Charging onwards!! Body work etc April-May 2015

Hi Folks!
Its been a few weeks and a mental few weeks too! with ongoing work on the Marcos together with my volunteer work on Shackleton WR963 a lot has been done over the last two months. When I left you all before, I was working on the engine strip down.
The engine was taken apart piece by piece starting with the Heads, all the parts were stored in number order push rods etc put through numbered pieces of cardboard so that they go back in exactly the same place they were before. everything looked great! until of course we got to to the crank and bearings.....most of the bearings were fine, a quarter of them though were quite heavily scored and the crank apparently has so much wear on it that it will need a full re-grind all the bearing shells need replacing and also to my dismay was the bores on the engine itself, these were a different measurement from the top down to the bottom so unfortunately a re-bore HAS to be done so I'll most likely go to just under 3.1 as advised by a contact who has been speaking to Ric Wood (Manufacturer of race spec Essex V6 engines. So thatll be in the memory bank for sometime until I rebuild my engine. At this time we have a spare Essex unit that for cost purposes we will use in mine until such times my original engine is rebuilt as this will cost around a £1000 to sort out fully.

I just want to get the car out on the road so Ill earn the rebuild cost with some extra overtime.

So below are some of the strip down pics of my engine. only limited im afraid as the phone I took them on had a melt down this week and lost half the camera folder!!! grrrr! stupid thing not buying a samsung phone again!

Shortly after this was done the Marcos Chassis was taken over to the Fibreglassers to be reunited with the body tub after we had completed the build up of the chassis.
Significant work had already been done with the body as well as a totally new roof as the old one was quite frankly......knackered!!! Rory at M.H.S invoiced around 300-360? for a new one? he is the only person who can provide one as he has the moulds for them all. so the roof as per previous posts was a top with 4 posts to enable a better fitment to the body (And itll take less time for Andy my fibreglasser to put in place than re-hashing the old one!)

Below are some of the placement pics of the roof before the fitting work was carried out.

As you can see, the bootlid had a significant amount of remedial work done to it too to make it stronger and have a smoother non-crazed finish.

Looking a little bit like a patchwork quilt the marcos has a number of other jobs to be done on it, not least a great deal of remedial work to the front end, the wiper motor cut outs in the front just forward of the front screen had bbeen made larger by years of use and movement these have been shored up and strengthened, together with the make up of a new dash console top the piece that the leather top cover then fits over.
below are some more pictures of this work carried out too.

 This is the old dash top cover as you can see in a number of pieces and fairly rotten the whole top has been recreated in ply as per the below image......

Brand new ply Dash top cover, note the cut outs in the body tub for the new roof pillars included within the new roof mould we had done. 

From this point the new Dash top was installed into the car.

As you can see from the insulation covered gear box tunnel, there is still a lot of fiber glass damage visible and this is also on the list of 'must fixes'

Huge amounts of work have gone into this bit as the seat base rear kept fouling the chassis so a decision to modify this was made to ensure that when unscrewed completely you can remove the chassis with far more ease than currently possible far from the current crow barring and jacking of old! please note the cut outs near the pillar points around the edge of the front screen area this is where the new roof inserts go in.

The Gear box tunnel has been reglassed including repair to the retro ash tray fitting hole. Ill keep this in but no smoking in this car!!

The seat belt mounts now all come through the tub and have been glassed around the bases im told that the floor is now strong enough to stand up on! you currently can with no roof!

I now move to the bit that is massively important on the car.....the roof bond in! This car hasnt had a roof in place for a couple of decades i think, the chop off caused a bit of consternation in the club from what I heard, so this is now remedied please see the below pics emailed to me short time ago that show the re-bond.

Wit the work that has been so far, the car is at last looking far more solid than she was I can rest easy knowing that the car has been fully sorted from top to bottom.

well. at this point it was necessary to clean out the garage that the car hasnt been in for the last two and a half months so we swept out and arranged a lot of things so that we can get the car in at some stage soon. the old chassis that I intend to sell is currently sat in place of the rebuilt marcos  being degreased and prepped for a new coat of paint. This Chassis has been modified to accept the latest strengthening mods, a rebuilt front end with additional bracketry and although 45 years old has been fully approved by M.H.S (as they found out during welding) it is packed solid with waxoyl hence why it hasnt rusted and is in such good condition.

So the main jobs we will be doing over the coming weeks will be painting this (at the point of writing we have painted the front third already and also mechanically prepping yellow V6: TTU 11J for its trip to Luxembourg for their fantastic rally pictures to follow. See ya next time!