CHRISTINE'S LAIR
WEEK 3
29th June - 6th July
Injury of the week – Any number of burns and cuts, we’re at the “might lose a hand” stage of the build.
Most-played in the garage – Lost, series 1. But it’s not really working out for us.
Helper of the week – it’s the old fella again, making patches to brace this old crate together. Or, out of left field, XJS racer Brian McMahon. It’s amazing who you come across sometimes, and how helpful they become when you play the fellow XJS racer card.
Week 3 - the timetable goes completely to pot. We've decided we can make Silverstone, but we're still without a shell, and that race is under a month away....
With the garage sitting empty we’re basically playing now. Dashboard drilled for additional warning lights, the old car had nothing at all but a rev counter, but the plan is to MOT this one. No compromise, it’s still a solid-mounted harsh full-on race car, but given our regs require us to keep lights, wipers etc it really is no stretch to make them all work properly and get it roadworthy, the only thing is the need to retain a handbrake, but to be honest we planned one anyway this time.
The doors are lightened yet further, as are the front wings, there are little bits you can nip and tuck out of them, it all counts.
Parts ordered from all over the place, there’s paint coming in from one side, electric water pumps from another, tube arriving, harnesses, parcels from Merlin and Tweeks and CBS flood into reception, there’s a lot of money being spent in the absence of anything to bolt together. We have OCRD Obsessive Compulsive Racing Disorder, the need to do something, anything, to the car.
Pieces lie in baths of thinners to strip off the old domestic gloss paint, we’re using proper paint this time, pedal boxes glisten with new paint, fuel tanks sit in fresh gloss, parts lie everywhere just waiting for a bodyshell to attach them to.
Blasted but still wearing her pinstripes. How very proper.
We’ve filled an entire container with Jaguar parts, Megan’s 2 subframes sit with her cage alongside the 2 subframes from the now-deceased Cordelia. There are seats, windscreens, heaters, fans, radiators etc scattered about, but at least the garage is clear, right? Apart from the 2 engines, which we wrapped in shrink-wrap and stashed in a corner, no sense leaving open bores about the place with a week of grinding predicted.
In fact the garage too is rather cluttered, but at least with the shell returning to us on 3rd we finally have something to attack.
First job, of course, is get rid of the shotblast sand. Roll the shell from one side to the other, by hand, and stick the airline in the chassis to blow out kilos of black shot, it pours from holes in the car you didn’t even know were there. We know already that she’ll be shedding this sand until at least Snetterton, but we can get most of it.
A quick look round the shell and of course it’s worse than we thought, but not as bad as we feared. The floorpan Andrew welded in needs revisiting, that whole area is crucial for jacking points etc so it’s an obvious place to attack properly and we beef up the jacking point, in place of the single little lug Jaguar offer we put a 9” square plate in, it’s a much easier target to hit with a jack in pouring rain without getting on your knees.
Radius arm mounts are fine, floor generally is solid. Front shocker towers are rusted engine-bay side, as usual, so they’re the first place to fix.
The plan is to have the remedial welding done by the end of the weekend, so we can start on the seam-welding, cage, and the extras we’re fitting.
It doesn’t go quite as smoothly as that, because the desire to wield the acetylene at seam sealer that survived is powerful, and then the pleasure of seam-welding bare steel takes over, by the time the weekend’s over the car is lightened, holed, swaged, sawn, burned, patched and welded from nose to rear seat, topside only. The underside is next, but that’s still pretty fast going when you consider the amount of steel cut out, tidied, welded, and modified. There must be 10kg of steel laid on the floor, but the best part of 5kg of mig wire goes back in.
The real secret to this construction is that we’re back to bare metal, the weight that takes off is a real gain, and the stiffness imparted by a fully seam-welded shell is a significant advantage. The rigidity in her sister car, Helen, is apparent, and we know how serious the weight loss was there even with all-steel panels and glass. The concept that we might get an E car to the weight limit with a sensibly-sized driver is tantalisingly reachable.
CHRISTINE - from the Steven King novel, the evil red car with a mind of her own that rebuilds herself. Useful, given the startline damage the class E runners seem to inflict on each other....