Separated at Death

I'll be honest- there's no real suspense here. The operation was a success. It's not the first time in history that a TVR body was dismembered from its chassis, but it was just as great as the first. (The end of that is what she said.)

Anyway, with the help of Brian, Andrew and my Dad, we were able to split the car in two in just around 3 hours. And it would have take half the time if it weren't for 2 lousy bolts that some idiot missed. (Ok yeah, it was me.)

Here's a before picture:

Here's a picture during:

And here's a picture after:

As you can guess, the separation has caused the body to lose all feeling to it's extremities, and it won't be able to move on its own for some time. The team has given it 3 to 12 months to come out of this state before the master of the house (Mom) gives it the needle.

Anyways, as you can see, the rolling chassis comes out with basically everything it needs to work on its own sans a radiator, engine management system, intake system, and gas tank. If it had those, I could start it up, and almost drive it around.

...which got me and my Dad thinking. How cool would it be if we never reattached the body? The answer is very very retardedly fucking cool. Like if Steve McQueen, Zooey Daschanel, and Rachel McAdams had a love threesome and spawned a car. That's how cool. I'm talking a car that weighs somewhere around 1,200 pounds, and has 330 hp at the crank. A 2001 Corvette Z06 has 385 HP and weighs in at 3,115 pounds, giving it a power to weight ration of about 8.1/1. The TVR would be about 3.6/1. I'm talking 0-60 in under 3 seconds. Weld on some side rails, fabricate my own front fenders/body, mount a couple seats- it would be awesome.

Well, it's a thought anyway, and one that I am looking into. I'll keep you posted on more details of that.

Back to the car. The frame is in surprisingly good shape. The passenger side outrigger needs to be replaced, and there's a broken weld near the rear for the center tunnel that needs to be cut out and replaced. But that's the bulk of the damage. Naturally all of the suspension components are looking rather dirty and rusty, but it's all just on the surface and should clean up nice. Here are some pictures of various parts of the car:

And here's one more after I did a quick power wash and hand scrub:

It actually cleans up pretty nice.

Tips for anyone else trying to do this: Make sure you have everything disconnected. That's really about it. Maybe on a coming post I will post everything I can remember that I disconnected to help you out.

And that's all for now. The next steps are getting that motor out of there, finding a really good welder, and starting to disassemble the suspension.

As always, I'll keep you posted.