Colin Sharp

In Part I, I closed with the newly painted shell arriving back at the workshop. It had been mounted on a square section tubular frame since removal of the suspension and while this had been a godsend for moving it between workshop and spray booth it made the painter's job of spraying the underside much more difficult than a rolling frame. This resulted in considerable hand painting of shadow areas in box sections and wheelarches. However, as the shell stood outside the workshop in the August sunshine it became apparent just how red a car it had become! Such is Glasurit's Rosso Ciaro.

As I mentioned in Part I, I hoped initially to remove suspension engine etc in large lumps and have little to do to them before refitting since they had done just 15,000 miles since the last refit. Twenty years, six of which were laid up, saw to it that I would never be satisfied putting such tatty running gear back into the "new" shell and so each lump was refitted in parallel with the shell work.

Rear Suspension/Back Axle
Removed as a unit, this was steam cleaned and stripped with the exception of the differential, which wasn't broke so I didn't fix it. I had changed the rear springs in 1989 after rear ground clearance had reduced to the point where the exhaust systems were in real danger. Thus, they were thoroughly cleaned, painted and then soaked with engine oil whilst laying on each side in turn. The dampers were also cleaned up and refitted since they had been doing their job perfectly well. I wonder if I might revise this view when the car is running again but it is not a major task to replace them.
The rear axle itself was stripped to bare metal and initially painted in red Hammerite but this looked completely wrong when offered up to the restored shell. Much to my son's disgust (because he had spent a day painting it!) it was stripped again and repainted with two pack gloss black over an etch primer. I have to admit here that the axle was the one area I had not touched in 25 years of ownership and I did not even realise there was a breather in the axle casing just to the offside of the differential… mine was blocked solid. The only other job on the axle was to replace the nose oil seal which had always seeped oil - I wonder now whether the blocked breather might have been the real culprit but the first long journey will reveal all when the oil gets hot.
Both drums were completely stripped and the cylinders and adjusters refitted. The brakes always worked well but the overhaul was timely as there were several imminent failures waiting to happen.

Engine/Transmission
With the engine out, it seemed a natural step to lift the heads and fit hardened seats. There are so many different views on the problems or otherwise of unleaded fuel, additives and LRP that I now have peace of mind whatever the politically correct, environmentalist, scientific numpties making the decisions, come up with next. I noted with some satisfaction that during the last couple of MOTs, GPP almost passed the catalytic converter emission limits with its knackered Autolite carburettor, lumpy cam and otherwise standard set up and it was set up by ear'ole without going near a rolling road!
Having lifted the heads, I measured the cam mainly to identify it as it was changed back in 1978. It turned out to be a TP108 and perhaps more importantly, there was no measurable or visible wear on either cam lobes or lifters. With the engine open, I also examined bores and two big end bearings. The bearings were perfect and only one bore suggested possible ring failure, so I lifted the piston only to find a very healthy set of rings. The internals of the engine were then reassembled, carefully cleaned and flushed, and the rebuilt heads were refitted. Having stumbled on a nearly new Edelbrock inlet manifold in Keith Hampson's barn, this was adorned with a new Holley 1850 and finally fresh oil was circulated using a new high volume oil pump driven by the original distributor with its cam drive gear removed.

Much later on and with the engine back in the car, I grew more dissatisfied with the slow build up of oil pressure that had been a feature when starting the engine for many years. In an attempt to aid engine cooling, I had fitted an oil cooler in the 70s, in front of the radiator, suspended from the lower grille bodywork. With the pipes entering and leaving the bottom of the cooler, it was clearly important to ensure it was full of oil but it only occurred to me after I had wriggled it back into its original position that every time I changed the filter, the resulting air pocket would naturally end up in the cooler afterwards… Half a day making up two stainless steel brackets later, the cooler was mounted the conventional way up and three turns of the distributor with a spanner resulted in a rock steady 65-psi oil pressure. Amazing I hadn't done serious damage to the engine really! One other object lesson in basics involved the often overlooked oil filler cap. This crimped assembly contains effectively wire wool as a filter for the air entering the rocker box. 35 years on, when I prised my cap open, the filter crumbled into what was very abrasive dust that would have been unwelcome either in the induction system or the valvegear. I rebuilt it with a jumbo-sized stainless steel pan scourer!

