The Car

What good is a blog about a car without any pictures? No good. Or at least only mildly interesting at best. (I mean c'mon! This is 2010. People want pictures, not words. Everyone has places to be and other Web sites to browse! Yeah, I know.)

First things first, I'm actually a little farther past step one in this project than my first post might suggest. Not crazy far though. Currently, I am getting ready to take the body off the chassis. For those who don't know, it's a fiberglass body over a tube chassis, basically mated together with all of about 14 bolts, and two dozer or so annoying wires, hoses, brake lines and whatever else those Brits could think of crowding in this thing.

Here's the car as a whole:

As you can see from both pictures, I've already taken the rocker panels (outrigger covers?... I'm not sure exactly what to call them) off. And no, it's not pretty underneath. There's a decent amount of rust on them, so I'm thinking they'll just have to be replaced completely. Here's few more closer shots.

The only good news I have to report on this is that the rest of the chassis is not like this. Still fully covered in paint, and nothing looks too bad.

Here's the plan: I'm renting two engine hoists this Saturday, and pulling the body off. The basic technique will be as follows.

Two heavy duty tow straps. One will wrap around both front wheel wells and under the car and connect to a hoist. I'll use a 2x6 wedged where the hood normally goes for added support so as to refrain from crushing the whole front clip into itself. The other strap will go through the rear wheel wells, with a 2x4 in between it and the car for added support, and connect on top to a second engine hoist. I got the idea from this guy, who says it worked pretty well. It definitely seems to make sense anyway. (Scroll down the forum a bit to get to the images.)

I've got my dad and a couple friends coming over to help. We'll basically keep raising the body until there is enough room to simply roll the chassis, engine, drivetrain and all right out the back. Then, I'll place enough cinderblocks under four points of the body to keep it at that height it's at so that I can continue working on it and getting under it when need be.

That's the plan. Will it work? I think so. Will it take a lot of time? I sure hope not. Will I drink a Bud afterwards? Most definitely. I'll keep everyone posted, and make sure to take lots of pictures too.

That's all for now.

A Bit of History

Hi Everyone,

This is my story about completely restoring my TVR, and mating it up with a 2.3L SVO motor. But before I get into all that, a little history...

About 5 years ago, the summer before my senior year of high school, I bought my first british sports car- a 1986 TVR 280i, and it was just about the coolest car I could have dreamed of at the time:

Classic 80's wedge design, tubular chassis, German-build ford motor, fiberglass body, in-board rear disk brakes. It weighs somewhere around 2,500 pounds, has a 5 speed, leather seats, a top that drops, and of course the motor is bolted to the rear wheels, which is a strict requirement I have for cars I own.

The car was awesome, and I had a blast driving it. I learned how to heel and toe, hit apexes, kick the rear end out for some fun(so long as it was wet enough)- you know, all the things that Mom and Dad dread thinking about.

Of course though, the car is British, and it decided to break down... a lot. The clutch slave cylinder decided to go, brake pads wore down, the electrical systems were constantly faulting (damn you Prince of Darkness!!), my warm-up regulator went bad, the radiator started to leak, the front springs went bad, the chassis got cracks and broke... it was a nightmare. Anyone who has owned a TVR knows that finding parts for them is no more fun or easy as conducting mouth surgery on yourself.

But, I managed to fix it time and time again, doing my best to at least keep it road worthy for the warmer months. (I don't even want to get into how poor the heater and defroster work.) Still, it wasn't easy keeping up with it all, and even though some things would break and get fixed, the car as a whole became more and more dilapidated.

But even worse than that, I got behind the wheels of much faster cars, like S2000s, Corvettes, SLK350s, 350Zs, (even my Mom's Mini Cooper S was killing me off the line) and I quickly learned that my precious 280i is nothing short of a dog off the line. (It didn't help either when I bought a motorcycle and REALLY felt how slow my car was.) It was time for a change, a drastic one.

Which is where I am today, and yes, I PROMISE that most posts won't be this long, and that they will be filled with many more pics.

Briefly about what the plan is:

I have a new motor, a 1986 Ford 2.3L. I'll do a separate post on that alone but in short, it's getting mated to the TVR.

The whole car is coming apart. The body is coming off, and I'm replacing everything that I can, and fixing everything that I can't. i.e. new brakes, new suspension components, new engine, limited slip diff, new radiator, new engine management system, stripping the chassis and re-coating it, and so on and so forth.

So, stay tuned, give me tips if you have them, and please, PLEASE don't ridicule me too much for putting what's going to wind up being a small fortune into a car that many argue is not worth the time or money.

I know it's a TVR, and that they break, and that they don't even handle that well, and that I could just as well go out and buy an S2000 or heck, an MR2 or Miata or something and have more fun while spending less money and wasting less time. This project isn't about that. It's about a car that I've come to like very much over the years. It's about me learning a lot more than I already know. It's about preserving something that I think is worth preserving. Don't worry, I plan on buying the other cars too.

So for now, that's all.