MadaboutKitcars

Nice. Not so sure about the colour and the front and rear wings run in a straight line where the A6/Sammio wings are much curvier, so a Formosa might be a better starting point.

I've now shortened the spindle from the centre throttle body by a centimetre, repurposing its butterfly as a link, and made a bracket to mount it as a linkage between the TB's with a couple of 8mm bushes pressed into it so the shaft won't seize -









To my total amazement everything lines up and it actually works!

The rear TB (with Throttle Position Sensor fitted) is a bit sticky in the closed position, but I'm pretty sure it's the years of crap that's built up where the butterfly chokes off the airflow when it closes that's causing that. I'll sort that out next week when I strip everything down for a good clean.

I'm very pleased with the way it's coming together, as it's going to look pretty 'factory fitted' and be very compact, which is what I want.

There won't be any more progress for a few days as I'm spending the weekend in the West country, visiting the Prescott hillclimb as a spectator on Saturday and then heading over to the battle of Evesham re-enactment on Sunday.

More next week

Thanks Paul, I have to admit it is coming together quite nicely so far.

So, I spent last weekend following The Pet Shop Boys' advice to Go West by visiting Cheltenham and attending the Vintage Prescott hillclimb. Aside from all the vintage and veteran contraptions that variously clattered, chuffed and occasionally wailed their way up the hill, a stand out for me was this Lancia Aurelia B20 GT in the classic car parking area -





Absolutely stunning, right up my street and it's for sale! Sadly, if you need to ask the price you can't afford it and I did so I can't

Anyway, progress on what I can afford is moving along slowly but surely, and I've spent the last two days fitting the crank, rods and pistons to my reconditioned block -



The pistons are sixty thou oversized and the block has been bored to match, while the block has also been skimmed by 5 thou and acid dipped, which has left it pretty much new looking. To get the pistons in I bought a piston ring compressor tool off Amazon, one which comprises a spring steel collar which expands and contracts by means of a ratchet drive, which turned out to be a frustratingly hopeless piece of crap.

I say that because it took me about fifty attempts to get the first piston into its bore as the tool kept lifting off the block at the critical moment and allowing the lower oil control ring to ping open and jam against the surface of the block. Somehow I eventually managed to get the first piston in, which is when I realised I'd put the conrod on the wrong way round as one of its cap bolts fouled the inside of the block when I slowly turned the crank to check for binding and clearance issues. In my defence, I had googled which way round they went, and the first hit was from an Ai bot that confidently informed me that the conrod caps should face away from the camshaft. This as it happens, is bullshit, as the caps should actually face the camshaft. So, it seems that, contrary to popular belief, we can't always trust what sentient computers tell us, and I'll remind you all of that when Skynet goes live...

Anyway, after a full afternoon wasted repeatedly trying, and failing, to refit my first piston and much head scratching, I came up with a method to clamp the useless tool to the block to stop the lower oil control ring from pinging out and jamming the whole caboodle.

Which happened again anyway as the design of the tool means that even when it's tightened up fully it remains very slightly pear shaped at the point where the steel collar overlaps itself, which is just enough for the lower ring to pop out as it reaches the face of the block.

So, the final solution was to add a G clamp to squish the collar back into a circle at the critical point -



The result of all that bodging of what should've been a simple to use tool was that after taking two days to fit one piston, the other three went in in fifteen minutes this morning.

I'm now waiting on a few spare parts from Canley's, like the wooden wedges that help the lower engine sealing block do its thang, so there should be some more progress next week.

I've made a fair bit of progress since my last update, starting with bolting up some lovely aluminium front and rear end plates (my old steel ones were dirty, so I couldn't possibly use them), then fitting and timing the camshaft which was a bloody frustrating job.

The 'foolproof' method I used to install the cam was to establish TDC on cylinder no.1 with the head off and attach my degree wheel to the crank and a pointer made out of an old wire coathanger to the block. After fitting a new head gasket and torqueing down the head nuts in the approved order, I turned the camshaft until it was sitting bang on the centre of the intake lobe lift on cylinder no.1. Once that was done I fitted the rocker gear and set the valve clearances, bolted up the distributor and turned the crank until cylinder no.1 was exactly 108 degrees ATDC, which is where full intake lift on cylinder no.1 should be with my Piper 270 cam. Being very careful to keep the crank and cam sprockets completely immobile, I then bolted down the cam sprocket, ensuring that I kept a significant amount of tension on the left side of the chain where the tensioner goes. As I'd made sure that nothing had moved while I did all that I was pretty confident that my cam would be timed to perfection.



