Definitely time for an update...

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I have pretty busy with my new job and driving things like this...

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..

Stripping out the rear

Saturday was a day of crappy rain so the shed will have to wait. Despite this, we still had a good day of work on the GT40. 

First up, removed the brake calipers - front and rear. We'll need to rebuild these with new seals and hone them out if required. Dad noticed one rubber brake line was completely rusted out and one of the steel ones was broken. Plenty of work to do here.

Rear brakes (Alfa Romeo according to the previous owner)

Next, we started attacking the rear end.

Removed the rear suspension and moved all the wiring etc. Dad started cleaning it up with degreaser and it's already looking heaps better.

One Granada rear control arm 

GT40 stuff is taking over the garage, so I've decided to knock up a workbench with an under-shelf to go in front of the garage window, where the toolboxes are below.

I was inspired by this Autospeed article, so decided to knock up the workbench myself out of scrap metal and an old kitchen bench top. It should do the job. So far, it's cost me $70 for scrap metal and $15 for the kitchen bench, so I'm pretty happy about that.

Unfortunately, I ran out of time to finish it off, but will hopefully knock it over on a week night.

Building the shed slab

 OK, this blog entry is not strictly GT40 related, but building a shed does mean that stuff is removed from the garage to make more space for GT40 parts :)


So yesterday I cleared this space out the back for the house and knocked up the slab frame. Any want gravel? I've got a big pile of it left over now.

  









Today I went and picked up 14 x 30kg bags of concrete. Of course, at the end I discovered I needed 14.5 bags, so went back and picked up bag number 15.

Lugged these suckers all the way down to the back of the house. For some reason the dog thinks the wheel barrow is enemy number 1. No idea why, but it's pretty funny.

And 15 bags of concrete later. The finished result....

Oh yeah, a box with "KBS Coatings" on the side arrived today. This stuff is for tidying up the rust on the chassis. Can't wait to see how it turns out.

No Lamborghini drive, but work is progressing on the GT40

Well and truly time for an update. I've been away for the past few weeks and finished my previous job on Friday. I had lined up on Sunday to do a Ferrari and Lamborghini driving day. My mates are absolute champions and gave me a ticket for my 30th Birthday a few months back. Not all went to plan though. The skies decided to open up on Sunday for about the first time in 3 months. The driving day was cancelled. Damn Brisbane weather!

Oh well, at least things are progressing with the GT40...

While I was away, Dad continued stripping the engine down. He removed the crank and started trying to sand the stuffed bore to see if it could be fixed with a hone only.

We measured the piston clearance and it came up at around 0.014", which is way more than 0.008" that is regarded as the maximum according to the Chevy book. By the way I had to order a new version of the book mentioned in an earlier blog. I never found the old one that Tim brought around. The roof of a car is not a good place to leave books it seems...

On Saturday we had a fairly busy day: Disassembled the heads and cleaned them in kero, cleaned the valves, wire-brushed one head, removed marks on the crank and re-arranged the garage.

It took me many hours with the wire brush to bring the head up to scratch. You can see from the picture below that there was a fair bit of the rust behind the valve.

You can also see the pitting which was caused by the rust. It's cleaned up reasonably well. We will need to get the valve seat reground though.

Before

After

Tim cleaned up the valves and found one of them will need replacing due to rust.

Dad worked on removing some markings from the crank. It's good to have many hands with this tedious cleaning work.

We're starting to find that GT40 parts are taking over the garage and we are falling over each other. Therefore, we spent a fair bit of time re-arranging the garage and trying to clear a parts shelf.

I've decided that this is a perfect excuse to build a lawn locker. I've ordered a small 1.8x1.0m shed (it's all I can fit out the back). I spent a while today preparing the site for it and knocking up a timber frame for the concrete slab. It's rained nearly every day this week, so I'm waiting for a clear day to do the slab.

Yesterday I finished cleaning the other head....

Today I also finished stripping the block (welsh plugs, etc) and dropped it into the machine shop to be bored and honed. Lets hope they can save it. 

The wagon comes in handy once again.... 

Sorry for the large blog. I'll try to do regular smaller ones in future. On the plus-side, I start a new job on Monday. It's much closer to home than the previous job and I won't need to go away for a while. More GT40 time!

Engine Out

Yesterday Dad, me and my mate Adrian got stuck into it. We borrowed an engine crane off my mate Danny and pulled the engine out in no time at all. This car is so easy to work on. I'd previously removed the rear clip and a few lines, so there wasn't much left to clear the motor. Unfortunately, I suck at remembering to take photos, so didn't take any of the engine on the crane. Anyway, here's the after pic. I'm looking forward to cleaning up and repainting that chassis.

We did notice a bit of rust on the chassis, but on closer inspection, it's just surface rust. Score!

Dad and I picked up an engine crane for $55+GST (who quotes prices ex GST these days?) at a place called Radum around the corner. Absolutely bargain price. It took a bit of messing around to get the engine mounted on the stand, since we didn't have any long enough bolts. I did a trip to Repco, but took the wrong bolt (IDIOT!), so had to do a second dash. Got it mounted up in the end and got stuck into stripping it down.

The bottom end doesn't look too bad. A bit of grime in there, but it doesn't look like too much water got down into the sump. Some small block chevs have 4 bolt mains. We thought this one did, going by the engine number and what the interweb revealed. Oh well...

Pistons out. They all look quite good.

We couldn't take the crank out, because we need a pulley puller to get the harmonic balancer off. Dad has one at home to use next time. The crank journals look OK. Someone has machined it in the past.

Next we started to try and clean up the dodgy cylinder (previously full of water). We started to rub down the bore to get to the bottom of the pitting. Then we can measure it and decide if a full bore is required or if we can get away with a hone only. This is how far we got... It's looking like a bore out will be required. Thankfully parts are amazingly cheap for these Chev motors. Not like the Jap parts I'm used to.

We're starting to build up a collection of parts here there and everywhere in the garage. I need more storage shelves and a nice work bench. Oh well, things can only improve from here.

Check out this crazy flywheel. Made up to suit Audi gearbox and adapter plate....

So all in all, we're quite happy with the engine. With the exception of the dodgy cylinder, everything else is in quite good nick. The previous owner said that the engine had been rebuilt and only had roughly 2000km on it (10 years ago) and it seems reasonable. Dad gave the dodgy cylinder head a quick clean up and it came up pretty good, too.

I'm off again with work for a few weeks. This is my last trip to New Caledonia (for the foreseeable future). I've got a new job that I'll be starting in a few weeks. Horray!

The missing book...
Tim came over a few weeks back with a book that his Girlfriend Renee had bought him "How to Rebuild a Small Block Chevy". I thought great, that will be handy. My mate Jim also gave me a Chev magazine from 1974. Also good reading. Anyway, yesterday I thought I'd dig up Tim's book, but then realised I hadn't seen it for a while. I figured he must have taken it with him. After sending him a text he said "Last time I saw it, I put it on the roof of the Mini". Doh! Not a wise move. That was a crazy day: I had a job interview, I had mates over and I had to go into the city that night. Needless to say, I most likely drove off with the book on the roof. Being a short-arse, I wouldn't have noticed it sat on the roof. Oh well, I just ordered a new copy to give Tim....

A few more pics

I noticed this blog doesn't have many pics of the car before we started attacking it. Here are a few more..

Plenty of work to do.