MadaboutKitcars

Thanks guys. I like the idea of cinema style seats that tip back for you to climb in without standing on them. Could be a bit of a tricky one to pull off though and I've noticed that builders who've adopted the bench seat approach tend to sit a bit high in the car for my liking.

One unexpected bonus of using the Dax seats that I've ended up with is that they're so reclined it's as good as lowering the floor about another six inches.

Once they're upholstered my eye-line will be just above the fly-screen, which is exactly where I want it rather than having my swede sticking out the top too far and spoiling the aerodynamics. Shorter drivers will be compensated for by the seats rising up as they go forward on the runners.

At the moment I'm not going to put a tilt mechanism on the seats, just sliding runners mounted so that the seats can be pushed forwards a long way. I'm also thinking that maybe a split folding luggage bay door might help with clearance a bit. If it's a bit tight getting things in and out of the boot then I'll have a rethink about the seat tilt mechanism thing.

Gary, I'm sure you'll get another car finished one day, then you'll just need to find the time to take it across Europe.

I'm going to pop back out to the garage in a mo' and seal all the edges of my boot with PVA. That should be dry enough by morning to give the whole thing a coat of cuprinol's finest shed paint...

Enough room to put a couple of small children in there Mr T! Watch out coming back through Calais or Dover or you will have a few immigrant stowaways!

Looking good though....

On the seat debate I am starting to put the interior in mine now, and spent and hour or so this evening doing a trial fit of carpet (old fitted set from a Herald I did up once) and also the side panels and seat back. I am having the back part of seats shortened slightly - the only thing I am outsourcing as my sewing machine was not man enough for the job! But the bench seat set up works extremely well in mine, so I will post pictures in the next week of it all fitted up so you can see what I have done to access my luggage compartment.

Looking forward to seeing your interior finished Tony. How are you locking the back of your folding futon btw?

It's got a catch in the middle that is hidden behind the arm rest...




I will take some pictures today as I am putting my interior in for a trial fit today....

I've now noticed that quite a few of you are going with carpeted interiors.
Due to my recent somewhat soggy trip to the Bath & West Classic Car Show i thought I'd ask if they are waterproof, or plastic backed or, or, or....

The reason I'm asking is that i had quite a bit of 'sloshing' going on during my trip back and while i've always been in two minds whether to fit carpets in mine or stay with the stripped out look, I've always had a worry that carpets would soak-up / trap water?

A bilge pump sounds a good idea!!! Or a few drain holes in the floor!!!

It's going to be bare paint and the odd bit of ribbed rubber matting for me. Carpets are for tarts boudoirs...

Mr T,

Have you got any idea how much it will cost to have the bucket seat shells upholstered? Just spoken to someone locally who suggested that I should allow £150 per seat which seems quite excessive!

Chris

Hi Chris, Mine will be coming back at £350 the pair so it sounds like yours is about right dependent on how you are getting them finished and in what material.

Yep, I'm going to budget about five hundred for the trimming. If there's any change it'll be a bonus.

Couple of commitments today means not much progress I'm afraid. I did grab fifteen minutes first thing to paint the luggage box with some Country Cream Cuprinol I've had in the shed for years. I seem to recall that when I last used it it had a pretty thick consistency. Today it was as runny as John Cleese's Brie (anyone else old enough to remember that one?).

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the runny Cuprinol worked pretty well as a base coat and this evening I finished it off with a coat of Hammerite to match the chassis and subframe. With Cuprinol undercoat and Hammerite topcoat it shouldn't rot or rust...



I also spent some time pondering my instrument selection today. I had planned to use a big Herald speedo, then had second thoughts and decided to go with either a new Triumph 2000 KPH one from Canleys

http://www.canleyclassics.com/?xhtml=xhtml/product/speedo2000.html&xsl=product.xsl

or the standard Vitesse jobby for reasons which will become apparent once you see my final dash design. Having changed the final drive for a 3.27:1 from a GT6 however, it occurred to me that it might make the Vitesse speedo somewhat inaccurate. A quick check on this very useful site - http://www.mintylamb.co.uk/gearspeed/ - showed that with the GT6 diff fitted, when my Vitesse speedo says I'm doing 60mph I'll actually be doing nearly 75, while the Triumph 2000 speedo would be telling me that I'm doing just under sixty while going well over seventy-five.

That could have a seriously detrimental effect on my nice, clean driving licence so I started casting about to see if I could find a suitable GT6 speedo as it just costs too much to have a speedo recalibrated (around £120). I tried a couple of Triumph specialist breakers with no luck, but then found one being auctioned on the bay of e.

Now, the trouble with the GT6 is that it's both rarer and more desirable than the Spitfire that spawned it so the unique fit spares, like the standard GT6 speedometer are harder to come by.

The other problem peculiar to my predicament is that the standard four speed GT6 had a speedo calibrated for the 3.27:1 diff while the overdrive equipped cars had a speedo calibrated for the 3.89:1 final drive they came with, which is the same as all 2 litre Vitesses. Quite why Triumph added overdrive to the GT6 then changed its final drive so the rev's in overdrive fourth were the same as the rev's in fourth on the non overdrive cars is a complete mystery to me btw. Apart from the German export model cars of course, which came with overdrive but kept the 3.27:1 differential giving a theoretical top speed of close to 160mph.

