Progress! Paint done!

I recon most of you thought this project was dead in the water! I have to admit that progress is very slow but I'm very happy to have reached this milestone: I have finished painting the car! The result is decent but not to a professional level. As this is a racecar and will get war-scars this is, for me, acceptable. Here's the result:

I'm finishing up the painting of the interior, inner wheel arches, the underside of the car, inner side of the bonnet etc. All this with polyester paint made for marine use which gives extra durability and will protect from moisture getting into the glass fiber. 

Progress will continue to be slow over the next yeah as we have just bought a new house which will require a bit of TLC. 

BTW: when I rebuild the frame i realised that most of the rust had come from the inside of the tubes and not from the outside as I would have thought. To protect against this from happening again, I have injected half a deciliter of oil into each tube and sealed it off. I have used oil made for outboard boat engines as this has the desired characteristics. 

Christmas came early this year!

To finish the brake system I obviously needed new brake lines as the old ones where not reusable. I decided to go for braided steel hoses all the way through and Euroquip fittings. I also need a new pedal box as the old one was worn out. Furthermore I wanted to create a 2 circuit system, both for safety reasons and to be able to adjust the brake bias between front and rear. I turned to Rally Design where I have previously bought miscellaneous race parts. I didn't have much clue about which fittings to buy to construct a new, complete brake line system, but with the help from Scott from Rally Design I managed to order everything in one go. And just the other day the package arrived:

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Finally some mechanical work!

After all the glasfiber work, constantly having to wear a mask, applying filler and sanding down again and again, I really needed to get started on some of the mechanical work on the car again. I decided that the brakes would be a good place to start. The brakes where in a very poor shape. I have never driven the car as it was a basket case when I got it but when dismantling the brakes I had no doubt that it must have been a horrible experience. The rear brake cylinders were both stuck and 3 out of 4 pistons in the front calipers were absolutely unable to travel anywhere. I had to use a combination of chemicals, pressurized air, heat, and brute force to get them out. Here are some picture from just before i took the calipers apart. 

Through a local supplier, Classic Car, I ordered the parts needed to refurbish the calipers with new pistons etc. Lars Skotte from Classic Car was very helpful in figuring out the exact right parts to order. I bought new brake disks, pistons, new rubber kits, rear cylinders etc. Lars comes highly recommended!

Currently I've taken the calipers apart (that was actually necessary to get the pistons out) and have cleaned them down and given them the first layer of caliper paint:

More paint preparation

Currently I'm working on two tracks on the car. One is the brakes which I'm rebuilding completely. More on that later. The other track is getting the glasfiber body ready for paint. As you may have been it was extremely bumpy when i had taken it all the way back to bare fiberglas. Since then an uncounted number of layers of filler with subsequent sanding have been applies. I'm now quite far and I'm now using spray filler to get the last bumps (or at least most of them) out of the way. This picture should give you an idea where I'm at:

Paint test - shiny doors!

Some month ago I managed to get the doors smooth enough for a paint test. It took a loot of filling and sanding an the bumpiness is still visible when the light falls from steep angles. I have decided, though, that it is good enough for the doors on a race car :) Here's what it looks like:  

Summer 2011, bare glasfiber

This is just a short post to show a picture of the car from the Summer of 2011 where you can see the car stripped to bare glasfiber. As you can see it's very bumpy and a lot of work has since gone into getting it ready to get painted.

Introduction to this Blog

This blog is a continuation of the blog I started here: http://tvrgrantura.blogspot.dk/ about my giant project of restoring a TVR Grantura Mk2a from 1962. If you read the old blog you can see that i started the project in 2006 and so far i have done quite a bit of work in rebuilding the frame, reconstructing the glassfiber body and rebuilding the suspension with hard copper bushing and much more. The project has been on hold in several periods but I have now picked it up again and have done some decent progress over the last few month.

I plan to write a bit on this blog about the progress going forward but I'll start out with a couple of post about the progress since I last updated the old blog. Keep tuned!