MadaboutKitcars

Thanks guys, yes, it does look like the people signing off the rebodies at DVLA do actually seem to understand the specialist car/bike world.

There has been the odd scary story circulating, but it's mostly multi-millionaires trying to register their brand new Argentine built Type 35 Bugatti's as 1920's originals to multiply their value by 10x.

Wow, that's a real beauty.

I see it has fully adjustable wheelarch gaps, you just need to select the right hammer.

Thanks Slarti, leak sorted but haven't fired the motor yet due to me probably installing the cam out of sync. with the crank.

I'll be taking another look at that tomorrow and hoping to hear some vrooming noises this weekend, but I'm not going to hold my breath...

Success!

Of sorts.

The story so far is that, before continuing with the bodywork I wanted to make sure that I had the engine running as it's much easier to access everything with no bodywork in the way.

As with all things Kit/Classic Car, it sounded so simple - Take an old Triumph Herald 13/60 engine that the seller showed me running so I knew it was a good one.

Modify to Mk3 Spitfire spec with a rebuilt, high compression head and a Piper 270 cam. Add a pair of rebuilt HS2 SU's and an electric fuel pump. Wire up to a new battery. Ignition on. Press starter and run engine for 20 minutes at 2500rpm to break in the new camshaft.

Only it didn't quite pan out like that. The engine turned and turned but there was no hint of it firing.

I double checked the cam timing - full lift on no.1 inlet valve at 108 degrees atdc as per Piper's spec. Check.

Valve clearances set as per Piper's spec. Check.

Compression checked on all cylinders with my compression tester, which I believe may have been manufactured in the land of China*. Check.

*A cheap piece of crap which, once I'd spent an hour trying to get the connectors to hold together under pressure showed 45psi in all four cylinders. Eek! A quick check of my Midget, which runs fine and returns 40+mpg showed exactly the same result, so it's clearly a faulty gauge. Phew.

New plugs properly gapped. Check.

Nice fat spark from each plug on turnover. Check.

Firing order 1-3-4-2 anti-clockwise. Check.

Ignition timing set to 6 degrees btdc. Check.

Carburettors rebuilt with new SU service kit. Check.

Fuel getting to carburettors. Check.

But the engine just wouldn't start.

So, I double checked everything again and decided that the only thing I couldn't check was whether the fuel was getting from the carburettors into the engine (anyone know a way to check that?).

As an experiment, yesterday afternoon I tried squirting some fuel directly into the intakes and turning the engine over again. It didn't start, but it did cough on one or two cylinders, which was encouraging, as it confirmed my suspicion that it was a fuelling issue.

So, this morning I removed the HS4 carburettors and manifold from my Midget's engine and bolted them up to the Speedster's motor.

All hoses and other connections double checked, ignition on, press the starter and...



Sorry, forgot to show you how I set up the cooling system with an old Renault header tank, so thought I'd share this pic with you.

Ahh yes, the engine.

After about two revolutions on the starter IT FIRED!

I quickly ran it up to about 2500rpm and held it there with a bolt mechanism I'd cobbled together. I also switched on the electric fan so it wouldn't overheat, eased off the choke and adjusted the revs.

As I've already said, I needed to run it for twenty minutes at quite high revs to avoid ruining the reprofiled cam, and it behaved itself impeccably, running really smoothly and sounding awesome. No clattery bug engine for my Speedster!

I was so happy I did a little dance.

After just under ten minutes I noticed that the coolant in the expansion tank had risen to near the cap, then scalding hot coolant started gushing out of the overflow on the radiator, then about a minute later I got a 360 degree shower of boiling coolant from the cap on the expansion tank.

Damn, it was boiling over so I had to shut it down.

As soon as the engine stopped running I realised what the problem was as I couldn't hear the electric fan running. A quick check of its power supply - zero voltage, a fuse must have blown somewhere in the loom.

