Back in Action

Despite the long gap since my last post (almost 18 months!) there has been some progress but also some set-backs along the way. The biggest disappointment was not being finished in time for the 2014 Pre-80’s show which at one stage looked probable but then difficulties in finishing off the Windscreen Frame and Side Screens meant that the target was missed. I was then not able to devote as much time to the project over the last year as I would have liked (due to all the other parts of life’s rich tapestry getting in the way) which meant that the 2015 Pre-80’s show was also missed. But, as time allowed, I did manage to progress other parts of the rebuild and to keep on thinking about solutions to the two main issues and now, finally, I’ve got some progress to report.

Before I go into detail on that, however, I think it’s worth mentioning some of the other tasks that have been completed, some in parallel with the re-wire reported on in the last post and some that have taken place after the re-wire.

With the re-wire almost complete, it was time for the car to go back to Coftons to have the bonnet refitted. You’ll remember from Return of the Tub that the tub, doors and boot lid were delivered back first since the bonnet required further repair work and the new bonnet frame needed to be glassed in (see First Sight of the New Colours). But now the bonnet was ready and waiting in the workshop for the day it could be re-united with the rest of the car (and looking good too!).

Meanwhile, the wiring had progressed to the stage where the engine could be started, most of the accessories had been fitted and tested and the loom to the bonnet lights was in position and ready to be cut to length so that the connectors could be added. All it needed was a bonnet!

So on a bright mid-March morning in 2014 (!) the car was loaded onto the truck ready to be taken to Coftons again. As (un)luck would have it the winch jammed so the car had to be driven on. I had only driven it in and out of the garage and wasn’t too sure of the brakes but Robin managed to negotiate the ramp in a fashion that had my heart in my mouth but ultimately got in on board quickly and successfully. In other words he just pointed it up the ramp and then floored it – watch it here!

A week later she was back on the drive, complete with bonnet, and beginning to look more like a car again. They had also done the final dressing and buffing of the rest of the tub so that the finish was looking superb.

Now it was time to fit and wire up the light units and then fit the front quarter bumpers  and TVR bonnet badge (bought a few years back from ebay to replace the sad looking original). Quality issues with the quarter bumpers were beginning to develop into a saga of their own. When filling up from a jerry can, I spilt some petrol on one of the rear quarter bumpers  and was horrified to see that it turned the surface of the bumper into a gooey mess. At first I thought that the petrol was dissolving the rubber, but on closer inspection it seemed that there was a coating on the rubber and it was this that had dissolved. A call to the supplier (David Gerald) and short discussion later, they agreed to take all 4 bumpers back and re-coat them in an oil/petrol resistant coating. Well done them for a no quibble response to their problem.

The next part of the mini-saga then unfolded as I tried to bolt them back on (having made sure that petrol didn’t dissolve the new coating). A few of the bolts were quite stiff and somehow I managed to loosen the thread inserts which had been bonded into the rubber. In retrospect, this could have been because some of the coating had got into the threads and I should have stopped and investigated before turning the inserts out. But I didn’t, so I had a few more hours work to do to fix them back in. The inserts turned out to be a couple of nuts welded together which provided plenty of edges and crevices to help in re-bonding and after a few experiments, I settled on using P40 to fix them back in.

Eventually, all 4 bumpers were bolted securely back on and looking good. This view also shows the need for further work on the windscreen frame since it had become somewhat lop-sided on the driver’s side.

The rear-end was completed by fitting the number plate and a copy of the original John Britten badge. The plates were supplied by the friendly guys at The Number Plate Centre who were able to supply a copy of the originals with the John Britten – Arkley logo as well as the BS number. They were also able to do this on the basis of my old style V5 (1980’s) Registration Document whereas other suppliers would only accept the latest V5c style.

The badge was a replica of the original enamel badge which I had cracked trying to buff up and was made by Pamela David Enamels and you would struggle to spot the difference – great workmanship but there’s a long waiting list for their time.

With the outside of the tub more or less complete there were a few finishing touches to make to the inside. The space between the gearbox and centre console had had some flimsy heat shield in there originally but which had disintegrated over the years. I replaced it with some thin fibreboard covered with heatshield on the underside and FatMat on the top side. Hopefully, that will reduce heat and noise a bit.