I covered the T5 gearbox mod in the previous part to this story. Having married it up to the engine, it was remarkably straightforward to set the whole unit on a box on rollers under the shell which was on a two post hoist and lower the latter whilst lifting the tail of the box from above into the tunnel. Sunbeam Spares' four branch manifolds slid into place in unison with the engine mounts and we didn't even scratch the new paint …. at this stage! It was a different story when we offered up the new stainless 2" exhaust system, which was supplied through David Herning via Sunbeam Supreme. Not only was it necessary to remove and reposition every support bracket (not unusual as every Tiger seems to have its exhaust brackets in a different place on the shell) but almost every bend required cutting, realigning and rewelding. My friendly welder also made up two highly impressive stainless steel offset reducers to ensure smooth flow between the headers and the systems - it seems a shame to hide them away under the car! Having run the car for several hundred miles, the noise turns heads at normal throttle openings but causes coronaries at full chat so a couple of 6" boxes may be needed in the tail pipes.
With the engine and box in place, it was simple to establish that my propshaft needed lengthening by about 3 inches thus easing the load on the UJs which were replaced anyway.

Front Suspension and Cross Member.
One of the significant unknowns when starting a Tiger refit is whether the four ½" bolts securing the front cross member to the chassis rails will be seized in place. Since the heads are inside the cross member, difficult examples are not easy to attack and since the threaded tubes in the chassis rails readily collect coolant, road grime etc from above, corrosion of the threads is not rare. 20 years ago I was blissfully unaware of this potential disaster, but then, my four bolts undid without a hitch. I made a wild guess that a generous dose of copperslip on the threads when I replaced the cross member would make them easier to remove "next time". I can now testify that it works despite much neglect but have now gone a stage further by plugging the top end of the threaded tubes with ¼" long by ½" UNF bolts. If your bolts do seize, I believe you are stuck with drilling the heads off (good luck) or even melting out the aluminium spacer that lies between cross-member and chassis rail to get a hacksaw blade in to the bolts…. how depressing!

Having got away with the worst problem, my main irritations in this area were cleaning (by hand) and painting the cross member with Hammerite only to find that it chipped off when tapping it with the side of a screwdriver. Save your time and effort, get it shot blasted and powders coated and while you're at it, throw in wishbones and disc shields. A word of warning though, if you do not plug the bolt holes and bush holes, you will have a long fettling job removing the coating. I also had to replace one upper wishbone after my inadequate support when removing the swivel bearing resulted in a cracked splined ring. It is also much too easy to bend the wishbones when removing (and fitting) the fulcrum pins and bushes. Another area of concern was the unavailability of fulcrum pins at the time. I eventually had five sets made of tougher steel and larger diameter than standard by a local VSCC loon who runs a design engineering firm and is currently fitting a Liberty V12 into a 1924 Minerva chassis - 1100 ft lbs of torque through 5 inch wide rubber should be spectacular! David Herning had the other four sets of pins but I don't know how many he has left now.

Other than reassembling the unit with new 380lb springs, adjustable shockers and nylon bushes, it is all standard and even the calipers are the originals from 35 years ago. - Mad you say, but I don't intend track work other than the odd lap at track days so I am happy to remain with the standard caliper/disc set-up.
Replacing the fully assembled cross member into the shell should have been as easy as the engine and gearbox since I had the use of a forklift and the shell remained on the two post ramps. In spite of this, the out of balance forces on the cross member create an awkward twist which is not easily controlled, and, with the very tight clearances between suspension members and the inner wheel arches, we managed to gouge the paintwork both sides with the top of the suspension towers as it was nudged into place. However, these blemishes were touched in much later and you have to know they are there to spot them now.

When the car eventually took to the road again, it was booked into Circuit Motors at Castle Coombe for an MOT, a check on tracking, and castor and camber angles and a run on the dyno to set up carb and distributor. The handling certainly became much less nervous as a result but the rolling road results were disappointing, leaving me with a fast idle (1200) and an effective rev limiter at just over 3000rpm and this after two days. A pre Blenheim check of the front suspension two days later revealed all six bolts holding both steering arms and both calipers were less than finger tight… I wondered what my actual tracking settings were! Needless to say, I shall not be wasting any more money at Circuit Motors.

Seats and Trim
Both seats were stripped back to their frames, exposing stripped threads, decayed cushions and many broken welds. The frames were repaired, taken back to bare metal, zinc sprayed and Hammerited. New cushions, diaphragms and fastenings were covered with wonderfully smelly hide and the first 200 miles proved very comfortable for my notoriously fragile back. The old carpet set
from Mr Macnamara fitted well and had hardly worn, but as the tunnel carpet had to be modified for the new gear stick position, I was tempted to get a new set of Wiltons fitted to the car. As mentioned in Part I, the armrest was shortened to accommodate the new gearbox, and then re-covered in hide.
I had made a new dashboard back in 1981 to accommodate an extra gauge (ammeter) and to fit a cover to the glove box since it always seemed to empty its contents through the grab handle. It had lost its lustre in the intervening years and was stripped back to the veneer which removed the switch lettering. Just before it was refitted to the car, brake fluid destroyed the varnish adjacent to the oil pressure gauge and virtually the whole operation had to be repeated. I did end up with a better final finish but I did not see the joke at the time! Insulation for ½" central heating pipe was used to reline the dashboard support bar which was then also covered in hide as was the original crashpad.