A few seconds later I connected the fan up to another live wire and got it running. After topping up the coolant, ignition on and a press of the starter saw it fire instantly, but running it up to 2500rpm again almost immediately resulted in a shower of fluid cascading upwards from somewhere near the distributor. Damn.

It wasn't coolant this time, but oil, and I got covered in it. I looked like Red Adair after capping a gusher (google him if you're too young to remember).

On closer inspection with the engine off, the oil pressure switch housing has a take off for an oil pressure gauge, which had been capped by a previous owner with a length of plastic tube with a bolt screwed in the end. That tube had become brittle and been ejected by the oil pressure from the engine, spraying about a litre of oil all over me, the engine and chassis and all over the inside of the garage door that was open above my head.

So, to avoid that happening again I softened a new length of plastic tube with a heat gun and pressed it over the 'Christmas Tree' barbs on the take-off tube. Once that had cooled I wound a bolt into the other end, then applied some heat shrink tube over the whole thing and shrunk it down with the heat gun to lock it all in place.

After a nice cup of tea and a quick top up of the oil, I started the motor up again and it ran perfectly for a full twenty minutes at 2500rpm without overheating or losing any oil.

Success! Even if I did have one hell of a clean up job to do on the chassis, the inside of the garage door and me.

So, something's wrong with my HS2 carburettors and I'm thinking of using something else instead, maybe a single 45 DCOE. Has anyone tried one of those?

At least I now know that the engine works and I'm both delighted and relieved in equal measure.

Thanks for the encouragement, guys, it's much appreciated.

I partially stripped down the offending carburettors on Thursday but couldn't find anything wrong with them - with the dashpots off and needles removed, fuel bobs up out of the jets when you blow down on them and everything else was set as per manufacturer's instructions. I'm guessing it was just that they are adjusted way too lean for the engine to fire.

Plan was to fire up the engine with the Midget carbs fitted just to check everything still runs after its shenanigans when breaking in the cam, then refit the 1 1/4's and richen them up to see what happens.

...which I will do next weekend when a new starter motor arrives as the old one has died since last weekend. I'd rob the one off the Midget but it's a PITA to get to and there's a danger I'll have no Midget left by the time the Speedster is up and running

Paul - I'll take some pics of my Stater today, Gold really is incredible as after spending 2,000 years rolling around in the mud, a quick rinse under the tap saw it as clean and shiny as the day it was minted.

Issue with the HS2 carbs now solved. They weren't set too lean and everything was adjusted fine. The only thing I hadn't done was fit a breather 'Y' pipe from the rocker cover to the carbs, but that couldn't stop the engine firing, surely?

An internet search didn't throw up anybody who'd cited it as a reason for their engine not working, and the breather pipes on a MkIII engine are just tubes with no one-way valves in them so it made sense to me that running without them fitted would make no difference to the manifold pressure so shouldn't affect the running of the engine.

Despite not really thinking it would make any difference, I stuck some insulation tape over the breather tube on each carb, then, ignition on, press starter and Vroom! It worked.

So, for future reference the old Triumph Spitfire or Herald motor won't fire if the breather tubes are disconnected. Who could'a known?

Hoping to make some real progress now I have a working motor

I hope everyone had the best Christmas possible given the circumstances, I certainly did so now I need to go on a serious diet!

Nothing much to update on the Speedster yet, but I'm aiming to get on with it in a day or so. I did have an interesting day out in Iris the Midget last Friday, though.

As you may be aware, after selling my Spyder I bought Iris as a running car to use on sunny days while I finished the Speedster. That quickly turned into a total mechanical refurbishment of the suspension, overdrive unit, cylinder head, new clutch, new brakes, full respray, etc., etc., which swallowed about a year of kit building time.

Okay, with hindsight I should have just got on and finished my Speedster instead, but at least Iris now looks like this -



Which rather unexpectedly led to me being asked if Iris would like to appear on television.

