1973 AC Model 70 Invacar, Visitors & Occasional Distractions

Sorry to hear about your friend. That's curse word. Sometimes you do what you have to do and the cars come second.

Great thread by the way. Keep it up! (When you have time.) I remember looking at those little cars with disdain when I was a snotty kid but I've grown up (marginally) now and they are quite fascinating.
I'm still not sure if they were a brilliant way to get the disabled mobile or if the government was trying to kill them off in traffic accidents. Either way, I'm glad you've rescued this one.

James

I appear to have managed to fail to take a photo of my progress today...but not a huge issue given there's not much to see!

All of the rivets to the left of the seat in the floor of TPA have now been drilled out and replaced with stainless bolts. The vast majority just disintegrated the moment I touched them with the drill so clearly weren't doing much useful.

The difference in rigidity of the floor panel with only that done is huge...you can still make it move, but it has resistance and doesn't just flop around. Thumping it with a first now makes a solid sounding thud rather than a hollow rattle.

I definitely want to make a point of changing all of the fasteners involved here as they're all clearly shot. So the seat needs to come out next as there are half a dozen buried underneath it that I can't get to any other way.

Goes without saying that I'll be looking closely at a few of the other body mountings where rivets have been used in case they're in as bad a shape - though the water being trapped under the floor mats for years probably made the issues here so much worse.

With everything going on just now I'm only getting the odd few minutes here and there to do anything relating to the cars. Despite that the structural improvements to the nearside of the Invacar floor have been finished and I've started cutting the carpet to fit.



You can start to get a feel for how it's going to look now I think.





These are the new kick plates that might be going in.



I'm still undecided...whether they get used or not will probably depend on whether I can get the originals back to a vaguely presentable state...currently they're awful.

I'm basically making the left carpet, right carpet (which is *mostly* just a mirror image) then will cut an infill to go in the middle.

Nothing is being glued in place yet. Before that happens I need to rotate the car 180 degrees so I can do the same knackered rivet replacement on the offside, paint the seat base, find a rubber boot for the gear selector linkage where it passes through the bulkhead and thoroughly degrease the entire floor and front bulkhead. Depending on how things sit I may apply some foam underlay. I think that this will really make a huge difference to the feel of the interior.

As the seat can only be moved a few inches to either side I'm also doing away with the sliding capacity. Two bolts will be going through the rear of the frame to secure it in place. As the latch is at the front of the frame the rear of the seat tends to shift an inch or so every time you change direction, and it's quite annoying. If someone wants to undo it in the future it will just require a couple of bolts to be removed. Should make the driving experience a bit more pleasant. The seat wobbling around really doesn't instill confidence, so I'd really like to stop it doing that. I reckon this is probably more of an issue with my seat than it would be with the original as this provides a lot more lateral support than the original one would have.

New offside outer "sill" made up from some ally sheet and bolted in place.



I tapped the edge at the overlap flat with a hammer, though as this will be under both the carpet and sill kick plate I'm not really too bothered about how it looks.

I then went on a similar rivet replacement mission as I did on the nearside before giving everything a thorough wipe down then starting to get the carpet glued in.

After an hour or so getting distinctly high on carpet adhesive fumes we were three or four pieces away from the floor being done.



Closer look at where it's following the contour of the front bulkhead to show how well it's formed.



Yes I fouled up the bit by the steering yoke bracket...an infill will be cut to disguise that oops.



Sadly three or four pieces short of being finished I ran out of time! Annoying having to stop so close to being finished, but that's how it goes sometimes.

Should get it finished tomorrow and get things put back together tomorrow. Have a few more bits to fit as trim but they're a bit less of a faff than the floor where you're working around the seat base.

i'm almost certain i have a piece of video from 1990 of john welch (british rallycross champion) in the pits tweaking his engine management with one of these toshiba.

the carpets made a big difference to the look of the interior, and no doubt significant effect on quality of life (anti drumming)

re: the tosh, made this screen grab, what do you think ?

After attending the funeral of a friend this morning I found myself with a couple of hours free this afternoon so I decided to try to crack on with getting the offside kick plate sorted.

After a couple of hours of hitting things with hammers and swearing at it we had the kick plate in place. Once I got the bolts in I was able to pull the kink out at least. They'll both want to be stripped and painted but that's a job for another day. Will be a hammered black finish we'll go with to match some of the other details in the cabin.




Then the seal was reattached. These will be changed for tubular section seals at some point as I reckon they will work far better.



This was the last part of this project which involved stuff being apart so I was able to remove all the tools and nonsense from in the car and put things back together again. Longest job there was finding the seatbelt which I had helpfully hung over a hook on the garage wall...right in front of my blind face. Took me half an hour to spot it. Idiot.





From the previous round of work I noticed that the side "cheek" behind the windscreen washer bottle clearly had lifted while the adhesive was curing before (lack of patience on my part likely to blame as it was the last bit I fitted). So this was peeled back re-glued and was left with a screwdriver wedged behind the washer bottle for half an hour or so to keep it sitting flush. Sorted.



While I'm calling this job fundamentally done there are a couple of bits which will want a little further attention.

[] Parcel shelf. I'm 1/3 of a time short of having enough left to cover that. This is probably the most important one as it's where about 80% of the mechanical noise in the cabin gets in. I'm probably going to put some actual Dynamat or similar on there as well for that reason.

[] Door cavities. To match the visual aspect of the rectangular cutout at the base, and to help cut down drumming from these pretty large flat panels.

[] I may also do the windscreen pillars as the black semi gloss paint on there is *really* bad for reflections when the sun is even vaguely low. Plus the metal is quite pitted in a few areas so it would look tidier.

[] Sun visor panel. This was originally fabric lined from the factory, I stripped and painted it because the original material was decomposing, but it would feel appropriate to return it to a soft finish. Especially as the roof will be done somewhere down the line.

Lining the roof itself is what I'm terming "phase 2" of this project. That's something I will probably tackle next year. I'll use a lighter coloured material for that, and will probably go for actual automotive trim to maximise audio absorption, minimise weight and get something that's easier to work with. I'll also remove the roof from the car to make access far easier. Being able to flip the whole moulding upside down will make the job massively easier I think.

I only had time for a quick test run round the block today. Initial impressions though are that the apparent noise levels in the cabin even from the work done so far are vastly reduced. You can actually best wind noise above 40 now which was never the case before, so it's definitely helped! The panel being more firmly fastened down has helped improve the feeling of solidity too as it's not rumbling and vibrating under your feet half as much. Hoping I might be able to get a proper test drive in tomorrow.

It has definitely highlighted that I need to make a sealing boot/plug for the cable passthrough in the rear bulkhead where the overhead control box cables to through as you can clearly hear a lot of mechanical noise is coming through there now that a lot of the other avenues have been cut off. The overall job was to improve the interior though and it feels like we've definitely achieved that aim.

When I first started the car up it became apparent that the carb was lacking a working idle circuit again, presumably due to a bit of grime finding its way into the (tiny) idle jet. This cleared after a few minutes of running thankfully...but the reason it happened quickly became apparent.



If you look closely you can see the metal cap over the end of the filter element in the fuel filter has broken away. I'm really getting hacked off with how hard it's getting to find decent quality consumables these days. Think I'll see about getting some filters from a marine specialist as I did with the fuel lines, being a more safety conscious field hopefully the quality control will be better...

Looking smart! For the roof lining and pillars maybe look at four-way stretch fabric that's commonly used for campervan conversions, relatively easy to work with and forms to awkward shapes.

I would prefer this type, you can see if fuel is there and it has a replaceable element. Better than plastic ones.