Bye Bye Rust!

I keep finding more and more little jobs to do with every visit! The throttle pedal has sheered at one end so a quick visit to the local breakers solved that. This was a bit of a pain to change, the christmas pounds are still with me and i struggled to crawl into the footwell and reach upto the retaining clips and pedal mounts at the top of the bulkhead. Still its done now!

So then off with the drivers side front wing. Quite bizzarre how this one has rotted out yet the passenger side is perfect with no rot at all. Im guessing a drain tube has been blocked. The wing was a bit of a pain to remove, there are two screws right inside at the front and you have to get your hand inside the splash guard, with battered knuckles and torn hands the bloody thing caved in and the wing was removed.



You can see the remains of some of the wing in these shots.





A little cleaning up with the scraper and wire brush and we got back to the main body. Apart from the lip which has a small amount of rot everything else is really solid, phew! The whole lot was jenolited and then silver hammerite was applied. The whole innner wing was then waxoiled. This should be it now in that area for the rest of the cars life...........hmm!





So all the car needs now is a wing and some paint then its MOT time :-)

Ash.

New Project

I’m sick of the Spitfire! The whole project has zapped all my enthusiasm of late. It’s at that stage I guess a lot of restorations get too. The car has had lots of time and expense put into it but it’s still a long way from being a nice vehicle to look at, tinker with and overall get in and drive!

So for now I have shut the garage door and it will stay like that until I get some spark back and carry on.

Last week my good Friend Phil Wright bought himself a 1985 Saab 900 Turbo, then another mate Ben speed bought himself a 1992 325i BMW. This got me thinking about my old BMW that’s laid up in a garage; I really should do something about this. The car is kept in a council garage that i rent, not ideal but not much else i can do about this at the moment. Because of this ive not seen it in a long while.

Armed with a battery and a gallon of fuel I popped down to see it on Sunday. Poured the fuel in, connected the battery,the car fired immediately fuel reached the injectors and once the oil had circulated sounded pretty dam fine! When I started being self employed I had a large loan to pay off and I was working out of the boot of this car, she was faithful to me, eventually I moved onto modern vans for business and bought another e46ci BMW to use as a toy but I could never quite bring myself to sell this one, I think its time to put something back for her loyalty.

Its a fully specced 325i, it has many options and toys and I have piles and piles of history, all the sets of keys, the original sales invoice, the spare wheel is brand new and has never seen tarmac!

Ok enough waffling. I yesterday went to the trade wholesaler near me and bought all the filters, coolant, oil, plugs etc and spent yesterday evening giving her a full service and added a brand new battery. Its fairly easy to work on, the hardest part is changing the plugs as they have coil packs with deep tubes on each plug and then the plugs themselves are set deep into the alloy head. Fairly easy job but they had been in there a while and i didnt fancy taking the head off if one snapped! With some time and persuasion it all turned out ok. So with new fluids I started her up and let the car run for 45 minutes to get everything warmed up. I’m pleased to say its all looking okay. The front wing is rotten in the bottom corner but it’s only a bolt on panel and the actual car body is fine.

So the plan Thursday is to change the pollen filter and remove the front wing. The filter looks a bit of a pain as its buried deep in the dashboard somewhere, bit of fiddling I am sure it wont be as bad as the other e36 guys have informed me!

Once that’s done then it’s off for its MOT. It was last MOT'd in early 2005 but I never actually used it, it’s done less than 100 miles so watch this space, wish me luck and fingers crossed. Once we get that ticket i will give it a good valet, as its shockingly dirty and then just drive it - see what happens!

Then Phil, you can look out for me in your rear view mirror on your Sunday Blat accross the Peak District!!!

Hopefully having a toy to actually use will lift my enthusiasm and ill get cracking on the spitfire again!

Cheers,

Ash.