Blast!

Assuming anyone actually reads this, I left you many months ago saying it would be a few more weeks to finish the blast cabinet and find out whether it works.

Well the good news is that it does work. Rather well actually. With some decent lighting inside the cabinet so we could see what we were doing the results are excellent. The before and after pictures speak for themselves. All the pedals and associated bracketry are now cleaned, painted and fitted back on the car.

Before...

...and after

The seat and harness came back from Motordrive too and they really look the part. A little fettling of the mounting brackets and the seat was ready to fit.

At this point however things stopped going so well. Before I fitted the reinforcing plates to the floor of the car  to accommodate the seat and belt mountings I realised the underside of the floor needed cleaning and a coat of paint. I set to with a rotary wire brush but quickly discovered that whilst the floorpan wasn't terrible it was in need of some attention if the job was to be done right. There are a couple of rust holes and the old suspension mounting point at the back isn't very pretty either (It got worse when I prodded it with a screwdriver!).

I've decided that to tackle these properly, and to make sure there are no more problems later, the body needs to come off the car again so the whole underside can be cleaned and repairs made as necessary. That meant finding someone with the space and facilities that my single garage doesn't have. The car should therefore be off for some more professional attention in the next week or two.

Unfortunately this has delayed the whole project by quite a number of weeks so there's been disappointingly little progress recently.

Once the floor is sorted out though, along with a few other minor jobs that can be done at the same time, I'm hoping to see some real progress quite quickly as the seat, harness, engine, gearbox and propshaft are all lined up waiting to be fitted.

And so to 2013...

Not only is it 2013 now, it's February already. I've no idea what happened to January but at least a little progress has been made on the projects,,,

The issue with the clutch release arm was resolved with a bit of fabrication. I extended the arm by cutting one side off a length of steel box to form a "C" profile channel. I then modified the end of the cast aluminium arm so the channel would bolt up against the flat side of the casting.

The pushrod is now acting in a straight line again and bears onto both the new extension and part of the original casting so hopefully spreading the load a bit.

The arm is a little thicker now with the steel attached to it so I'm hoping there's still enough clearance between the release arm and the clutch cover when the slave cylinder is at full throw.

I've offered it all up and it seems to fit together nicely. Some better weather will be needed before I feel like dragging the car out onto the driveway to fully refit the engine and gearbox.

The next job is to clean, paint and refit the pedals before the seat and harness comes back from Motordrive. To that end I've been working with my brother on a blast cleaning cabinet. The kit came from Frost but the woodwork is all our own work (hence why some of it is a little rough around the edges!).

Here's a picture of two tired blokes leaning on the result of a weekend's work.

It kinda looks like a blast cabinet. It'll take another weekend to get it finished and find out whether it works as well.

And yes, that is a slightly rotten MGB GT in the background. I think this old car lark must be contagious.