NEW CAR BUILD

STAGE 1 – TWO INTO ONE DOES GO.

As you know, because you’re devoted to us now and can’t stop reading of our antics, we’re building a new car.

It’s a class E, modified 6 pot, but without any significant changes to horsepower, it’s a lightweight D as far as the engine goes.

It is a more relaxed project than the last two, and it is a refreshing way of going about the build, because for once we’re using and refurbishing stock that we had and building the car up bolt by bolt, rather than robbing giant chunks out of a crashed car. The aim is to buy, other than the race parts we need, cable, extinguisher etc, nothing at all. Zip.

The difference is that this is a new car, not a reshell of an existing car, so everything must be done afresh. The shell is my old road car, the cage donor is Philip Comer’s old D class, but other than the cage we’re using very little of the donor, the machine we’re building is not the same thing at all.

The goal is a shakedown run at Snetterton on 7^th April 2011. It might be the 8^th. Either way, it’s booked, so this thing has to be there.

We have the shell already, Andrew’s old V12 auto road car, stripped a full year earlier. Many of its suspension parts are retained, but few are of much use, as the car was in a pretty bad state in general.

Usually we prep a shell, then appear from nowhere with a set of pre-assembled pieces stolen from the wrecked racing car, throw them on, and assemble a car in incredibly-short time.

We like this approach, so this time round we’ll start with all those pre-assembled pieces that we need and don’t yet have, then do the shell prep.

At the same time we also strip the donor car, the crashed Comer machine, for the cage we want out of it. The welding on the rollcage is less than impressive, looks like a chicken defecated all over the pieces inserted into the sills. The crash has deformed the rear wheelarch too, which is something we’d long suspected, the cage is strong, but the car it attaches to isn’t always the best, which is why we spend so much time improving it.

Stage one then is to start with two cars, one ageing, rusty, and retired V12 auto, and one crashed low-quality 6 pot race car, and strip both to bare shells. One gets weighed in, the other gets blasted.

The stripped V12 sells its engine to Ebay. You don’t get much for a 5.3 these days, but it is enough to pay for the shell to be blasted. We had no use for a V12, we don’t race them, so it had to go. Glad it found a home, and not just the melting pot.

The crashed car donates its drivetrain, and gains us yet another worthless 3.6 engine, but again, someone on Ebay wants one of our three 3.6s, and that buys the primer we need. Because we know the car away for blasting will need repair, we cut out both floorpans to this car, just in case. We also cut off the entire front end, because sometimes you need one. The shell weighs in, despite these huge pieces removed, at over 300kg, which reinforces our view that some shells are simply heavier than others. We think the very gauge of steel used at Jaguar changed over the years.

The money from the weigh in is spent on steel sheet and box. It is important to try and be cost neutral wherever possible! Things cost money otherwise. We don’t like to spend.

By the time this exercise is done, we have reduced two cars to one bodyshell, a cage, a manual gearbox, pedal box, diff, and windscreen. The crashed car didn’t have a screen. Or a bonnet. Or wings. Or doors. The V12 had doors, rotten wings, and the wrong bonnet. Fortunately, as a class E car, the bonnet isn’t steel, and the wings, well, the wings we can fix, so long as you don’t want to sit on them.

This is, literally, all we’re using from both donor vehicles though, the suspension etc will all be built up from bits we have in stock.

A lot of time in the double strip, but we’re at a point now with a bare, blasted shell, a pile of bits, and it has cost us nothing but time. Factor in the time and the sums stop working, so humour us and pretend it was free rather than the £10000 it probably really cost in man hours. If you put a value on your time for any hobby you’d never do it.

Ready to begin the rebuild now then. The fun begins....

Part 2 soon.