Unibody Mk4 Spitfire 6

[BiTurbo228]

@Nick Jones: Yeah the authorities thing worries me slightly. I'm hoping that by changing the V5 in stages I might be able to slip under the radar (apparantly it's doing it all at once that flags things).

 

If not I'll have to get a Q-plate, but I'm fairly sure I'll do it anyway

 

I'll put some thought into propshaft clearance and chassis when I hook things up. How about underneath the chassis? Arch it upwards to clear the exhaust underneath?

 

Yeah I know the Slat 4 is fairly sub-par, but it's dirt cheap and I'm fairly certain you can get them humming along quite nicely with enough effort

 

@JohnD: Yeah that'd be ideal, but I had such a faff making my roll hoop it's put me off it until I've got the funds to get 4 cages-worth of tubing (seems to be the ratio of duds to good stuff when I was bending tube...)

[pomwah]

JohnD

 

Is that related to the work done in this article?

http://www.stanceworks.com/forums/showthread.php?t=42151&page=3

 

They talk about torsional stiffness and weld in a plate to improve the situation.  With a swing spring I'm not certain how much it would really help my car, but I dream about incorporating it if I ever get around to taking the body off mine.

 

Interesting project all around that one. I wonder what happened to it, been searching but it seems to have disappeared after, I assume, the students graduated?

[BiTurbo228]

That is a shame. I wonder where it's gone. I hope one of them kept it, although registering it might be difficult...

[Nick Jones]

Not sure it would have been at all practical.  Turbines have strange performance characteristics compared to a reciprocating engine and I'd think it would have a truly epic drink problem, never mind the risk of burning the paint off the traffic around you or setting pedestrians alight......

 

Did grieve me a bit seeing them chop up that minty tub and bonnet given the crap we've had to work with on our Spitty!

 

Nick

[richbike]

That's an interesting link. Do you reckon he used OD or standard gearbox ;-)

 

I suppose the only thing beyond that would a Merlin. Keeping it spitfire. Not sure where the driver would sit though.

 

Simon...your mission should you choose to accept it.

[oldtuckunder]

That's an interesting link. Do you reckon he used OD or standard gearbox ;-)

 

 

They did use the standard Spitfire Diff and Drive Shafts though!

[BiTurbo228]

That's an interesting link. Do you reckon he used OD or standard gearbox ;-)

 

I suppose the only thing beyond that would a Merlin. Keeping it spitfire. Not sure where the driver would sit though.

 

Simon...your mission should you choose to accept it.

I seem to remember working it out that if you swapped a Merlin V12 into a Spitfire the engine would weigh as much as the entire rest of the car!

[richbike]

Perfect 50/50 weight distribution

[BiTurbo228]

 

So, this is what I've been working on recently

 

The next step for the Spitfire is to strip the underside of the body and paint it, ready for welding to the chassis. I looked into the prices of new car rotisseries for all of 5 seconds before thinking ‘sod that for a game of soldiers’ and ordered some box-section.

 

The a-frame itself was pretty simple, and to make it easier to turn the body over I bought a £16 winch from eBay and cannibalised bits from it. I also drilled holes in the gear through which a little pin fits to lock the body in place.

 

You can sort of see here and in the picture before that it’s got a box that’s welded to a pin which fits into the a-frame. The box is then bolted to a bracket which attaches to the car, and will allow us to mount different cars on the frame by just making up new brackets (and is also why it’s taller than it needs to be for the spit body). 

 

However, my favourite feature is that it folds! A really useful feature for someone with an actual working space that's smaller than Jack Olsen's excellent 12-Gauge garage, and certainly without the level of organisation and innovation that has gone into that place.

 

I’ve just got to shift the body forwards slightly so I can get to the back of it properly and make up a bracket to bolt to there and I can get cracking

 

Side-note: if you haven't seen much detail on the 12-gauge garage before it's truly inspirational: http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=55006

[Nick Jones]

Very nice.  You need to get the Chinese to put some together for you, paint 'em red and then you can flog 'em......  Some might like to see wheels on them?

 

Nick

[BiTurbo228]

Great plan! Need to price up the bits and pieces and see if I can make a few bob

 

If it's to get wheels then I'll need a long bar to fit inbetween the two A frames. It rocks a little at the moment with only on on solid ground and the other side on an axle stand piled on top of some wooden blocks :S

 

Might not be a bad idea to do anyway actually. Need to think about how to attach that and make it collapsible too.

[BiTurbo228]

Oh, and make it adjustable too so I can use it for different length cars (such as when I've got the chassis attached).

[BiTurbo228]

It's 1am......and I finally have a Spitfire on its side! Started at 7 and made a rear cradle which you can see in the pics below. A lot of head-scratching about how to get the pin the right height. Then I had some teething problems with the gears not quite meshing so had to cut and reweld those a little lower. Then I had to add some little feet for stability. Then I had to upgrade the little locking pin to an M8 high-tensile bolt as my eyeballing to guess the centre of gravity was quite a ways out :S all working nicely now though

[richbike]

Nicely done.

You decided on your re-enforcing strategy yet?

 

I'm contemplating an engine hoist made of bits of scaffolding tower and timber. What could possibly go wrong😋

[BiTurbo228]

Thanks not yet on the reinforcing, although this is the next step to get that done. Need to strip the underside where the chassis runs so I can hit it with some weld-through primer. Then I'll get it shimmed up properly on the chassis for door gaps and then weld it in place! Then, once I've likely thoroughly distorted it I'll repair the leading edge of the roof and weld that to the windscreen frame, then re-make the box sections in the roof and then it's done!

