MadaboutKitcars

We will accept your apology on this occasion, seeing as you normally demonstrate a really good arresting performace............


(And I will not be drawn on the "its back to front" issue :-)

Having said that, if it was good enough for the King of cool, it has to good enough for me!

Friday

Rumour has it that WCA has taken on a baby walking job, he was snapped in the park chatting to locals...........

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Well, it is definitely not a 1.9.......

WCA, until I get the door back on the car with the side window on it, I still don't really know for sure if the quarter light idea will work or not!!

Oxford- Its too late now....... :-)

Friday

Terrific stuff guys! A sense of humour is essential as they used to say in the military. (To be in the military, I think survival is impossible without one)

Right! Apart from cleaning out my sons fish-tank, killing several fish by mistake,
spending about forty quid replacing them so he wouldn't notice, and several other mundane tasks, I actually did a few hours on the build.

I filed down the drivers window to shape, and also filed down the outer and inner stainless trim strips. And polished them to a high shine.

I still have more work to do on them yet, but we're closer than we were.

I only have one miserable pic, but it shows what it looks like now.

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Very nice too!!

Sunday

I spent a lot of today re-fitting the drivers door, and trying to find out whether the cunning plan worked or not.

I.E. Will the door open with the window in place with the quarter light?

After a very frustrating time, the answer is still inconclusive.

I find this very irritating and negative, so I have decided to go ahead with the rest of the build, and leave the side windows off the car for now.

Steve McQueen took his off his car for most of the time, but he did not live in Hereford.

I have more experience than he did of trying to look cool at the lights in the pissing rain. Basically it cannot be done.

I owned my seven car for five years, and it never had a roof or side windows,

but I did want this car to be different.

Still, I can go ahead and put the roof on it eventually, even without side windows that should keep a lot of the H20 out.

Mmmmmmmm.

I also put a chromed metal badge on the boot lid in place of boot lid handle.

I will go ahead and finish the stainless door top trims and bolt them on the car without the side windows for the time being.
I have several pictures of XKSS replicas with no side windows fitted, and I am wondering if they have the same problem I am having?

And have left theirs off for the same reason.

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Tuesday

So today I did a reasonable amount of work on the car.

I finalised the stainless trim for the drivers door and bolted it on.

I was well pleased with the result. Each little thing that I do now, makes the car look tantalisingly more like it is supposed to, yet so far from being finished!!

I have found from reading Paul's thread, that he has similar experiences to me.

He says that sometimes when you do work on your build, it often has a "knock-on" effect on other things.

Tell me about it!

When I cut out the inspection hatch on the rear of the bonnet area, I had no idea that later in the build when I came to fit the windscreen wipers, I would have to raise the motor by 4 inches.

I just found out that the knock-on effect this had was to render the inspection hatch fixing system totally useless.

The room that I needed to fix the hatch from under the bonnet had evaporated, and I would have needed lessons from Houdini on how to wriggle the hatch into place and fix it in securely without tearing all the flesh off my fingers and hands. (I'm good at that)

So it was back to the drawing board.

I fitted 4 locating lugs and held it in place with an elastic bungee.

It is really quick and easy to get the hatch on and off now, so its an improvement over the original system.

I still will use the safety line to prevent hatch loss if the system fails.

Just before I drove the car back into its tent for the night. I noticed a weepy water leak from the heater valve under the bonnet, so I attempted to undo the tiny bolts so I could get the valve off and fix it.

Of course, having been on the car since the battle of Hastings, they both sheared off.

I had a real job getting the bloody thing off, and when I did I had to drill out the sheared bolts which is always lots of fun.

Somehow I managed it without any damage to the valve, and replaced the rubber "O" ring thingy to fix the leak.

I drilled the holes out to about 5mm, much bigger than they were, so I could fit some stainless bolts and nuts.

It is a better job now than Triumph's original effort, and does not leak any more.

Just about all the nuts and bolts I have had to put on the car have been stainless steel. As I said before, I am totally, pissed off with rusty seized up sheared bolts in awkward places, and the long fight to get them off.

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Wednesday

Thanks for that redratbike.