So, after a wash and polish (and the inevitable strip down and rebuild of one of the carburettors due to a jet jamming open when the choke was released) it was off to a secret film set hidden away in deepest, darkest Norfolk -



Setting up took about two hours - the camera track had to be dismantled to get the car into the 'garage' (mostly made of polystyrene and ply board) then reassembled and levelled, and the set had to be dressed to look like a domestic garage scene -





Which was followed by lots of lighting adjustments, camera checks and test shoots -



Before I went on set to play second fiddle to Iris and do some acting -



The young media savvy production team just loved Iris and apparently I'm a natural in front of the camera, perfecting the art of zipping up my overalls and pretending to remove a hubcap in only about 200 takes.

The shoot was for the sponsor of a new series of The Car Years, which is due to go out on ITV in February. They have also shot a selection of other vehicles - a modern, high performance SUV, a 70's Escort rally car, a Rat Look Bay window bus, etc., and the film will be edited to look like the camera is scanning a row of terraced garages with owners attending to the various needs of their pride and joys.

If they use the footage (I hope they will), Iris and I will be on screen for about three seconds at each end of the adverts. I guess if they repeat it enough times we'll get our fifteen minutes of fame.

All in all it was a very interesting day out and the fact that Iris was considered worthy to appear on TV just shows what you can achieve with a bit of mechanical ability, a domestic garage and a £150 spray gun at home.

Thanks for your kind words, guys, and yes, it was a good end to a piss-poor year in terms of classic car events.

Funnily enough, the whole thing came about because my wife has some pictures of my old Spyder on her facebook page and a friend of a friend got in touch to ask if she knew anyone with a more conventional classic car. She sent back some pictures of Iris and that's when we were invited to take part in the advert.

It was a grand day out and I was pleased to see how genuinely interested the young trendies doing the filming were in Iris as most of them had never seen an MG of her vintage.

Chatting to them during the setting up process it turned out that most of them aspire to own a really old classic car themselves. Maybe something like an E46 M3 from as far back as the late 1990's. You know, from the time before they were born

About time for an update, I feel. I've been slowly plugging away in the background for a couple of hours a day after work (I'm WFH in the morning every weekday at the mo).

I've tackled two jobs over the last few weeks, the first being the fuel filler flap on the rear deck above the Spitfire tank.

Having successfully used a Vectra filler flap to access the methanol/water tank that fed the water injection system on my Spyder, I bought another one for a fiver on ebay to use on the Speedster.

On the Spyder I was able to cut a hole in the rear deck with a hole saw that was a perfect fit for the Vauxhall flap, which just happened to have the correct curve to match the profile of the rear deck. The hole saw even left a bevelled edge inside the hole that allowed the flap to sit flush with the surface without falling through. A big blob of industrial bonding paste applied between the flap's pivot housing and the underside of the rear deck and 'hey presto' a fully functioning filler flap that took about an hour from start to finish. It was almost as if Vauxhaill had the Sammio Spyder in mind when they developed the Vectra's fuel flap.

My expectation was that it would be the same on the Speedster. Unfortunately, once I'd cut the hole, I could see that the rear deck of the Speedster has a compound curve that was nowhere near the shape of the Vectra flap. I tried cutting the Vectra flap down and bonding the piece cut out of the rear deck onto the hinge/pivot, but then found that the Vauxhall pivot didn't have enough 'throw' to lift the new flap out of its hole without jamming. Hmm.

So, long story short, after spending about a fortnight trying to make it work I bit the bullet, chucked the remains of the Vectra flap into the 'might be useful one day?' box and made my own mechanism out of fibreglass. I copied the basic design of the hinge mechanism but gave it enough 'throw' for the flap to clear the body.

It took a lot of work, but it now fits and opens really well. It has a few posh features: there's a 'stop' built in so it will swing up to the vertical position but won't carry on and foul the rear deck, a magnet holds it in the closed position and there's a (Renault) electric solenoid that pops it open. It needs tidying up and a skim of filler to make it properly flush all round, but I'm happy with how it's turned out.