 

Apart from my little tubing idea, but that will likely need to happen after I've made my exhaust manifold and hooked up the steering for clearance.

 

I'd say that'd work fine for an engine hoist I've just got a ring pinched from my sister's stables screwed into one of the 9x2 roof joists and a ratchet winch which has so far lifted my engine numerous times, a Jag IRS unit which probably weighs as much as that, a Jag AJ6 which weighs significantly more and an old Drummond Brothers double-height bed lathe we sold for spares!

[BiTurbo228]

Well the Spitfire hasn't got much attention recently as again the moderns are acting up, but I've also been doing a lot of work on the garage.

 

Most of it is finished, but I've come up with a pretty crazy idea to store a bodyshell in the upper reaches of my 11' tall garage.

 

It’s fairly nuts, but it’s pretty space-efficient (moreso than a 2-post lift anyway). The plan is to build a frame to support a bodyshell then have a hoist lift it up to the ceiling using cables attached to the ceiling joists. At the left-hand side of the picture is the plan view of my garage To get enough drag on the single cable for it to be able to lower it all the way to the floor I need to double-back the rearmost cables which adde complexity, but shouldn’t be too bad.

 

In the centre of the picture is a side-view of the frame and cable arrangement. The cables will be looped down to a snatch-block and then connected to different ceiling joists to spread the load. By looping it down to the snatch-block, I halve the weight the hoist has to draw (essentially to lift 1000kg it just has to lift 500kg twice as far). This is good as high capacity hoists are bloody expensive...

 

For safety I’ll have a straight chain looped around another ceiling joist that will provide a failsafe in the ‘up’ position should the hoist brakes fail. Also, each individual part will be specced to be able to hold more than I’ll ever hold on this thing entirely by itself. As the vast majority of parts are duplicated, and any single parts will be beefier than that, it should be pretty safe. Oh, also, as per the far-right I’ll reinforce the corners of the wall where it meets the ceiling joists to stop the whole thing trying to pull the garage down.

 

All in all it should cost me £300-£350. About half of what a 2-post lift would cost second hand (with probably a reasonable amount of the functionality).

 

Thoughts? Ideas? Referrals to mental institutes?

[richbike]

Presumably your not using screw in eyelets this time. Wasn't entirely sure about that one you had the winch on ;-)

[BiTurbo228]

Yeah I'll be looping chains around the the ceiling joists much less sketchy...

[JohnD]

THANK YOU, Pomwah!

 

That gas turbine Spitfire project was epic, awesome, almost up to Bad Obsession Binkie standard!

I'm surprised they needed a mechanical transmission with those exhausts!

 

Yes, that thread is a much larger record of the project that what I was able to post, just as their chassis stiffening was a much smaller part of the project.

I fear that Nick's suspicion that the car was pulled apart/cut up was right, looking at the Project Groups picture on page 6(?).  Despite their words of hope, I fear they know its bound for the scrapper.

 

John

[BiTurbo228]

Well that's a shame. I hope the remaining parts went on to keep other Spits on the road.

 

It's a shame they didn't sell it on for $500 actually as then it would be eligible for the 24h of LeMons.

 

It could have followed in the steps of the Rover/BRM turbine endurance racers at Le Mans, and the LeMons crowd would have loved it

[Nick Jones]

The LeMons crowd might have got roasted in their jackets........

 

But yes, would have been a source of much entertainment I'm sure.

 

Nick

[BiTurbo228]

It's been a bit quiet on the Spitfire front recently. Stripping old paint and re-painting in weld-through primer makes for a bit of a tedious post :S however, I have reinforced the open box section that the shock (and body) mounts to on the chassis (the bit on the left).

 

That’ll be useful if I ever go over to coilovers, and the backstays of my rollcage mount just above there so that will strengthen them too

 

Once I've finished the stripping and repainting I'll be able to test-fit the bodyshell, gap the doors and then weld it in place!

[BiTurbo228]

Also, fairly certain I have a problem (see picture below).

 

It was only £114 though sold the Minilites that it came with for £120 to recoup my losses (never really warmed to the Minilite design), and it comes with the 3.63 diff I need for the Slant 4 Spitfire.

 

It looks like it must have hit a massive pothole at some point as the chassis is bent pretty significantly around the N/S suspension tower, but nowhere else. Rusty anyway so if I can find a dead bulkhead I can do some crash testing of my little reinforcement brace between the suspension towers and the bulkhead.

 

The body's a little rusty in places, but definitely usable. Not sure what to do with it yet though. If I can find a GT6 roof structure I'll turn it into my GT16v idea with a Dolly Sprint engine. Other options would be the Rover OHC 6 I've got lying around, or maybe a Triumph Triple.

 

All a rather long way away though. First thing's first is to build a little shelter for it so it doesn't disintegrate before I get round to it!

[BiTurbo228]

Oops, wrong pic!

[BiTurbo228]

 

When God himself strips paint and rust from classic cars (it is the Lord’s work after all), he uses wire wheel attachments for angle grinders. It took me well over a month of weekends to strip and paint the chassis (which is good to go incidentally). The silver bit on the bodyshell above took me an hour and ten minutes. Pic of the chassis (and some mess) too