Then an idea that I had from Andrew G. to fill in the floor depression with structural foam seemed like a good idea. This should stop the carpets from being deformed into the hole and any drainage issues will be addressed as and when they occur. I don’t remember too many problems with damp carpets back in the 80’s and she probably won’t be taken out in the wet too often in future.

And a final finishing touch for now, also courtesy of Andrew who supplied a pair of sill plates in the original checker pattern a few years ago when it seemed like all stock of material had been used up. Here it is on the driver’s side riveted in with the same stainless steel pop-rivets used for the heatshield.

Whilst all this was going on, I was also trying to get the side-screens sorted. Coftons had modified the windscreen frame to fit the glass and had adjusted the angle to match the original side-screens but since I had told them that I was planning on getting the side-screens re-fabricated, they suggested it would be best to wait for the new side-screens before finalising the windscreen frame – so the ball was back in my court.

During this restoration, I had become good friends with Rudy M. since he was also restoring a 3000S and had the good fortune to be a skilled metal worker with his own business in Ostend. He also needed to re-fabricate his side-screens and had the capability to make the necessary forming tools for the window frame whilst the rest of the skirting and brackets required his sheet-bending equipment and welding skills. In return for helping with the re-wire of his car, Rudy agreed to make a set of frames, skirts and brackets which I was able to collect when I was over there to fit the looms I had made for him. There had been some discussion about making these in stainless but due to the difficulties of working with stainless it was decided to make them in mild steel and eventually to get them chrome plated.

Since Rudy had noticed that each 3000S had different spacing of the spigot holes he made the brackets adjustable fore-aft and to account for any lateral tolerances he supplied the spigots loose and I would need to weld them to match the tops of my doors. I would also need to grind down the profile of the skirt to match the door tops since we suspected that each door was going to be different . . .

The welding of the spigots proved to be the trickiest job – I had no welding skills so needed to find someone who could do this for me and finding someone willing to come round to my garage and weld them into position using trial and error proved difficult. In the end I found someone who was willing to tack them in position in his workshop and then adjust them later according to my feedback having tried them on the car. This wasn’t ideal and took a few iterations but eventually I ended up with a pair of side screens that more or less matched the car doors.

I was then able to assemble the frame onto the skirt with the window runner and piping strip sandwiched in between ready for Coftons to use as the reference for getting the windscreen frame at the correct angle. With the skirt seal in place they are beginning to look like the real thing.

The fit on the drivers side was about right although the passenger side still needs a bit more work. However, they are now good enough to allow Coftons to adjust the windscreen frame rake. The inner runner channels and glass still need to be fitted but I’ve done a trial fit of them with no issues and decided that it would be safer not to have too much glass in the workshop whilst welding and grinding was going on.

The next step was to book an appointment with Cofton to collect the car again and get the car fitted with all the bits they’ll need to sort the windscreen frame.

So on a fine & dry October day, the now familiar site of the Cofton low-loader appeared in the drive again and this time she was winched sedately aboard with none of the drama of last time.

Finally, progress has been made with the two major issues that have held me up for over a year now. How Coftons got on with the alignment of the windscreen frame will be the subject of my next post, which hopefully won’t be too long now (but then again, how many times have I said that already?).

Rewire – in colour!

One of the best loved features of the M-series TVR’s is that the wiring is done throughout in black wire with coloured rubber sleeves at each end to identify the circuit. Over time, the colour of these sleeves evolves to a beautiful dark brown, making circuit tracing impossible. I first encountered this quirk whilst trying to fix the headlights which had failed around the car’s 2nd birthday. This turned out to be due to corroded connectors exposed to all the muck and bullets of the front wheel arch down near the offside bonnet hinge.  Many years later, the grease that I had smeared the new connectors with to protect them was still in place and preserving the contacts! However, one of the early decisions regarding the wiring was that these bullet connectors would be replaced with waterproof connectors.