Second job was to fit the engine cover (boot lid in my case). I've gone for external hinges as I figured that they'd be really easy to fit and they'd look really cool. Original 356's had internal hinges but racers would replace those with external hinges to allow the engine cover to swing open much further for easier access to the motor.

After looking at custom options and considering making my own hinges, I had a hunch that BMC Mini boot hinges might do the trick, so bought a new pair for about £15.

The Mini boot hinges have a curve to them which means that they're handed, and yesterday afternoon I did a bit of measuring, placing of parts and chin scratching before drilling some holes, bolting them in and...

...after about an hour's fettling the inner edge of the 'boot' opening to get the bolts some clearance the hinges fit perfectly and open and close with no issues! Although I love a challenge when building a car, it is nice occasionally when something actually works straight out of the box.

Anyway, enough talk, a picture paints a thousand words as they say, so here's what you've been waiting for:

Filler flap in place and closed -



And popped open with the solenoid -



And fully open (you can possibly see the magnetic latch, solenoid push rod and locking cap beneath) -



And from the inside, here's a shot of the solenoid and hinge mechanism -



Classic BMC Mini boot hinges fit perfectly and will mirror the curve of the head fairing once it's fitted -



Fitting the rear 'engine' cover was just about the easiest job on this project to date -



And they allow the lid to open much further than internal hinges would -





And finally, it was nice to get the body back on the chassis as it reminds me that I'm actually working on a car rather than just moving a pile of disjointed bits about my garage -

Thanks guys, all compliments greatly appreciated

Got to agree about the Phillips screws, they came with the Mini hinges but don't even really fit the countersunk holes properly.

Might have to look for some Allen bolts instead.

I've been tinkering with the doors today, making up some brackets and some fibreglass mouldings to fit the MG Midget door hinges at the rear of the doors so they open in suicide style.

It does look as if it's going to work at this stage, I'm just waiting for my fibreglass mouldings to recess the hinges in the body and attach them to the inside of the doors to set and for Amazon to deliver me some suitable nuts 'n' bolts and I should have the driver's door hung by the middle of the week.

I'm going to use a pair of MG Midget door latches and slam plates at the front of each door as I do like to stick to what I'm familiar with.

I also have a cunning plan to prevent the possibility of a door being opened on the move: I'll be fitting a solenoid inside each door that automatically locks the doors when the handbrake is released and unlocks them when it's applied. A hidden override switch to allow the doors to be locked when I park it up and unlocked to get in.

Once I have an opening door 'll take some pictures which should explain all the above a bit better.

That's very nice indeed, I do love the colour.

Thought I'd share a few pictures of progress on the rear hinged doors:

The hinges need to be recessed into the body about 25mm, so I'm moulding a set of four 'soap dishes' in fibreglass to French into the body. Starting point was to hunt around the boxes of 'useful' crap in my shed for something suitable to use as a plug, but then tripped over a cork sanding block that fitted the bill dimensions wise.

After carefully wrapping it in parcel tape and then taping it to an old place mat, it was slip, slap slop with the resin and CSM (you can see an identical sanding block in shot that's too damaged to use but gives you an idea of what lies beneath) -



I also moulded a set of four 'finger slots' to take the hinges inside the doors. I was able to make all four at once by making two symmetrical plugs out of wood covered in the obligatory parcel tape, glassing over them then cutting the resulting mouldings in half. Probably easier to understand if I show you this picture -



And to give a clearer idea of how it's all going to work, the 'soap dishes' will be recessed into the body and the 'finger slots' will be bonded onto the inside of the door skins in the position shown here -



The key to fitting hinges on curved surfaces is to make absolutely sure that they're in a straight line with each other. To that end, you'll see that I have bolted the hinges through a piece of flat steel bar which will keep the hinges in line with each other. That will sit inside the body and will be welded and braced to the subframe beneath to make sure all the stresses are taken by the frame, not the body. That should ensure I don't end up with droopy doors and cracks in the body.

