BbyCbra - The 7.5 Litre TR6 Project

going full tilt - installing a fairlane tilt front end on a '53 f-100

I found this today when I took afew moments to investigate how I'm going to build the tilt front, the search term that returned the most on topic hits via google was "tilt front end". Not sure I've got enought room to put a motor setup to lift the hood automatically but its got great pictures. real close to what I had envisioned.

The other site that I saw is a yellow bronco where the whole clip slides fwd a few inches to provide the room needed for the inner bottom corners to clear the firewall. he uses a truck latch motor 'from a towncar' to lock everything down once its back on, nice idea.

Ashton Little emailed me this morning asking if I'd add this site to the Triumphs webring. I've been actually abit concerned (not losing sleep or anything...) about the reception I'd get from the owners who have the nicer cars that they tend to think of in "restoration" terms. My car is in no way a restoration candidate, never has been. So when I thought about customizing it to make it more exciting to drive it seemed like a no brainer to put in a drivertrain with a bigger heartbeat. Anyhow, enough of my guilt... Part of the webring signup is to place the webring navigation code onto the page, I guess so that the webring code can recognize my site. It looks like for now that the code will live in the navigation on the bottom left side. I'll work with getting it integrated into the site abit better as time goes by.

Cannot find server

thats not good... The BritishV8 site is down... hope thats just a temporary issue. Tons of great info and links on that site. Its actually run by Dan Masters but I hear from those in the know that he's kinda burnt out on running the site. I dropped him an email afew months back offering to help out, but got no reply.

I'm commited. The Eastwood part was a whiff, it didn't work out well at all. I tried it on one or 2 spot welds but given the way the welds were done on the corners there was no way it was going to be effective. The tool itself seems like it would work well on a flat surface -- in fact the picture below shows just the way it would work well. What the picture doesn't show is how short the thing is, it can't be more than 1 1/4" tall. The head of the drill must be just out of the picture because there isn't much room left on the shank of that thing.

So I took to the brute force method and beat the welds out. I took a 8" snap-on flatblade screwdriver, filed it abit to get the tip sharp and then used a combo of rubber/plastic mallet supplemented with a small 5lb sledge. I'll mock up a pic later to show the seams I worked loose to get it out. Lots of old, hard putty covering some of the seams, the rust under was not too pretty...

The knife that Eastwood offers might work well here but theres so little room to work between the panels that are all sandwiched together. Give a hand to the welders that put these bodies together, they did quite a job. The welds probably run about 3 per inch, and given the technology its amazing how they got them right in on the edges where they are near impossible to beat out. I think I only had the screwdriver tip go thru the firewall once, but since alot of that metal will be replaced I'm not too concerned - just trying not to make extra work.

Anyhow, got the drivers side off tonight after quite a battle. I ended up leaving part of the inner fender on -- I decided to leave a ~8" section from the firewall near the wiper motor to where the dropoff starts. I figure that I can cut it out later if I need to, but there are 2 bolt holes that I can use as alignment holes for the flipup hood and/or a support of some sort. Also by reattaching the bolt-on wing that goes right below it, it will help enclose the inner panel from as much road dust as possible.

The tub itself, now starting to be exposed, is starting to show its age. The metal is pretty fatigued. I used a regular hacksaw with a cheap blade to cut some metal and welds and it went thru the metal like butter. I've got some firewall work ahead with replacing sheetmetal, but my new Weldmark MIG welder should make easy work of that. I'll do some experementing with some of the extra metal I cut out tonight when I'm getting ready to start welding, I'm sure the metal will need a much softer MIG power setting.

The spotweld remover bit arrived today. I'm concerned that I'm not going to be able to reach all the spot welds once I've started... I don't really have a backup plan if this goes south once I've commited myself by drilling the first one out.

The tool looks almost too big across, wondering if I should have gotten a 5/16" one instead, but Eastwood doesn't offer one. Time will tell. I didn't make time to pull the engine this week, work and the first of what should be many flying lessons started on Tuesday. Frankly I find myself dreading the start of this project, once I pull the motor then I'm commited. Yipes, can you tell I'm nervous?

Spent a few minutes on the car today. I've got the hood, front valance, and outer front fenders off. Now I'm looking at getting the inner fenders unattached. I figured out that these inner fender panels are held on by a ton of spot welds on some pretty thin, and old, british metal. I've tried the "beat it with a thin screwdriver to see if the welds will let go" method, but I'm hesitant to work the old metal too hard.

So I ordered up a spot weld drill from Eastwood that is supposed to remove the panel from the weld by cutting around the weld, and not harming the 2nd/3rd layer of metal still bound by the spot weld. I checked the local orchard supply but they didn't have anything. No body shop supply houses nearby so this seemed the best bet. $20 plus shipping, hope it works well...

I'm also going to pull the engine/trans as one piece next week so that I can get in the engine bay and get to the spot welds that I can't see or get to with the motor in. I'm going to rig up a stand on a rolling pallet to hold the motor. I'm still debating if I'm going to sell the motor/trans setup or not. Its running good, but its getting old and will need to be rebuilt. Part of me thinks that keeping it is the way to go, perhaps in 20 years when the boy is driving the car he'll want to put it back to stock. The motor is the original, but the tranny is a swap in that happened prior to me getting it.