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DVD3500

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Everything posted by DVD3500

  1. He works for free. 😉 Well... beer... but I was going to drink that anyway! ;D
  2. Hi John, Thanks. Yes I know cross posting is not the zenith of online social etiquette but quite a few people tend to stick to only one forum or t`other so I figured no harm no foul. 🙂 I really don`t think getting a specialist to do it is 100% necessary mostly because I have an automotive electrical engineer willing to help me but his eyes glaze over when I mention Lucas or British/Imperial standards. So for full transparency he asked me the above question and I figured I would ask.
  3. I am breaking my project down into "modules" i,.e suspension, body, motor/transmission etc and one big aspect is more or less restoring/upgrading the wire loom i.e. electrics. I presume it was done according to some British standard. I actually have 2 looms from the two cars I bought (`72 European and `76 Federal) plus a guy gave my a European MKIV loom of unknown model year so I have lots to check. However, should I need to replace a wire/cable I would want to get as close to original as possible (or even slightly larger...) I did several searches but all I could find was the European standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60228 But I am not sure what standard was used on our cars so no clue what the equivalents are. (I do have the Lucas chart for the standard of what colors are used for what on a typical loom) Just buying a new loom doesn`t make sense because the car will have multiple upgrades such as relays for headlights, upgraded heater, possibly subtle DLRs/fog lights etc... Engine mgmt will also be nonstandard... Cheers and have a great day!
  4. I thought it was to meet bumper height regulations? Or is that another Internet myth? Next you'll try to convince me the earth isn't the center of the universe...
  5. The last two times I took it off there was a thin i.e. 3-5 mm foam strip on the leading and trailing edge with a mild adhesive on the cap side. As it was on there twice I presumed it was original but perhaps not....? Advantage would be making future removal easy. Not 100% sure how water tight it would be...
  6. The set I bought at a car show 2 years' ago is offset about 15°...
  7. I love the things but I barely see anyone use them around here. Particularly in hard to reach places I find them a huge time saver and knuckle-saver. I of course torque things done with "proper" tools... What do you all think?
  8. I used to run my then-department's online presence and in 2009 we decided to go on the "socials". It took us a while to figure out how to get the most "bang for your buck" but a rough guide is that anything on social platform of any kind is like a cocktail party. You wander around, pick up on snippets of information, maybe join a conversation and more than likely most people won't remember or or come back to said conversation in the near future. Someone said something about venues and event announcements. That is another area where socials are actually pretty good. In fact, anything of a timed-event nature is always well supported by some form of social media. The reason is because most people access these via apps and they get the info immediately and can make a decision also immediately. Sites and forums are great for having searchable content and for longer conversations you may want to refer back to. It is nigh on impossible to find reliable information on "socials". More static forms of communication are also better for the reliability aspect. If someone posts something BookFace I have to look at their profile, scroll through the group and also wait for others to chime in to get an idea if they are reliable or not. On a forum I can usually see at a glance by the number of posts, likes and length of time they have been on whether they are reliable or not. Where site admins fall down is not cross-pollenating the info. As mentioned here you have to have important info across all platforms. There are technical ways to do this but if you are on a shoestring budget just make sure you have a checklist of everywhere. (Hyper)Linking can help out a lot. One final thing social stuff can do is drum up a vibe, or buzz around a topic and keep the interest going. I attended the London Concours this past summer and they post a different car or a picture of the venue at least once a week. Key is having a very small number of people (or even only one person) in charge of the whole shebang. I have been complaining to Scalextric a lot lately... I am their official forum moderator and their websites and other "traditional" online media are in a woeful state.... Recently they only did their advent calendar on social media and I am curious if it was at all successful...