Here's the mock up I made to test whether the solenoids I'd bought to automatically lock the doors when the handbrake is released were up to the job, which they are -



After Mick mentioned the awful Phillips screws looking out of place on my car, as luck would have it, the pack of Allen bolts and lock nuts I'd already ordered to bolt up the hinges with arrived yesterday (Jeff Bezos will be delighted to hear that he's now £5.99 richer than he was on Saturday). I'd ordered quite a few spares and, more by luck than judgement, it turns out that they also fit the Mini boot hinges perfectly -



That's better

My second 'soap dish' will be out of the mould tomorrow so I should be able to start the process of recessing them into the body and seeing if the hinges will actually clear the body when they swing open.

Some more progress today.

Hinge pockets trimmed down to fit as I made them a bit too substantial, then slots cut into the door opening to allow the hinges to be offered up -



The hinges swing all the way round without obstruction, so it looks like my budget suicide doors might actually work!







I've attached them temporarily with a bit of threaded bar to allow for adjustment in and out.

Luckily enough I have a template to work from as Iris has them fitted as standard -



Job for tomorrow is to cut the slots in the door, mock it all up to see if it works and hopefully start bonding/glassing all the bits in place.

Hi Kuba, they're MG Midget door hinges. I can't remember what I paid for them but there are quite a few sets on ebay at around £10 per hinge -
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/MG-MIDGET-SPRITE-1964-79-DOOR-HINGES-SET-OF-4/224313918983?epid=18035574906&hash=item343a26c607:g:6mYAAOSw4Q1f-YDh

Yes, I've seen them, they look fantastic and they'll be great quality, too. I have one of Gary J's Porsche 550 style handbrakes for my Speedster and it's a real work of art. I'm so looking forward to fitting it when I get to that stage of the build.

If I was building another 50's pure racing car and it had doors I'd be using a pair of the Formosa hinges integrated into an exposed frame, but as I'm doing a Wendler 356 Special with suicide doors, the hinges need to be hidden, hence the Midget hinges.

I'll explain below in more detail, but the long story short is that my rear hinged doors aren't going to work. I'm not too worried as it wasn't a 'must have' option on my build, just something I fancied having a go at.

I have a plan B waiting in the wings, which is front hinged doors as Erwin Komenda intended. Should that not work (see below) then plan C is to fix the doors in place and jump in over the side, Le Mans style. Doors can be very overrated anyway imho.

It started well, it was very straightforward to shape the finger slots to match the curve of the door skin, bolt them to the hinges and 'glass them in place -





But after leaving them overnight to harden, an attempt at a grand opening of the driver's door resulted in the rear of the door hitting the body before it was anywhere near out of the aperture

I had an inkling that this might happen and it's down to a small, but significant defect in the way the door was moulded.

To start at the beginning, my bodyshell is probably a Banham New Speedster, intended to be fitted to a Rover Metro, and is now about 22 years old. When I got it, it had been through the hands of several owners but had never been on the road as neither the front hood or engine lid were even close to fitting in their openings.

Being meant for a Metro wheelbase, it was too long to fit a '356' shortened Bug chassis and too short to fit a standard Beetle chassis. Someone had taken a saw to the driver's side front wheelarch in a clear attempt to stretch the wheelbase to fit a Beetle floorpan, but that just left it in a bit of a mess.

