Lots of Words, no pictures

My apologies to my visitors today.  A couple of days ago I promised some additional pictures of the car and some further analysis of the condition.  This may be a long post, if you are going to stick around for the whole thing you may want to take care of some personal business, grab a refreshment of choice and then come on back, I'll be here.

I did take some pictures this weekend, but they were not all that great, I waited until to late in the day to get good ones.  So I will have to put that off until next weekend when I can pull that car back out of the garage.

Oh, yes, I did get the garage a little cleaned up this weekend and enough room to move the car inside.  It's not a spacious garage to begin with, so there's enough room for the car with some room to walk around it and begin to do some work.  I need to do some more clutter removal and move some of the remaining boxes O stuff to the storage room.  Need more room around the car to be able to jack it up on stands and role under it on the creeper.

I did find some of my old car repair and diagnostic items, timing light, compression tester, vacuum gauge, dwell meter, uni-sync, block tester, brake tools, so I can start doing some of the things I had set out to do.  But some of the assessment that I did on the car this weekend leads me to think I may need to take a slightly different approach then I had originally thought.  

The car has been sitting for 8 years, probably out in the sun and it shows.  Just about every old piece of rubber on the car is either hard as a rock and crumbling or has turned into putty, it just really depends on where it was sitting on the car.  So the gas line is leaking in about three spots, so when you run the car you are dropping gas in three different places.  It's not squirting out, but it leaves puddles and the smell after the fact in the garage.  So without even considering the rest of the car, there are quite a few hoses and other rubber items in the engine compartment that need to be replaced.  I would rather just pull the engine and trans out of the car, clean the entire engine compartment and then start from scratch.  What I will probably end up doing is piece meal work to get it running and relatively safe to drive.

What would I really rather do?  The whole damn thing.

Pull the body off the frame.  Pull the frame apart down to all the pieces lying about, clean it all up, put in the frame reinforcement pieces to augment the frame in the weak spots.  Then get it all powder coated and start putting it all back together.  New bushings all around, not sure which ones yet, adjustable swing arms mounts, new hubs in the swing arms, converted half shafts with CV joints, differential conversion, new springs all around and upgraded lever shocks in the back.  A few other items, but you get the idea.

Once the frame is pristine, the engine and transmission.

I've done a little research on this and I'm not quite finished yet on deciding what exactly I want, but I do now I want something a little more powerful and reliable.  I know, don't laugh.  I do know that I want the electronic fuel injection, electronic distributor, fan eliminator, lightened flywheel, and the transmission conversion, to new just a few.  There's more, but again, you get the idea.

Once the engine and trans are done, the body.

Pull all of the sheet metal off and strip it all done to bar metal.  Prep and paint, again this one needs a little more research before I settle on the final desire.  I've seen some pretty fantastic work out there on some of the other TR6s, really good quality work on the body shell, and the sheet metal hung back on it.

Now the reality of it is, it's not going to happen this way, at least not at first.  I'm going to get the car running the best I can, some of the upgrades will be done, some will have to wait.  The frame off work may have to wait a year or two.  We are getting rid of the one of the family cars, the freaking Mercedes (the black hole in the ground that sucks money from the wallet) and my current daily driver, the M5 will be going to my wife as her daily driver.  She doesn't put the miles on cars like I do and we need the M5 to last at least 3 more years.  So the TR is going to be my daily driver, fortunately it's only 17 freeway miles to work each day and so I won't be over taxing the car, just need to stay up with the maintenance.

So, if you have stayed with me so far, thanks for reading the ramblings.  I think I will treat each of the short paragraphs a little more in depth in future blogs, so here's what's to come.

A frame restoration plan blog.

An engine rebuild plan blog.

A body shell rebuild plan blog.

Even a blog about the car situation for the rest of the family.

Stay tuned to this station for more updates . . . .