But I digress. The problem was that the seller of the ebay GT6 speedo didn't know whether it came from a car equipped with overdrive or not So, a not inconsiderable gamble later and my unknown quantity GT6 speedo arrived in the post today. A quick comparison between my Vitesse speedo and the GT6 one with a variable speed drill set to a relatively slow setting and connected to t'other end of the speedo cable showed that I got lucky and got a non overdrive one as required as the Vitesse speedo read significantly lower than the GT6 one at the same drill speed. Phew. Ten minutes later I'd swapped the bezels over so my (mk3) GT6 speedo now has a chrome one instead of black -



Wedding anniversary tomorrow so I'm banned from the garage. More progress Thursday though...

Welcome to the wonderful world of speedos!

Based on my practical experiences so far i'd take the speed calculations compared with that you'll see on the speedo with a pinch of salt as it'll come down to which exact speedo you have and how it's been individually calibrated, but the speed <-> revs calcs from mintylamb are pretty spot on!

I've ended up with a SN 6203/38A 980 (which looks exactly the same as yours! ) which reads:
33/34 for 30ish
43/45 for 40ish
and above that i've still got to double check. Just remember i'm still on what i think is a 4.11:1 diff but i'll be changing to a 3.63:1 pretty soon.
I taped my tablet pc to the dash to confirm 30/40 so i'm pretty confident with what to expect, i just need to do some more runs as the weather cheers up to gauge 50/60/70. Or maybe after i do the diff

FYI i've also tried an SN 6203/38 - 980 but the magnet drive was shafted so it never read reliably

And i've also got a SN 6203/308 - 1152, but it had bigger numbers on the face and i never really liked the look of it! That one was...... optimistic about my speed to say the least!

Thanks for that Dave. If yours is reading a bit high that's less of a problem than it reading significantly low. Most speedometers in the cars I use at work read about 10% high when I've checked them with our calibrated laser speed guns.

I'll be mounting a sat-nav in mine for a double check as I've found that their speed readings are far more accurate than the speedo anyway.

Do speedos have to be accurate for MOTs etc?

Any satnav will give you an accurate speed, I have always considered speedos 'nice to have' but don't want to fail the MOT because mine reads out by a few MPH

Construction and use reg's say that you've got to have a means of indicating the speed of the vehicle. It details that the speed measuring device can over read by 10% but mustn't under read at all. As far as I'm aware there's no specific check made on the mot but you can't claim an under-reading speedo as a defence against an allegation of speeding. Trust me on that one.

My GT6 one is a 6203/38 - 980 while the original Vitesse one was a 6203/30 - 1152. I'm guessing the last number indicates the number of speedo cable turns per mile, although having just found this useful (?) link I'm still none the wiser -

http://triumph.daveola.com/NOTES/Speedo_Repair.pdf

speedo recalibration

Hi all,

a few years ago I got a herald speedo recalibrated by speedy cables for about £60.

http://www.speedycables.com/calibration.html

Nice one. I'll give them a try if my GT6 speedo is wildly inaccurate once it's fitted.

I have used speedy cables in the past, I found them to be really good company, just as well we do not have to SVA took me three attempts to have the speedometer calibrated to enough accuracy to satisfy them on my Hawk 289

OK, so it's my wedding anniversary and I did promise I wouldn't spend it in the garage.

But my better half was feeling a bit under the weather when she got up and, after spending the morning watching day-time telly with her and criticising her favourite programmes, she suggested, nay insisted that I go out and do some work on my Spyder.

So, fuel tank and boot fitted, new fuel lines plumbed in and the London Taxi heater control valve fitted up using the original Triumph heater hoses and enough jubilee clips to make the pipes look like Mickey Carroll's fingers (Google him if you don't know, it'll make you ).









Plan for tomorrow is to get the electrics finished and fire up the engine. Once that's all done it'll be time to fit the body...

looking good Mr T, the MoonRover is nearly complete

Spent today tidying up those small but surprisingly time consuming jobs that need doing prior to firing up the engine again. Started by heat wrapping the exhaust to prevent the cockpit getting too hot in summer. I guessed at ten metres of 2" heat wrap and really had no idea whether that was too much or too little. As it happens it wasn't enough as I ran out about half way along the car. I've ordered another five metres which will comfortably cover the rest of the pipe as far as the back box. I wrapped the downpipe and intermediate pipe while they were off the car by the way as it would've needed a contortionist to do it with them fitted.





I also fitted a new rocker cover gasket (there wasn't one to replace ), put the engine oil in, filled the coolant system and put a gallon of petrol in the tank. When I bought the donor it was leaking oil from the sump and rocker cover, petrol from the fuel pipes and carburettors and coolant from the radiator. Now I'm very relieved to report that it doesn't leak anything. That was after finding that what I thought was a pressure activated overflow on the Honda radiator filler neck is actually an open outlet, presumably to connect to a header tank, so the coolant just piddled out of it A length of hose with a plain shaft bolt pushed in the end as a stopper soon fixed that though.



Back to work tomorrow but I'm hoping to get the electrics to a stage where I can start the engine again on Sunday. I can't wait.

race ya, 'cos I want to start mine at the weekend too!

Twelve hour shifts for me today and tomorrow hand you the advantage...

Good luck getting yours going Tony.

I would replace the aroused dog look with one of these as i've seen the bolts work their way out under pressure. They are obtainable in different sizes from various suppliers. Link for visual only as you may need different size.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/FORD-CAPRI-MK1-MK2-V4-V6-ENGINE-WATER-PUMP-RUBBER-BLANKING-CAP-NEW-GENUINE-FORD-/270967188607?pt=UK_CarsParts_Vehicles_CarParts_SM&hash=item3f16e72c7f#ht_500wt_1206

Ha ha, yes, I suppose it does look vaguely phallic.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll see how it goes with my hose with a bolt in it bodge first but I'm guessing I'll end up with a proper fix in the end.