The body was painted and polished as far as I was happy with so next up was to install the engine and gearbox before lowering the body onto the chassis. I got the engine moved from my shed where it had stood since I rebuilt it, ready to turn over with assembly paste on all the bearing surfaces. The gearbox and overdrive were […]
I originally stripped the whole engine nearly 4 years ago. The main caps and big ends/conrods were already numbered so I think it may have had new big end and main bearings or something at some stage. The pistons look like the original ones as they are stamped with “Stanpart”. I knew the big end was on the way out again though because […]
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 […]
While I’m waiting for sand blasting media to arrive so I can finish stripping the chassis (yes, I’m still stripping the chassis!), I could start work on the engine. So far I’ve removed the gearbox and bell housing, cylinder head, front and rear engine plates, cam shaft, oil pump and crank shaft. It turns out the cam shaft was on its way out […]
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 was in immaculate condition. Not a spot of […]
Now I’m sure there are people out there that say one way of doing things is better than another. I don’t claim to be a mechanic here, this is just my experience with it all. If you have any advice for people, comments are welcome, scroll to the bottom of this page. Inside the rocker cover on the car looks like this and […]