Electrics
A new loom was fitted, since the old one had seen 35 years service and set the car on fire 20 years ago! Although I carefully labelled it on the living room floor, there were some strange departures from my original Workshop Manual wiring diagram. Power to a reversing light switch was provided behind the dashboard but the line to the screenwiper switch was left out. Door courtesy switch wiring was provided (GT only) but the instrument illumination circuit was not. I further complicated matters by taking note of the articles in Cats Whiskers Nos 46, P18 and 52, P50. I am afraid Tom Ehrhart's article in CW23, P6, advocates almost every malpractice possible, from using old wiring from scrap cars to testing circuits by touching battery terminals to see if there is an arc! Holden Vintage or Lucas will provide wiring correctly coded and rated and a simple multimeter is the way to check circuits! The end result is that I now have individual fuses protecting every circuit and have fitted a Lucas 7FJ fuse box in place of the original that held just 2 fuses for the whole system.

As said in Part I, twenty years ago I lost interest in the standard window winders when a new one failed after a couple of years use. A pal suggested electric windows, as the drive wheels were harder/more durable. It took most of a Saturday in 1981 to extract the rear door motors/mechanisms from an XJ6, marry them up with the Tiger cantilevers and mounting brackets, cut and weld one and fit it. It took less than a couple of hours to make and fit the second one. The result has been nearly 20 years of trouble free windows, controllable from the driver's seat, and, although both doors were changed for Californian imports during this rebuild, the mechanisms slid into place without modding in an easy days work, including fitting windows, frames and latch mechanisms. Oh and it cost me £10 for the motors but then it was 1981!

Doors and Panel Alignment
Both doors, bonnet, boot and hoodbins were fitted to the phosphated shell before any paint was applied. My molten ferrous moulding advisor (the welder) insisted on applying lead to all the edges until the gaps were even everywhere, except, strangely, and we all missed this, where the bodyshop carrying out the previous respray, had welded the new offside front wing to the bonnet opening. I only spotted this when the sprayed bonnet was reunited with the sprayed shell, and thus accepted it as another bit of character to go with the Jensen joinery. Having produced such even gaps in bare metal, every run or accumulation of paint at the edges risks closing the gap and chipping when finally fitting the panels. For those who have never experienced this, I can assure you that the professional car restorers that I know do not charge for anything like the hours it takes to get this job right.
Having aligned the painted and rebuilt doors, I have run into continuing problems with the various seals preventing the doors from latching. There are many different views on what shape seal should be where and I have come to the conclusion that you fit and trim the seals to suit your car. I can advise that professional screenfitters prefer pop rivets to self tappers to secure the stainless gutters/rubber seals to the A posts. However, you will need ½" long eighth inch rivets to go through all the layers and fourteen hands to hold them all in place while you drill the holes!

Epilogue
When I drove into Frenchay Garage in late November 1998, I had it firmly in mind that this was to be a bodyshell rebuild and there was little on the mechanical agenda apart from fitting a 5 speed gearbox. With the shell completely stripped and blasted two months later, it should have been possible to be running by summer 99. Having missed that deadline by a country mile, I set my heart on a run to the Nurburgring Oldtimers' weekend at the beginning of August 2000. As the months ticked away in 2000, it dawned on me that I would not get the month's shakedown I felt was essential before a continental trip: so, I made the immovable pledge with myself that I would be at Blenheim instead, and that neither Paul Grimsdick nor any other generous STOC member would tow me in this time! The engine ran at the first attempt on 21 July, the MOT was achieved on 3 August and I arrived at Blenheim with 120 miles on the clock, in sunshine on the Sunday morning to enjoy an outstanding day. As I drove home that night through the middle of England in a rare and special open top car, I thought you lucky b… Sharp, how good does life get?

It gets better because a properly shaken down Tiger puts a very large smile on its driver's face. Half a day at Interpro's rolling road in Thornbury, Bristol cured the chronic flat spot that had limited me to 3000 revs at Blenheim (3000 equals 100mph so who cares!) and showed that the car now produced as much power at the rear wheels as it had at the flywheel when new. There is still an irritatingly long list of tasks to finish the refit - the custom built hood is ready to be fitted to the car but I still have a large leak through the heater when it rains - but at least I am back on the road.

And Finally,
Many, many thanks to the following:
Keith & Brian for advice and parts often at virtually no notice.
Dave Herning for a very slick gearbox package that delivers.
Ian Morley at Frenchay Garage for your humour - pretty good at metal artistry too,
The rest of the Frenchay Garage team for your contributions to the car and the doughnuts,
Andy White for your selfless support when I struggled - GPP would not have made Blenheim without it, and, My other half for all those leave passes to Bristol.

Colin Sharp

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