  9. Cheers. I used to get to Gaydon from time to time. If the diffs weren't so darn heavy I would have no prob shipping them. There is a place a few hours away (Bastuck) that also do the aluminum casings. They will guarantee the work... Will cost north of 1000€ ... when you consider I paid about 2000 € for each car that kinda hurts.... 😄
  10. While living in the US I got many parts from them for my '72 I had .... Real pity..
  11. I have been keeping quiet about my project because frankly there wasn’t much to report on. The car left in October 2021 and since then has been at a workshop in Stuttgart. The car was acid dipped, galvanized, primered and some body damage came to light. By this point the guy who runs the shop (is essentially a one-man shop) had other projects that he thought he would get done quickly (a ’63 Beetle that came in for rocker panel/sill work and ended up being a body off restoration). Plus he is known in the area for allowing other people to do their work on their cars there. Once I was there a guy was swapping out the gearbox on a BMW 3 series for a better one… The original plan was to send everything off to Poland and then build it back up. One of the local Spitfire drivers who is a master mechanic and helps build protypes for a star car manufacturer in Stuttgart pointed out how much Spitfire bodies flex (even with strengthening) and since the car obviously had had a few dings maybe we should make sure everything fits since banging and welding into a freshly painted body would be somewhat annoying… putting it mildly. We will have the chassis and the underbody painted in the final color (Cobalt Blue) but leave the other panels until it all fits up nicely. I know many cringe at the effort of getting panel gaps to fit but this guy hung the doors back on after the dip and they are already nearly perfect. As idle hands are the devil’s work he is having all the suspension components powder coated and I will put them together on the bench so that when the body is ready for the first test fit we can just bolt them on to get the whole thing rolling. Then the rest of the car will get the final coat(s) of paint and I asked to have them put in the windshield/windscreen as I don’t have the skill for that. Then she will come home and I can do the rest! Only minor hiccup I see is the guy I had lined up to do my diff (convert it to 3.63, put an aluminum casing on it and overhaul it in general) says he can’t get the shims to do it. I tried to convince him but so far no joy. There is a company that will do it for about 1000€ but I was hoping to not have to go that route… Open to offers! 😄 While I wait for the powder coated parts I am reading up on best practices for fitting the bushes. I got my Dad’s tap and die set and will chase the threads with that. Feels good to have them in my hand again after almost 25 years. I have some upgraded parts from the US and am tempted to put lightweight hubs on the front but the Finance Dept. might not approve that! 😄 So with any luck, sometime in the Spring she will come home and I can report back as I stumble through such tasks as: Rebuilding and upgrading (relays!) the wiring loom from scratch Upgrading the heater motor and wiring Trying to find a way to mount a third brake light without it looking crap Making a custom dashboard (see comment about new powertrain) Rebuilding the top/hood frame (luckily I have two, one original and one refurbished in parts) Reupholstering the seats/installing the interior (to a point… we are resto-modding the powertrain so may leave some of that to the very end) Re-installing the windows (I have hands smaller than some former president’s so I don’t mind. 😊) Etc etc etc… Watch this space! To all who celebrate something this time of year: Happy Holidays and wishing you all a great new Gregorian new Year!
  12. These are my Dad's tools. The same ones I used one my Firebird, my first Spitfire, Porsche 924 and Sunbird.... I brought back a set of deep sockets and various wrenches last time I was in the US. These come very timely as I will be getting the suspension parts back and we will be mating the body and chassis soon and will have to recut the thread since everything is now powder coated/galvanized/painted.... Using his tools seems to make the project more "mine". Thanks for all the input!
  13. Hi All, My Mom is cleaning out stuff from my Dad's toolbox sent me a picture of this tap and die set. If I understand the standard correctly the 1/4" 24, 5/16" 24 etc are in line with the UNF standard.... Am I correct? Thanks!
  14. There is a fine line between brand recognition because of the form (see Porsche...) and having "common" styling. There was a "meme" a few months back of the top 35 cars where they were all painted white with blanked out wheels and you could not tell them apart regardless of the brand....
  15. Some car names I almost convinced someone were real: K-Lusion Side-Sweip Head Awn Flatt-Ire
  16. Reminds me of a guy with a Porsche 924 who had a rattle and replaced the entire torque tube (924s are transaxle i.e. gearbox in the read motor up front) only to find out it was spare change in the ashtray. :-)
  17. I have read this before as well. The Dolomite Sprint was in many ways a better BMW 2000 I think and the 2000/2500 were very good at beating similar BMWs in many aspects. The only BMW I ever had a mild fizzy for was the Z1, mostly because I like quirky technology. The more I live in Germany though the more loath them. One time I was getting a lift from a colleague. A very privileged, only child West German who was shocked, SHOCKED when her manager actually demanded she work more than 4 hours a day (she literally spent the first hour at work doing her hair and nails... every day)... She told me to meet her in the parking lot. So I went there and I picked out the most over powered BMW estate (SUVs were not a thing yet) with a personalized license plate that matched her. She was very surprised I twigged which car was hers...