Back to the rubber sleeve issue, I found out all those years ago that by rolling them inside out the colour could be identified since the inside of the sleeve hadn’t faded as much as the outside. My mistake was to not turn the sleeves back again – so that over the intervening time both inside and outside became the same shade of deep chocolate brown thus ensuring that many hours were required to decode the loom so that I could make a new one.

This article therefore covers the ups and downs and the fun I had in getting the car re-wired, which happened over a long period of time and overlaps with some of the previous articles. At this point I should declare that I understand much more about electrics than the mechanics of the car. However, I was still hoping at the outset to be able to buy a replacement loom and just connect this to all the new electrical items but once I had stripped out all the wiring and saw the issues with the original concept, I thought there was no alternative but to design and build new wiring looms myself. Probably the correct decision but more time consuming than I originally thought.

As I was stripping out the loom it became obvious that none of it was going to be re-used. The picture below shows what I discovered when I removed the dash (probably around 3 years ago now). The connectors had pulled off the fusebox terminals and the rest was a real rat’s nest and a daunting prospect to try and unravel and trace, let alone rebuild. Despite that, I was determined to label everything that I could identify to help in tracking down what was connected to what, where and how.

The dash wiring wasn’t in too bad a condition but I could see that some of the terminals needed replacing and the instrument earths needed new life so again decided it all had to be replaced.

Similarly, the boot wiring was basically OK so the main motivation in replacing it was to have the wires in the correct colours and to get new terminals and connectors on everything to improve reliability. The bonnet and engine bay looms and connectors had suffered as shown in the first picture above so there was no alternative than to start there from scratch as well.

The main part of the wiring loom (engine bay and behind the dash) was labelled and hung on the garage wall. Bit by bit this was dissected so that I could trace out the individual circuits and see how they connected to each other. I had the original circuit diagram from the car’s handbook but this contained a lot of extras that the 3000S didn’t have (e.g. heated rear screen switch) as well as a few obvious mistakes (such as the brake warning circuit is shown earthed at both ends with no supply voltage) which didn’t build confidence in using it as a guide for a new loom. On top of this, a circuit diagram doesn’t show where all the real connections are made so, in terms of working out what connectors to order and what the lengths of each wire colour should be, it was no help at all.

I therefore set about drawing up the circuits in CAD (TinyCAD to be exact – free and easy to use) starting with the Battery, Starter, Ignition and fuse circuits. The circuit below is probably tricky to read at this size but clicking on it will bring it up in full screen resolution that should then be easy enough to read. I suppose putting up circuit diagrams on a car blog is like putting equations into popular physics books (à la Stephen Hawking and “A Brief History of Time” where only e=mc² featured). So this will be the only one – promise.  If you’re interested in the full set just let me know and I can email them to you.

The main idea behind starting here was that I wanted to replace the original Lucas 4 way glass fuse box with the more reliable blade fuse system. At the same time I could fuse individual circuits, hopefully making the electrics safer as well as more reliable. I finally decided on the arrangement shown using two 8-way fuse boxes, one for the unswitched circuits and one for switched. This still doesn’t fuse every single circuit but with some logical doubling up on the supplied circuits, it’s a major improvement on the original system of 4 glass fuses (IMHO).

The next thought was where to locate the new fuse boxes. There would have been space where the original box was located on the bulkhead and it would have been easy to access the fuses from the engine bay but would also have been an obvious modification. Since one of the goals of the restoration was to change as little as possible I decided to make it not so obvious and locate them in the driver’s footwell. I blocked up the hole with P40 and a couple of layers of matting on the inside and in the engine bay it was covered by the heatshield . That way, I don’t have any leaks through the bulkhead and the absence of the old 1970’s box will not be so obvious as the presence of 1990’s new technology.

This picture shows it as work in progress as a hingeable flap containing fuseboxes and the relays for the Dip and Main beam lights. The blanked off original fuse box hole can be seen top left next to the steering column bracket. The connectors at the bottom left are new connectors for the ignition and stalk switches as well as a couple of connectors for the dashboard (more on this later).