The doors had also been bolted in place, the space between doors and body filled with builder's expanding foam and the door gaps filled in with filler. It was when I broke the doors out of the bodyshell that I noticed the issue which means my rear hinged doors won't work, well, not on the driver's side, anyway:

I found that there was about 5mm of filler along the mid section of the rear of the driver's door which was necessary to bring that part of the door flush with the body. If you look at this picture you can see the difference in colour and the remnants of the filler where I've chipped and scraped it off -



Looking more closely, the driver's door skin is profiled to match the curve of the body along almost its entire length, but then flattens as it gets about four inches from the body, with the flat area being about six inches high. This leaves that section of the door below the surface of the body by quite some margin, enough to lose a £2 coin in anyway -



The passenger side door doesn't have the same issue, it fits flush all the way around the opening. It's that gap that means no amount of adjustment is going to allow the door to open backwards while still fitting in the rest of the opening. I could cut out that section of the door and reshape it to fit, but that would be quite difficult to get right and might not work anyway.

So, it didn't take long to decide to scrap the suicide door option and go for front hinged doors instead.

Only I've now taken a look at the front of the doors and the recesses that they swing into, and the recesses have been moulded too small to allow the fronts of the doors to enter them.

So, more work required. Much more work...

Looks like a couple of my pics have corrupted and aren't appearing - I'll take some more this afternoon.

Thanks guys, it's really not a big deal - half the fun of building your own car is trying things just to see if it's possible.

Here are the missing images from above:

Doors look fine from a distance -



But up close a £2 coin fits in the step between the body and the door skin on its back edge -

So, given that my rear hinged doors aren't going to work I need to hinge them at the front.

Which means that I need the dashboard fitted to make sure that the door pillars, which need modifying if the doors are ever to open, are the right width apart to start with.

Which means I need to have the front bulkhead in place to make sure the dash is at the right height and angle.

Which means i need the floors fitted so I know where the pedal box will fit to get the lower edge of the bulkhead in the right place.

Which means I need the steering column in place to see where the pedal box needs to be to be comfortably in line with the driver.

Which means I need the dashboard in place to...

I've already said that, haven't I.

Anyway, to save myself from endlessly going round in circles in a chicken vs egg style, I decided to start with the driver's side floor and work from there.

Using the modern wonder of CAD, cardboard aided design, I've made a plug to take a mould for my driver's side floorpan from and plastered it in parcel tape.

As it's Valentine's day, as a special treat, my significant other even allowed me to work inside in the warm as the parcel tape was too cold to stick to anything in the garage.

It's now ready to have the sides stapled to some timber strips to keep them level when the fibreglass is applied, they're cardboard, after all, so need a bit of bracing, but I'll get on with that tomorrow afternoon. Until then, here's the progress so far -

And coated in gelcoat -



Then fibreglass -



Then once cured it seems to fit pretty well -





And with the seat and pedals in place -





I could either use this as it is or use it as a mould to make another floor, the upsides of that being that I could make more in the future.

Hi Kuba, I haven't reinforced the floor with anything rigid, if you add enough layers of medium to heavy CSM then fibreglass is rigid and strong enough to work as a floor.

Having said that, I've now had time to go all over the floor banging it with the pointy end of a screwdriver and I've found that there are a few voids where the CSM hadn't bonded to the gelcoat and a couple of soft areas where the CSM wasn't fully wetted with the resin. I'm pretty sure that's down to the resin being too cold when I mixed it, it felt a lot thicker than usual and although it soaked into the first couple of layers of 200gsm mat, I really had to work it into the next couple of layers of 500gsm, which are the layers where it's soft in places.

So, the plan is to bring the resin indoors to warm up for a few hours then stiffen up and repair the voids in what I've done so far before painting, polishing and prepping it to use as a mould for the finished article.

When I use that mould I'll make sure that the resin is warm enough, that the mat is thoroughly wetted through and I'll also be adding in some core mat to make the floor as rigid and strong as possible.

Anyway, I need to get some more resin and catalyst ordered as I'm down to my last few kg's.

Oh, I do like that 'Porsche' steering wheel, btw. I'm not sure what it's from but it has the look of the early Spitfire/Herald/Vitesse wheel, so it could be an old Standard (Triumph) model. I doubt it would fit my steering column, but I do have a classic wood rim wheel with a Porsche crest already.