74 carrera restoration

[Gilbert '71 T]

Great pictures Jonathan, thanks for sharing them. I saw the tub at our esteemed Mr Carter's quite some time ago, long before it was ready for paint, even then you could see that this promises to be a wonderful car when finished

[jtparr]

hi gavin

POR-15 was used throughout. on top of their own metal ready

it is best coated twice with the second coat applied when the first is touch dry, but not solid so the second melts into the first

if you wait too long its not a disaster, it can be sanded to take the sheen off and then coated

it does need its own primer though prior to applying other finishes, so the underside of the whole car has actually had 2 coats POR-15 then 1 coat primer then a OEM rubberised textured spray (barry sorced through 3M I think) then black gloss top coat..hope that keeps the elements at bay....

darryn
yup barry did a fine job, no doubt about that

[Simon Rudge]

Jon,

It's looking good, I am in the middle of just the same thing with my '70T/E.

The hours you spend now make so much difference later, but it's hard to think of that when you are up to the eyeballs in scraped off sealer and underseal!

I am inspired to try and put some pictures of mine up!

Keep up the good work!

[steve wright]

awesome, awesome. you now have an intimate relationship with your car... something you can't get buying "just" a restored one. good luck with the rest of the resto.

[jtparr]

So onto part 2….

Having bust a gut to get the preparation ready, using my free time rather than paying someone to prepare the car it was time to start spending money

I omitted to mention but I had bought a grit blaster and compressor so having ground off the underseal and then finally linished with the fibrous discs, all that remained was to blast remaining inaccessible areas like the rear seat pans and around the torsion bars back to bare metal

Never again, blasting in the open is a hell of a mess….did the job but not one to wish on the neighbours….

Cue Mr Carter

I had met Barry a few times thanks to the DDK site and was quite convinced that he would be a solid bet for working on the car

I would have loved to do some welding but in all honesty it was not the kind of project to learn the art of bodywork…..a statement that would only become more apparent as time passed

So by the early new year I had received numerous body parts from Mittelmotor and the car was transported down to Sussex…..

Problem was the Mittelmotor bonnet, in a word it was crap, “did they drag it behind the lorry or just drop it and stand on it for a laugh” was Barry’s opening line

He did have a point

so apart from being able to tackle smaler parts of the work, like bumper mounts and mirror mounts (my car originaly had the chrome durant mirror but I bought it with a pair of SC doors so we had to blank off the holes for the later style mirrors), we were in a holding pattern...






A second bonnet was ordered but apparently the shipper did drop it….

So I had to wait even longer

A third(Mittelmotor) bonnet was finally supplied but by this time probably 4 months had passed (yes 4)

This was a bit better but still pretty average, and no matter how it was tried it would just not sit on the car right

it did allow us to get the front suspension rrepair sections and slam panels done though....











So after a further few weeks I split the cost of postage and it went back to Germany

Cue Alan.UK (thanks Alan…)

For a very reasonable sum a second hand genuine bonnet was provided

Would this be my salvation, well kind off, only that now we had a good bonnet but after 24 hours of head scratching, as this one would still not line up properly I had one of those great Friday evening calls

“I think the cars not straight, what are you doing tomorrow, perhaps we could have a look at the problem”

yup

this was where the fun stated

we are still not quite sure what could have done it but the car had definitely hit or been hit around the drivers A post and had

a) pulled the drivers front inner wing down by about 8/9mm and as we discovered also
b) pushed the A post in and buckled the floor and cill, plus
c) required the B post to be adjusted” when repaired


oh and pushed the drivers door frame up into the roof and over to the passenger side




not that bad really

the pictures next are the dozer stretching equipment which lead the another great Friday night call











“I’m not sure if this will work , if it doesn’t its always going to pop the screens, so it could be a case of calling it a day” (write off I think is the general
term……)

hmmmmmnnnn

not that I had any doubt, but after a bit of a detour of around 2 weeks the car was just fine and dandy

including, courtesy of Mr Moss, a donor section of an A post plus portion of inner wing and cill for a most reasonable sum (thanks Nick)













masses of measurements and we recon its within a mm or
2 off perfect



not bad is a bit of an understatement

3 cheers for Mr Carter





the rest as they say is history, but in total the body count amounted to

new slam panel
new front suspension repair section
various battery tray related panels
both front windscreen repair sections
let in new drivers A post and reapirs to inner cill
both outer cills
both middle cills
new drivers floor ( this is one of my favourites, its an invisible joint, with well over a hundred drilled out and plugged new spot weld)….gorgeous both kidney bowls
removal of all bumper mounts and new captive bolts let in

and new fabricated front repairs to rear wings (my other favourite, beautifully fabricated from flat sheet, invisible TIG welding, just great















can't even see the joint.......




tweaking new pattern wings (pretty good from
Mittelmotor)

generall tweaking to get the panel gaps to a constant
3-4 mm……just lovely

plus a host of general repairs…….in each case all panels were stripped of primer, re primed with weld through primer, then installed















so after around 3 months of real work. Spread over a lot more I had also stripped the last of the paint off the upper body panels at Barry’s (nitromores), we had completed all the POR-15 paintwork including its primer, then Barry sourced an OEM rubberised coating, which after spraying was coated in a final black for all the undersides, engine bay and front trunk

last thing was a long day of bolting on some nice shiny bits and finally she was a rolling shell

















that little lot brought us to end of October this year



the car is now in the paint shop, I saw it last weekend, I will upload in a few weeks for part 3


enjoy the pictures

I do.

It makes me realise just how grubby she was initially when you look at the nice ones


thanks

Jonathan

[steve wright]

holy shite. and Barry (ever the english master of understatement) said "there was a bit of work on the '74". My Ghia is going in later this month for a "few bits" - christ i hope it doesn't end up looking like this.

[Nige]

holy shite.

no sh*t

[Derek]

jtparr, I'm suprised you have any hair left

Barry told me he thought it was a little bit out , That is top work very cool indeed .

well done.

[Bootsy]

Great thread and top work, well done Jonathan and Barry!

[hot66]

wow

Where did you source the shocks / struts from?

[impmad2000]

I now know for sure (Not that I didn't believe already) that my car is in very good hands !
I had heard all the stories, but your pictures make the story very much more real. It looks like you now have a very good car.
Cheers
Tim

[Dyno Soar]

Barry your the man...

[jtparr]

hi hot66

shocks/struts are the original bilsteins

they were blast cleaned, etch primed then gloss sprayed (by barry)

not sure if i got the colour right but RAL 6002 loked good to me so that's what they are !!

jonathan

[Barry]

Thanks for the comments, chaps, and most of all, thanks to Jonathan for giving me the opportunity of working on the car (and having seemingly endless patience ).

Having seen the work that the paintshop do (they've just sent out one of the original lightweight E-Types valued at £1.2m, and are working their way through a small fleet of sixties Ferrari's), I'm pretty confident that the car will end up with some lovely paint on it .

Thanks again, Jonathan, it's been a privilege.

[renzo]

hi

great job ! Fabulous !

congratulations !!