, so the pistons are in excellent condition.
What's next? We'll keep stripping down the front end. We're not sure how far we'll go with stripping it down just yet. As long as we keep finding areas than need attention, then we'll keep stripping it. After that, we'll repaint the chassis and get stuck into the engine. I know Dad's looking forward to the rebuild.
It's certainly starting to look like a longer term project. Oh well, we're not in a hurry and spirits are still high. It's all part of the fun..
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