Tag: restoration
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Overdrive Rebuild
Once the gearbox was complete the overdrive was next up. It’s a Laycock J type used on many cars of the era. Mine always worked quite well so I wasn’t expecting to find anything particularly out of order. It basically consists of an epicyclic gear system which allows the input shaft to reduce speed by…
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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…
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Spitfire Chassis Strip Down
So I’ve continued with the Spitfire today. Last week I removed the engine and gearbox along with the radiator. I removed the engine with ease using an electric winch I was given and my dad has installed in the garage to do just this (or lift motorbikes). I plan to work on the engine and…
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Automotive Surgery
Now it’s really coming on and there’s no turning back. I finished removing everything from the body tub this weekend. The pedals, fuel tank and hand brake cable. Although I hadn’t realised the handbrake cable was still attached to the body initially. We tried to pull the body tub off the chassis and it didn’t…
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Spitfire Restoration Continues
I spent a fair while working on the Spitfire today. Mainly concentrating on the interior and the wiring loom. Last time I worked on it I removed the bumpers, lights, quarter valances, various bits of chrome trim and the boot trim. Most of that went fairly smoothly. The only bit I found hard was taking…
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Small Car, Mammoth Task
I’ve owned my ’79 Spitfire 1500 for about 8 years now. It’s been used as my daily driver every year, through every season with the exception of about 1 year when I was in Australia for 6 months and unemployed for the next 6 months. I paid about £3800 for it back then and it…