The hinged panel turned out to be a bit flimsy since it was made from 2 layers of trimboard and hinged on a piece of carpet.  I therefore decided to replace it with a 3mm aluminium panel and did away with the hinge idea. I fixed a wooden batten to the front of the A-post using P40 and screwed the trimmed panel to it with wood screws. In this position the fuses are relatively unobtrusive but still accessible on the (hopefully rare!) occasions that they will blow. With the relays behind the forward edge of the panel they can also be replaced without too much trouble. The finished result is shown in the picture below.

To tidy up what was becoming a rat’s nest of bullet connectors where the boot loom joined up with the main loom and where all the earth connections were being made (above and to the right of the steering column) I decided to make a terminal board of 12 x 6.3mm blade terminals. This was a piece of aluminium bent into a top hat section and bolted to the bulkhead using the bonnet catch fixing bolts. On the panel, I screwed 2 rows of 6 blade connectors with each row soldered to the other using some solid copper wire. This used up a lot less space than a bullet connector solution and formed a star point for all earths. The panel is earthed directly to the offside chassis earthing stud with a 44/0.3 wire (rated at 33A) and all other earths for the cabin and boot connect into it meaning that each earth is only 1 pair of connections away from the main earth thus avoiding unreliable and difficult to trace daisy-chains. This can be seen in the photo below (the wires in a plastic bag are for the interior light and are ready for the time when the windscreen frame finally gets finished).

The wooden dashboard has been completely stripped and re-trimmed. The instruments have also had their bezels replaced and while I was doing this I stripped out the innards to check that everything was OK – which they were so just a clean, polish and bench test and they were ready to go back in. I renewed all the wiring mainly to get rid of the black wires but some of the terminals needed replacing as well. One thing that I didn’t re-use was the old bi-metal voltage regulator. The modern solid-state regulators provide a much more reliable solution and are not expensive.

To make it easier to wire-up, I decided to use two 9-way Mate’n’Lok connectors. This meant that all the vehicle wires going to the dash could be terminated at a connector and thus worked on separately. Similarly, the dash wiring could be completed on the bench and then offered up for mating with the rest of the vehicle loom at a later stage.  This won’t help too much in the future with dash removal since there will still be all the mechanical components to disconnect – speedo cable, oil tube, heater cables, air ducts etc. but once that’s done, the plugs can be disconnected and the dash removed from the car for any further work (hopefully this won’t be needed!). The 2 connectors can be seen at the lower edge of the dash next to the air-vent hole.

The back of the dash still looks a mess when all the aforementioned mechanical parts are added but at least they are hidden from view when fully assembled. . .

. . . so that the car is starting to look like a car again!

As mentioned in the first paragraph, in order to avoid the corrosion of the bonnet connections I decided to use two 9-pin waterproof connectors, one for the nearside and the other for the offside lights. I needed 9-pins so that I could feed each lamp and earth with separate wires. These wires then ran back to the area of the washer bottle where I could use bullet connectors without the risk of them being exposed to the corrosive muck being thrown up by the wheels.

This provides quite a neat solution – the two connectors are visible in the photos below just forward of the two bonnet hinges.

That just left the wiring in the boot which was pretty straightforward. The only downside is that the lamp cluster bulb holders are notorious for creating bad earths through the clips that hold them in place. I thought that I had found a source of new ones but although they were nice and shiny, the build quality was poor meaning that the clips came out of the plastic body when removed from the cluster a couple of times. So far, I haven’t found a reliable replacement so that part of the chapter isn’t closed just yet.

I also ran a wire so that a rear fog-lamp could be wired-up in place of one of the reversing lamps. I’m not a great fan or user of these lamps so I haven’t converted it yet but it can be easily done in future if deemed necessary.

Amazingly, the motorised radio aerial sprang into life when first connected up (after 25 years) but after one up/down cycle it gave up the ghost. The motor still ran but the aerial wouldn’t extend. More in hope than expectation, I stripped it down and found that the telescopic aerial is driven up and down with a nylon cord that had become detached from the wheel. I eventually managed to figure out how it was supposed to connect and with a bit of luck managed to get it greased up and back together so that it now works perfectly. Small victories like this keep you going!

Another modification I decided to incorporate was a power socket in the boot. I had already run a 33 Amp cable from the fusebox for this purpose and found an unobtrusive place for the take-off connector on the boot lid latch cover.