So, keeping a weather eye on my dial gauge I gave the crank a couple of turns, stopped when cylinder 1's intake lobe was in the centre of full lift and checked my degree wheel... To find that the crank was at 115 degrees ATDC

I won't bore you with the details, but it took about thirty goes at altering the relationship between the crank and the cam a few degrees one way then a few more or less degrees the other before I finally got a consistent reading of 108 degrees ATDC for full lift on intake number 1. Once that was done I was able to fit my flywheel, which has been refaced and balanced by Ivor Searle Engineering, so looks much better than it did -



It does look as if it had been balanced before, as the row of five blind holes at 12 o'clock in the image are old, while the shiny and shallow blind hole at about 2 o'clock appears to be the only machining Searle's needed to do. The yellow blob, by the way, is a marker for the orientation of the clutch cover, which was balanced with the flywheel, crank and pistons/rods.

Torqueing up the flywheel bolts and the front pulley bolt was made much easier with the use of the, ahem, correct tool, which in my case is one I've had since 1989 and is actually for a Beetle. Thankfully, a bit of imaginative bodging means it works just fine for Triumph flywheels too -



I had a bit of a quandary with the torque setting for the front pulley bolt as there's nothing in the Hayne's manual and t'internet discussions were a bit vague, with some people saying they think my small-crank 4-pot pulley bolt should be torqued to the same setting as a 1500, so 150 lbs/ft, while others said it should be 80 to 100 lbs/ft. After much head scratching I settled on somewhere in between and torqued it down to 120 lbs/ft., as I didn't want to break my poor old torque wrench, which only goes up to 150 anyway.



I've now bolted the gearbox up to the engine and dropped them both back into the chassis, and tomorrow I'll be attaching all the ancillaries. The last thing I did today, though, was to hang my throttle bodies onto the roll pins in the head just to see how they're going to look and to give some idea if they're going to fit under the bonnet -





As you can see, the Triumph Daytona throttle bodies sit at an anhedral angle, which leaves their highest point significantly lower than that of the original SU carburettors so I'm sure they'll fit under the bonnet without any issues whatsoever.

I just hope I don't have to eat those words later...

Thank you. Me too

'No plan survives first contact with the enemy.' - old Army saying that's very relevant to the substructure of my Speedster...

So, just to recap, in terms of the way I intended to create the floors and rear suspension attachment points for my Speedster, Plan A was to fabricate a strong box section steel perimeter frame with attachment points for the rear radius arms built in -





My intention was that it should be light, strong and overengineered to give it confidence inspiring super strength.

Super strong, overengineered and confidence inspiring it was, light it definitely wasn't. I wasn't happy with it so it morphed into Plan B, which, you may recall, was to reuse the donor car's floorpan complete with its front bulkhead, inner sills and rear heelboard that includes the attachment points for the radius arms. This, I felt, would provide a simpler, lighter and more elegant solution to the issue -





Unfortunately, the background of my '67 donor spitfire was that mid way through a thorough restoration that stalled due to the ill health of the elderly engineer owner, it was purchased by a dreamer who wanted to turn it into a bike engined track day car. The first three steps the new owner took to complete this epic conversion were to remove the body from the chassis, chop a chunk out of the front bulkhead to clear the canted over bike engine, then lose interest, plonk the body on a pallet and leave it in the woods for the bears to shit in for the better part of a decade -



Thankfully the chassis had been dry stored, and the whole caboodle only cost me £210, which I more than made back when I sold on some of the bits I didn't need, like the fibreglass bonnet, seats, windscreen frame and wheels.

Outwardly, the body didn't look too bad, which was possibly helped by the extensive use of fibreglass panels. Once I started digging, though, I found that what lay beneath had suffered greatly from its abandonment in the woods. The front bulkhead was mostly fine from about six inches up from the ground, but the floorpans and what was left of the battery tray were thoroughly rotten -







What those pictures can't show is how paper thin the remaining metal is, and I decided that resurrecting it would be just too much work, so I decided to chop the bulkhead off and initiate Plan B 1.5, which was to throw my Vitesse bulkhead at it to see if it would fit -





As you can see, the Vitesse bulkhead fits just fine, but I do need that for my next project and finding another one as solid could turn out to be very difficult, so I decided not to use it for my Speedster. Instead I'll be going back to part of Plan A and fabricating one myself. You may also have noticed that I had cut away everything above and behind the rear leaf spring, as it had substantial corrosion in it that compromised its structural integrity without reducing its weight. As I dug deeper and chased the rust in the rear floors, inner sills and heelboard assembly with a wire brush, I found that most of what had originally been solid steel was now mostly made of Weetabix. And Weetabix straight out of the box, too, not Weetabix that's been through the dishwasher twice but is still stuck to the inside of the bowl, a concretion which Jeremy Clarkson once described as 'the hardest substance known to man' in a discussion about Wankel rotary engine rotor tips -



So, after cutting away everything that was too rusty to use from my Spitfire donor's bodyshell, this is what's left of the original structure -



To be fair, I do still have the doors, bootlid and rear wings, which hadn't rusted at all because they're fibreglass.

