As days become months.........months become years...........years become........well , perhaps not centuries but possibly decades .........

Rebuild

1980

The car had been sitting at the bottom of the garden since 1975 providing home and shelter for a wide variety of insects , small animals and a large colony of tin-worm . All this became apparent as the body panels , doors etc were unbolted , leaving what was left of the inner shell on the frame .

The next step was to take off the radiator , upper steering column , all the electrical stuff , gauges , et al and put away for the next few years .

All the good books say to brace the door openings before lifting off the inner body , but what do you do when the floor pans and the inner and outer sills have rusted away to virtually nothing ? Well , you lift off the two big bits and you sweep up the middle bit !! I have since learnt that only one panel should be cut out and replaced at a time in order to keep a maximum number of reference points ..........next time around perhaps.

Once the above operation was completed it was easy to see that Triumph's built-in oil spray system had preserved about eighty per cent of the frame from rust damage , the only problems being a couple of body mounting points and the last metre or so at the rear , including the rear-most cross-tube .

The frame was then stripped of engine , transmission , suspension , pipework and all the rest .

At this point in time , I decided that if a "rebuild" was just possible , a "restoration" was not at all possible , considering my limited skills ( I wanted to do all the work myself ) and not wishing to invest a small fortune in something that might never get finished !

The frame was de-greased , wire brushed , and checked for straightness , plates and tubes made up , including reinforcing tubes that went inside the existing outrigger tubes and rear spring hangers and gas-welded into place , then the whole frame was painted externally and a rust inhibitor sprayed inside the closed sections . At the same time , new inner sills were built up using rectangular tube and fitted .

Rebuilding the rolling chassis was very stimulating simply because it didn't take too long and when it was finished , the pile of bits had greatly diminished , but even so , there had been a couple of problems .

Problem No1 ....the left side front suspension assembly that I had bought through an ad in a car magazine turned out to be for a later TR with a 3 degree caster angle but luckily a matching RH assembly was soon to be found , so I unintentionally ended up with an upgraded suspension and self-centering steering .

Problem No 2...the "new" steering box to convert to LHD seemed OK off the car but when fitted made very weird noises . Having read a few articles on rack and pinion conversions I decided that despite the cost , it was worth trying ......and all I can say now , after three years back on the road , is that it's great . It's a pity Triumph didn't do that fifty years ago instead of waiting until the TR4 was designed .

The engine , gearbox and back axle went back in with just a clean-up , repaint and oil change . Brake and fuel pipes were renewed and new coolant hoses were fitted .........nearly ready to roll ........pity there's so little of the bodywork left !

Sorry about the poor quality of the images !

Tin-worm food

After having carefully examined what was left of the bodywork , I decided to attempt to remake various panels in fibreglass , or GRP as the experts call it . I already had the two fibreglass front wings and front apron which I had fitted years ago , also two rear wings and a rear apron which had been purchased previously .

The problem now was that I knew nothing whatsoever about making fibreglass panels !!

A quick visit to the local suppliers got me set up with various pots of resin , gelcoat , mould release wax , mat , roving , etc and more important , an instruction manual and lots of good advice .

The first part to receive the "treatment" was the spare wheel cover as it was already in reasonable condition , relatively small and easy to mould .

The "treatment" consisted of rubbing down the external surfaces , filling where necessary and spraying with polyurethane paint , then more rubbing down and finally waxing and polishing using mould release wax . Gelcoat was sprayed on and left to polymerize completely , after which resin and glass mat were added in sufficient quantities to obtain a rigid mould . Once polymerized , this took about one week , the mould was separated from the original part , inspected for defects ....... polished and gelcoated in order to fabricate the new part , this time using resin , mat and roving .

I was very pleased with the result , so I continued with the boot lid and then the doors , each door requiring an inner and an outer mould . Then the rear left inner wheel arch was moulded together with the B-post , quarter panel , boot side panel and half the top deck all in one piece .This was repeated for the right hand side. Luckily , I had found a boot floor complete with rear seat shelf and spare wheel carrier , at a scrap yard , in fairly good condition , so they were prepared for fitting .The scuttle foot-wells were also repaired using heavy aluminium sheet .

Now that all the body panels , except the floor pans , were ready , the scuttle was placed on the chassis and inner sills , aligned and fixed , followed by the doors and the bits at the rear . All this took a certain amount of time to align , pop rivet and bond together with more fibreglass and resin , before making up and fitting new aluminium floor pans .

As I wanted to run the engine before finishing the front end , I decided to fit all the other bits and pieces such as fuel tank , pedal box , throttle linkage , "new" lhd dashboard , new home-built wiring loom .......etc .

I can't say that the engine started on the touch of the button , but it started , with a cloud of smoke and black stuff out of the tailpipe , the oil I had been putting in the cylinders for the past years had to go somewhere .......and that typical TRactor engine roar was still there !!!

After driving the car around in circles for a while , I finally came back down to earth and remembered that it wasn't finished yet . I had often thought how easy front end maintenance must be for those guys with Spitfires , GT6s , Heralds and such like , compared to the sidescreen TRs..........ever tried taking out the radiator on a TR3 ?

Off came the front inner wings ........ and the four front outer panels were bolted together and mounted onto supports , then more filler , rubbing down etc in order to build a mould , from which a new one-piece front was obtained and hinged onto the bumper irons (see "flip-front"). Sounds easy , but in fact it was very time consuming as there were numerous problems to solve , but I consider that it was worthwhile , especially as the original goal was to build a daily driver NOT a concours winner .

The car was painted a dark BRG , all the little bits and pieces refitted and then taken for the local "technical inspection" which it passed successfully .

So it was back on the road again , only one month late for the turn of the century !!

Finally a big THANK YOU to Daniele , Johanna , Peter and Stephen ...... without their help and encouragement this project would still not be finished .