All the electrical stuff is now installed and working except the interior light at the top of the windscreen frame since the frame hasn’t been installed yet.

In the end, the actual rewiring was not that difficult but what took the time was the planning so that I could decide where the cables would run and what length of each colour wire I needed to order as well as the type and number of terminals and connectors that I would need.

And the added bonus of doing it myself is that I now have a completely new loom installed in all the right colours and that I completely understand . We’ll see how reliable it is once the car is back on the road. . .

The continuing story of the struggle to make this happen will appear in the next blog which may not be too long in coming (but then again, I’ve said that before haven’t I?)

 

Bolting bits back on

Once the trimming was more or less complete, it was time to start getting all the other bits bolted back on. The wiper system seemed to be in good condition and so I set about cleaning the motor and rack to get rid of old grease and then applying liberal quantities of new grease before bench testing them. 

Everything seemed to be smooth and quiet so I re-assembled the motor, rack and wheel boxes back in position. However, it sounded a bit rough when testing it in situ so checked the mounting of the motor against early pictures. This showed that the motor had originally been mounted at a slight angle. I had mounted it horizontally since there were 2 holes to choose from and it seemed reasonable to use the horizontal pair  However, when mounted at an angle, using  the alternative hole as shown in the photo below, the difference was amazing – a nice quiet and smooth action again. Seems like a bit of trial and error in the TVR factory since the other hole doesn’t appear to do anything and was probably drilled in error!

Next up were the bonnet catches. I’d had the brackets powder coated but didn’t want to disassemble to slides to powder coat individual bits so painted those by hand. Using stainless nuts, bolts and washers it all went back together nicely.

Before the car was laid up, I had only just replaced the bonnet pull cable and handle so I was able to re-use this after a clean up. The outer cable needed replacing though and I sourced a suitable length from a bicycle shop together with a couple of new ferrules to fit on the ends once cut to length. A length of nylon tube was slipped over the outer cable to give it a bit more protection against the sharp edge of the bracket.
At this stage, the bonnet wasn’t ready to fit so I’ll have to wait to see how the they operate. 

In the meantime it was time to start getting the rear lights back together. I had already sourced new side markers since the originals were completely rusted but the rear lamp clusters were not too bad. However, I’d forgotten that the nearside lamp had taken a ding when the rear end went on excursion and got acquainted with a stone wall sometime in the 80’s. Once stripped and cleaned it didn’t seem possible to repair this damage so I looked around for a replacement. Ebay didn’t come up with anything at the time but a little bird told me that @Adrian had some, so that was duly ordered and sent for powder coating with the offside cluster. That just left the reflectors where the original reflective coating had completely crumbled. The reflector surfaces were cleaned with white spirit which removed the remaining reflective coating and gave a nice clean surface for a new coating. I was toying with using silver or white gloss paint but in the end settled for using chrome tape. The secret to applying this was to cut it into small triangular strips so that each one could be smoothed around the internal 3D curves of the reflectors. This gave an effect a bit like those flash-bulb reflectors of the 50’s and 60’s but certainly served their purpose.

 The lens covers cleaned up well with soap and water using a toothbrush to get into tight corners. The outer surfaces had some micro-scratches which were largely removed using AutoSol and in the end, when mounted on the car, looked as good as new.

Note that in the above picture you can just see that the gasket is upside down. I noticed this when looking at the photo and have corrected it – just haven’t taken another photo yet!

Getting the light cluster units mounted meant finding some more nuts since there were a few missing. I eventually discovered that they were 3BA and ordered some in stainless. These fitted the thread but not any of the spanners that I had so I ground out an old small spanner that I had since trying to tighten them with pliers was a non-starter.

Once mounted, I was able to complete the boot wiring. I had already laid the wires from the cockpit to the boot before the trimming started so just needed to make up a new loom for the boot lights and connect it up. At the moment I’ve wired both reversing lamps up as reversing lamps  but I’ve put in a red/yellow wire so that the near-side reversing  lamp could be converted to a rear fog light at some stage. The original bulb-holders were pretty rusty and to save cleaning up all the contact surfaces I thought it would be a good idea to source new ones. Although these are nice and shiny, the quality is not that good since I had to resort to soldering the contact ring to the bulb earth tag on a couple of holders –  the contact ring pulled out of the holder as I was removing them from the lamp cluster.