I was impressed by the car and I think it deserves a place here, up for grabs if anyone wants it, really cheap too, as its not costing £3 million pounds.

Apparently once owned by Nicholas Cage, one of only 9 replicas made by Lynx.

If I had known this was coming on the market, I would not have started building mine! (He lied)

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Later on Wednesday

Thanks for the encouragement Paul, yes it does seem to go on and on at times.

I have a friend who knows a guy building his own aircraft, and when asked how far he had got with the build, he replied,

"I've done 95% of it now, so I only have another 50% left to do"

Which I think sums it up for most of us!

I actually put in 6 hours on the car today, mainly shaping, filing, grinding,
drilling and polishing the last two bits of stainless trim for the passengers door top.

Stainless is a marvelous metal, and I am glad I kind of "discovered" it, and bought a fair amount of it very cheaply from the scrapyard.

It is invaluable as trim, and is forever, with no rusting and of course polishes up like chrome, BUT, it is an absolute nightmare to work with.

It is a very hard metal, and is very difficult to drill sand grind etc.
Which is mainly why it took me 6 hours to do what looks like not very much!
To be honest, after 6 hours of it, I'd really had enough, and just wanted a shower and some clean clothes.

Still, its done now, and as far as I can see the only dreaded thing left to do in stainless steel are the headlamp surround trims.

I will cut them out of a sheet, and make them only about half an inch wide,
and that way, they should be flexible enough to follow the curves they need to. We'll see.

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Friday

In the last picture, where I have put:

"Will trim these ends later" That was a big mistake not trimming them first!

When I fitted the door today, the "ends" were like razor blades, and I cut my arm several times during the fitting.

Really impossible not to.

I'm covered in plasters at the moment!


So once the door was fitted and shimmed, off came the sharp bits and now its all smooth and silky like it should have been before I fitted it.

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Why thank you kind Sir.

On the subject of your interior, I really do hope you will keep your "clock" if only to stick it on with tape sometimes, just for the piss-take value!!

Its kind of become part of your personna if you will!
Be a shame to lose it altogether. I know others feel the same way too!

Sat

Jones, you wrote:

its really look good those polished steel pieces look great! however i was expecting to see some blood splatter!

Well we would not want to disappoint anyone would we?

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I suppose it is a nasty gash, mind you, I never said it was my hand.........

Steady WCA, I never said it was'nt my hand either.......

Thank you Mr T, My hand is healing well BTW.

I bet you enjoyed yourself at Goodwood!

Did you dress up?

I will keep plugging away, as I can see how you are enjoying your finished car!

It really is a credit to you, it looks so coooool!

Steve McQueen would have wanted yours if he had seen it!

Thank you for the kind words jonesy!

When I first started my build, Mr Towed was still hard at work on his, and he inspired me, and still does.

His car is up and running and should act as inspiration for lots of people out there.

Mr Towed has seen it, done it, got the T shirt, and is currently living the dream!

I want the same deal, but its taking ages to get there.

Monday

I was thinking about the Lynx XKSS that was up for sale at Goodwood over the weekend, and it made me wonder what the definition of "kit" car actually was.

In the broader sense, a person has a dream car in mind, and does their best to re-create that car for real.

This can be done several ways, by buying a total "kit" of parts, or just a body-shell, or even make the shell themselves,

The end result is the same, the finished car is either a total "replica" in every sense, or a very very similar car to the original, (if trying to re-create an existing car)

Whatever it is, rightly or wrongly, it will usually be reffered to as a "kit car"

Lynx went through this process with their XKSS, which sold over the weekend for a staggering £384,540, remember this is not an original car!

Does anyone else know of a kit car that has sold for more than that?

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Normally with Lynx, that is the case, but in this particular instance, this car was fitted with a 3.8 litre engine which was not as original., and also it was built with an E Type chassis/floor-pan, which of course had not been designed when the XKSS's were in production.

That said, This car would most likely handle and be faster than the original anyway!

The reason I did not bid on it was that when it came time to pay,
I would have been in trouble finding the cash!

I shall have to to make do with my old sub-standard Spitfire based look alike!

But, I will be quite happy with that I'm sure.