  18. I can count the number of time BMW drivers indicators have worked on one hand... 😄
  19. It has to be "higher" than the original brake lights and it has to be "central". I don't think it has to be perfectly centered as I have seen some delivery vans that have this weird tear drop light that is more on one door than the other. Methinks the logic is that, in general, cars are not wider than 2 meters so if the regular lights are out you can guess that 1 or so meters either side of the light would be safe to pass... That does require the person to be applying the brakes though so not sure if that is really all that helpful..? On a tangent, whenever I have work done on/in/around the house and they explain to me something has to be certain way I usually ask (in a very Arthur Dent way) why it has to be done that way. Here in Germany they usually do in fact know why. I put it down to the very thorough apprenticeship schemes they have here. One exception was at a friend's house where he was having tiling done. The tiler insisted they remove the countertop so he could put up the tiles behind it. When I pointed out that the countertop was perfectly level and plumb and there was no risk of things looking off he begrudgingly admitted that that method worked... Similarly when our dish washer packed up they tried to charge us extra for a "difficult extraction". We had laid laminate down on top of some of the world's ugliest tiles and they claimed getting the dish wash over this 3 mm ledge was "hard". A small car jack was more than enough to move it... and they didn't charge extra...
  20. It would be legal and a piece of cake but as you say when going topless you are hiding the best bits! That sounds very weird to me.. 😄 I have actually found someone who has already done it, more or less. He has the light crammed behind the filler cap so I am thinking of maybe raising it all 2-3 cm (1 to 1.5 inches to the rest of us..) and moving it back a bit for clearance of the filler cap. Have to of course make sure the top/hood can be easily raised and lowered.... This is the first time I wish I had not scrapped the other body I had. I could have poked and prodded to my heart's content...
  21. Hi Folks, (For the TLDR folks jump to the IDEA section) Here in Germany LED lights (except certain headlights) are verboten so simply swapping out the brake lights for something brighter is not an option. Adding a 3rd brake light though is legal. I have a Körbler targa hardtop so that is easy. Lots of kits where I can add that in the rear window. What about when I want to go topless? (the car for pete’s sake…) As I near getting my car’s body and chassis painted I started thinking about improving rear visibility as we have had no less than 3 fatal rear-end crashes in the area in the past few weeks. I had toyed with the idea of eliminating part of the chrome trim on the lip of the trunk/boot and replacing it with a thin LED brake light. Problem was the lid is curved so the light would not be very big and not being curved would look a bit half-donkeyed…. I was thinking about the fuel cap, for example a ring that clamps on the fuel cap and then attach a light to it somehow. However the rules here in Deutschland mean you would have to affix it with “tools” so any time the cap needed to be opened or used would be a pain. (I also could not find a way to make it not look like E.T. with a 100° fever…) Then while on a very boring conference call I had a brain wave! IDEA (TLDR=too long didn’t read) The rear of the convertible top/hood is attached to the car by 2 ½” bolts on a strip of metal. I could fashion a thin strip of metal would slide under the mounting frame out the back and using 90° angles I could mount a 3rd brake light between the top/hood and the fuel filler. I t may be slightly obscured by the fuel cap but that’s OK I think as 96.30894% of all drivers are looking down on a Spitfire anyway… This has the advantage that I could fashion a plug inside the car and swap it when I put the hard top on (you are only allowed one central brake light) as well as being total reversible. Any gaps caused by the extra strip of metal could be mitigated with weather stripping. Since that part of the car is not subject to high winds the metal could be very thin, like .2 or .3 mm I reckon. In fact, it probably has to be thin to conform to the lip around the tub where the top/hood is mounted. Whadaya think?
  22. Is it me or are LHD Triumph saloons pretty rare anyway? More rare than the sports cars in any case...
  23. Yeah a date on the bareback of a horse seems very comical! 😄 Just joking.. but yes... life can have many twists and turns!
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