The wiring itself turned out reasonably tidy but the carpet trimming looked a bit of a mess. This is mainly due to TVR’s original design which didn’t provide any covers for the lamp clusters and just relied on the floor carpet covering them up. Also the carpet around the side markers was trimmed too high so will need some re-work to at least get the carpet down to floor panel level.

The Trim Story

Back in October 2013, I wrote that the trimming was complete and that I’d be posting pictures in a week or so – and hence close the chapter on the trimming. I also asked the question “Do chapters ever close?” and I think we all know the answer to that now!

Almost 6 months on, a lot has happened but, for a variety of reasons, I haven’t updated this blog so it’s high time I brought you all up to date. As an aside, it’s also taken a while to get used to using WordPress instead of MyOpera for the blog. I’ve used MyOpera for years and was very familiar with it so changing to WordPress was a bit fraught in places but I’m now beginning to get to grips with it. One advantage is that clicking on a photo will open a full size version so you can get at any detail that interests you.

The idea with the trimming was for John (The Trim Technician) to trim all the panels (that I had left with him back on his open day) in his workshop and then come down and fit them and complete the re-carpeting at my place. Most of this went to plan and, with luck on our side, we found a few dry days at the beginning of October so that John and Duncan could work from a temporary trimming bench in the garage and have the car out on the driveway to give them plenty of access room for fitting the carpets and panels.

First up was the FatMat soundproofing which was softened with a heat gun and rolled on to get good adhesion and a smooth finish. This was applied all round the footwells, transmission tunnel and back shelf.

Whilst Duncan was doing that, John was fitting the rear wheel-arch trim and the rear trim panels – which is where things started to go wrong but more on that later . . .

Once the FatMat and rear trim had been applied, the carpets were glued in place. These had been pre-cut based on the originals  and then trimmed to fit in-situ.

One of the few things that I planned to improve on over the original was the wiring and in particular to use the more reliable blade fuses rather than the glass types. I had decided to use two 8-way fuse-holders (one for switched and one for unswitched circuits) and had toyed with putting these on the bulkhead. In the end I decided to try and find a more discrete place in (order to preserve the impression of originality!). The panel on the A-post by the driver’s right knee seemed to offer the best compromise of being discrete but allowing reasonable access. The panel hinges out for even easier access and is held in place using an L-shaped bracket at floor level.

A trial fit of the dashboard, centre console and driver’s seat and it really is starting to look like a car again. The seats, in particular, were looking good – they had new seat squabs and head-rest inserts (courtesy of @Adrian) but used the original back foam since this turned out to be in good condition.

 

However, as I mentioned earlier, things started to go wrong when fitting the rear trim panel. In the photo below the front edge should have a flap of trim material so that it can be fitted under the door seal and cover the gap between the card and the body. The solution on the day to glue in some black trim material didn’t really work so needs a better solution which I’m still working on . . . 

The next issue became apparent when the door cards were fitted – some of the trim cuts could be seen on the inner curves for the door pocket. The solution here was to fit some black piping around the pocket edges which works well and actually smartens up the card – but it shouldn’t have happened really so a bit disappointed in that.

 

The Trim Story took place in October and it’s taken me till now to get it onto the blog so apologies for keeping you all waiting.  It has been more of a Saga than a Story mainly because sending the panels away for trimming  and then finishing off the trim on the drive is a bit of an unorthodox way of getting it done to say the least. Maybe there would have been better alternatives in hindsight but once the rear trim gap issue is resolved the result is going to be better than new.

There has been other progress over the winter including the re-wire and getting all the other ancillary bits bolted back on. That’s another story though and I hope it’s not going to be another 6 months before you read about that.

 

Return of the Tub

First sight of the new colours

Light at the end of the tunnel . . . ?

Big Decisions made

Was the last update really in November?

. . . nightmare!