Been nice enjoying another weekend of 4 days, and have done a few of the jobs that I want to do to the Spitfire before next Sunday's Oxford MC 'Bocardo' Autosolo that is once again being held at a Silverstone car park.
The biggest job being the fitment of the roll over bar that I bought from Dave Pearson, this being a hard used Aleybars Clubmans type bar with a fixed diagonal, exactly the same as the one fitted to the GT6. Aleybars were bought in the mid 80s by Safety Devices, the UKs largest roll over bar/cage manufacteur, the only problem with this bar (as the one in the GT6) is that the tubes are of a too small diameter for some types of competitive motorsport, however for 'solos, sprinting etc it would be ok. I was going to get the bar blasted and powder coated by my brother in laws company in Colnbrook, but decided that for now she will be fine in her slightly scratched matt black finish.
The other jobs I have done are fit some 330lb front springs and larger diameter wheel studs. Fitting these studs is a pain as one has to take the brake discs off the wheel hubs to get the things into place, obviously necessitating taking the whole hub assemby off the stub axles etc. The picture above shows the car before the 330 springs were fitted.
The car looks better as it sits nice and level now, however I am not too happy with the front handling as it feels light at speed. I aim to fit the Canley Classics tubular front wishbones I have in the shed, some 480lb springs and will polybush the bottom wishbones, hopefully this will tie the front end down. Using the top wishbones I hope to be able to dial in some negative camber, 1.5 degrees being a starting figure.
One of the other things I dislike about the car is the way the rear end can be deflected when a small pothole or road irregularity is hit. To this end I think a set of Jigsaw's adjustable radius arms fitted with some nylon bushes I have may cure this problem. These radius arms seem a good idea to enable me to get the suspension checked to see how straight the car is running, I am not sure about faffing about with the standard system of shim use at a wheel alignment garage. A better fix will be the use of some Canley CV driveshafts and lower wishbones , I have a set of rotoflex vertical links to go with these. This would necessitate the welding of the wishbone mount onto the chassis and the radius arm mount onto the heelboard. At present, this is outside my budget so I will have to wait until next year to implement these changes. Of course whilst at it I might as well fit a LSD diff!!!!
A first for this weekend was that I drove the car without the soft top on her, at first I must admit I felt a bit self concious, but after a bit I must admit I quite liked driving her like that.
Yesterday was spent at Prescott hillclimb track watching a round of the Paul Matty Sportscars hillclimb series. I went along with my old friend Jon Stevens in his recently purchased AMG Merc CLK, this being one of the fastest things I have been in as it develops about 350BHP, what a car! Some of the cars at Prescott were truely mouth-watering, lots of Gould single seat hillclimb cars that featured Hayabusa engines and some very nice old Lotus single seaters. As ever I was attracted to the historic saloons, a couple of very nice 105 series Alfas, Mini Coopers and Lotus Cortinas. Also 3 Frogeye Sprites were taking part, be interesting to see how the Spitfire would cope with them! All in all a good day. One of the stand out events at Prescott is the VSCC event that is usually held in August, this always features lots of excellent old cars, Bugattis, Bentleys, Rileys etc. I may have to wander on down to watch that event. Excuse the lack of photos, forgot the camera!
This week entails a day working on Sptfire next Saturday in preparation for Sundays 'solo. Also I must start getting the interior out of the GT6 ready to pull the gearbox so as to enable the fitment of the new clutch I have bought from Canleys. The IAE is coming up fast!
Nothing to report on the Saloon, head still with Roy.
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