Much activity has been happening in the misterbob garage!
Now, unlike a lot of the threads on here, where you'll see MASSIVE transformations in a day, there's little of that here.
It's just been a long, slow slog at dilligently rebuilding and restoring crucial parts.
This is what the TVR currently looks like:
And from the rear:
Dashboard and interior are still in pieces:
You'd probably think I'm bat-curse word crazy to think that this car will be on the road in under a month then, yes?
Weeeeeel, maybe not.
This is what's taken up so much time, the Jag-sourced Salisbury 4HU Powr-Lok rear end
TVR used, effectively, the centre of a Jag IRS set-up, with custom made trailing arm rear suspension instead of the Jag arrangement.
Everything else is exactly as you'd find in a Jag XJ6 or XJ12 for example.
It's a surprisingly daunting piece of engineering to sort out properly, hence I had a lot of help from the old man on this, who worked on these diffs before.
We've rebuilt the diff with new seals, and in the process had to change an output shaft bearing, which became mullered when we tried to strip a seal out.
This involved having to very carefully re-set the bearing pre-load using a dial gauge.
I've also rebuilt the (completely siezed and cocking useless) rear brake calipers with brand new seals and stainless steel pistons - hopefully so that I'll never have to do it ever again!
There are still the copper brake lines to make up, handbrake calipers to rebuild and fit, and the mounting yoke to fit - but this is a serious victory in the scheme of getting this car back on the road!
On Saturday, I had a load of mates over to help me out with some time consuming tasks.
We managed to strip a load of the brittle, cracked and inferno-prone fuel piping out of the rear of the car and drained the tanks.
We also removed the original (buggered) trailing arm bushes!
Honestly, there's no wonder these cars get a bad reputation for handling. With two worn trailing arm bushes, and bent trailing arms pins, it's a miracle someone didn't stuff the thing into a hedge backwards!
Turning our attentions towards the front of the car, we set to on the fuel injection manifold.
After seeing the state that the fuel lines were in underneath the car, I felt the only right thing to do was to change every last piece of fuel hose.
The last thing I wanted was for all my hard work to go up in flames
Cleaning up the castings soon revealed the 'exotic' sourcing of TVR's components
Which of course, immediately made me wonder if Leonard would take to the old-school gasser look:
Errrrrr, no!
Again, I felt vindicated for changing the fuel lines on the manifold.
Looking inside the sectioned hose running directly to the injectors from the fuel rail, it was very heavily cracked and perished!
Unfortunately, this gave us a problem, as the short stubs of pipe are factory fitted to the injectors with a machine fitted pressed collar.
After having sliced through the pipe, I wondered if I'd just bought myself a needless ticket to a full set of new injectors :/
Thankfully, we figured out a way of cutting the locking collars off with a hacksaw.
Violet was particularly good at this, and so we stood around and watched!
At this point Matt turned up. We were all very hungry, so piled into Leonard and headed off to get some KFC.
Driving through Mansfield (which has always been full of boy-racers for years) in Leonard, with Black Sabbath & Led Zeppelin cranked up was hilarious, and awesome fun!
We also needed some more jubille clips, which we managed to buy, of all places, in ALDI!
So yes, my TVR is now tuned, not by Audi, but by ALDI
After Onne's meticulous cleaning, and cutting lots of lengths of fuel hose and tightening jubille clips etc. The fannymould now looks like this:
I re-fitted the gummed up 'extra air valve', which was a source of rough and rich running, and now just need to replace the old vacuum pipes, and give the plenum top and throttle body some attention.
Again though, another very important part of the jigsaw sorted!
Finally, for a bit of a mojo booster, what do you reckon to the refurbished rocker covers?
I was originally going for a black wrinkle paint finish. However, my attempts looked, frankly, bloody awful!
My mate Gareth, virtually snatched them off me and set to with his set of machine polishing wheels, and gave them this beautiful, mirror-type finish.
Looking at them, I felt that having the valleys of the covers picked out in blue, to match the pin-striping of the car would really finish them off.
Seeing how Matt spends his time away from retro cars painting war-game miniatures, I handed him the paint and brush, and in the blink of an eye, they looked like this:
I'm well chuffed!