Anyway, to cut a very long winded story a little shorter, I have now implemented Plan C, which is something I should've thought of in the first place. After much head scratching and measuring of the back end of my Vitesse chassis and staring at my Spitfire chassis with my hands on my hips, I bit the bullet and bought a pair of Herald/Vitesse rear outriggers from James Paddock -







These will be bolted up to the side/front sections of my 'Plan A' perimeter frame, and I've welded them in at an angle that gives a straight run for the radius arms. This means that I'll also be reusing the front suspension mounts that I adapted to use as radius arm pivot points.

Plan C, I feel, provides a light, elegant, strong and factory fit solution to my problem.

Confidence is high...

Yes, should be fine as the outriggers will be the only permanently fixed parts and they qualify as brackets

Back from Goodwood Revival now where I had a fantastic time. It's surprising how inspiring it is to see hundreds of fabulous classics in all conditions and at different value points, both on track and in the classic car park, and I've come back thoroughly motivated to get on with my own project(s).

As such, I've spent today sorting out the rear suspension alignment. I'll need to do that again once the car is finished, but I wanted to get a basic setting just to make sure it's possible to get it all lined up. Rather than pay someone to align my suspension on these old classics, I prefer the DIY approach as it's much cheaper and I'm fed up with telling teenage car mechanics that I don't want the standard settings for the donor car as they don't work with a lighter and lowered car. So, a while back I made myself an apparatus for measuring the difference between the front and rear of the wheel rims, from which you can calculate the toe in or out of the wheels -



The received wisdom on t'internet is that you should measure from fixed points in the tread on the contact surface of the tyres, but I find trying to take measurements in 100ths of a mm from a flexible surface just never gives the same figure twice, which is why I use the rims.

The beauty of this contraption is that once it's in place and both ends are touching the rim, you don't need to measure the entire width but just the adjustable bit at one end, as it's the difference that's critical, not the overall width -



Fine adjustment was made a pleasure by these lovely radius arms that were made to measure in just a few days by Jon Wolfe at Wofitt Racing -



I can thoroughly recommend them as they're extremely well made, replace the flexible bushes with rod end bearings to keep everything aligned properly in use and are actually cheaper than the more usual type once you factor in paying for a set of polybushes for them. Jon also does a range of other Triumph suspension products that can be viewed here - http://www.wolfitt.com/wolfitt_products_1.htm

The more hawk-eyed amongst you will have noticed that I already had a set of adjustable radius arms with polybushes -



These came with a bunch of suspension parts I bought from someone else's abandoned GT6 Mk3 (swing spring) project, and I had intended to use them. Unfortunately, I found that when I tried to adjust them down to the length I need the threads bound up, got red hot and started to squeal like a stuck pig when I applied more force, even after liberal lubrication was applied to the threads. Closer inspection revealed that they'd been made up of parts with a mixture of imperial and metric threads that almost, but didn't quite fit together properly. I'll be repurposing the ends to make some hinges later in the build, but I just didn't think it was worth risking one of the damned things failing under load half way round a bend at sixty miles an hour and letting a rear wheel go where it likes.

The setup is starting to look pretty 'factory' to me now, but then I'm rather biased




Oh, and the reason I don't go with the tracking settings that Triumph recommend is that I had my Spyder set up to standard spec but then found that it understeered all over the place, probably because the weight, spring rates, track widths, tyre sizes and suspension geometry were all different to the donor Vitesse. Using a process of trial and error I ended up with around half a degree of toe in at the rear for stability and an unknown amount of toe out at the front. I say unknown because I just kept extending the track rod ends by half a turn at a time up front then taking it for a test drive until it turned in with telepathic inputs to the steering wheel, which was a very benign and confidence inspiring setup. I should really have measured the amount of toe out I ended up with, but I'm afraid I never bothered.

Anyway, I'll be doing something similar once my Speedster's ready for the road, starting with around 0.25 degrees toe in at the rear and as much toe out at the front as it needs.