Spitfire 1500 – Gearbox Rebuild

When I first took the Spitfire off the road I thought it would be best to exchange the gearbox for a reconditioned one as some of the parts were a bit scarce. I saw a single rail (non-overdrive) gearbox on eBay not too far away and decided to take the chance on it so I handed over a tenner and took it home […]

Head Work

The diff is on hold until I can get hold of a pinion depth shim that’s on backorder so I decided to do some work on the cylinder head. Having read a fair bit about porting and polishing I thought I’d give it a go. There’s loads of videos on the subject on YouTube. Some better that others, quite a few of them […]

Spitfire Diff Build

It’s been a while since I posted anything but I’ve been working on the diff again recently. I ordered the carrier bearings and the two pinion bearings, small and large. All was well until I realised that one of the pinion bearings was the wrong size. It’s part number is M88040, I needed M88048. They also share the part number M88010 which I […]

The Diff

Over the last few weeks I’ve not had a great deal of time to get stuck in on the Spitfire restoration. I’ve been bolting some of the suspension parts together but there’s not really anything I can do on the rear end without getting the diff done because the transverse leaf spring bolts to the diff. The vertical links bolt to the spring. […]

Painting the Chassis

I finally got to the stage of putting some colour on the chassis today since the humidity was low enough at 50%. Although I’ve not been working on the car at every given moment, I have been stripping the chassis down and preparing it for some time now. The old paint on the chassis was nice and smooth but it started showing signs […]