Spitfire Total Rebuild!

Looking good. I can imagine your sense of achievement. Putting down paint is certainly a corner turned, although your rebuild has more corners than the Hampton Court Maze!

I was the same when doing up my boat. No matter what I did, I never felt to be near the home stretch until it was painted. Looking forward to seeing more and hats off to your patience and dedication.

really enjoying this thread.

Great work here! I'm not familiar with your Starlet engine but it should be pretty easy to get a source for the tacho. There's a distributor on the Starlet, right? It's not an ECU job??
You should be able to just hook your Triumph tacho to the Starlet distribitor with no need for messing around. Am I missing something?

As usual, loving this thread. Regarding the reflectors, when mounting them, I would tend to position them further out towards the corners of the bumper, thus more accurately reflecting (no pun intended) the width of the car. It will probably never happen, but if you were parked in a badly lit area, you don't want to give the impression that your car is narrower than it actually is.

Just a thought.

The mk 1 mx5 has two mounts one either side of the engine then the gear box is connected th the diff via an aluminium rail its not connected to the body. So the engine gearbox and diff are essentially one unit held on with 2 nuts and 2 bolts.

Good work by the way.

That's a massive turning point for you, it's like you've gone from various piles of odds and ends to an essentially complete car in an afternoon. That must give you a good motivtional boost to keep moving

hi,
i will read back and have a look but its all going to come down to when you welded that stuff in. if the body was bolted to the chassis and the doors fit up then thats good news. if the body was off the chassis then you may be in for a bit of a surprise later on that you will need to address because the work you have done has, in fact really strengthend things and its going to be a lot harder to bend back. once i caught on to what was going on, i never used the soft spacers. i used rigid spacer under the center , and simply adjusted their size such that , with the oem hard spacers in the ends but not tightend down, when the center pulled tight, the doors fit and i simply adjusted the thickness of those center spacers as necessary to get the correct amount of bend.and get nice door gaps. ... and for the record, i only did that on street car restorations. on the race cars , i would actually section those areas of the body to allow the body to sit deeper on the chassis to buy a little cg improvement and areo improvement. im off on errands right now and will write a bit more later

CroppyBoy1798 wrote: »

Unfortunately the rot was so extensive on the front end of one of the tubs that it was beyond saving so I had to use the front half of the spare Spitty I bought, which as it turned out, had a rotten back end! So the tubs were split in two and the two good halves joined up again along the heel board seam.

The tub was rebuilt on the original chassis (that I'm currently using), hardtop put on, doors fitted and aligned and then bracing added in the door openings before the cills were removed, re fabricated/replaced and then the box section went on. Thankfully as it stand the door gaps are really good with just small adjustments required.

I dropped the tub onto the chassis with no spacers in place and as it turned out the alloy slotted spacers I had were just the right thickness to slide in around the bolts at the four locations, the two rubberised ones at the seat belt mounts were a little more difficult; jacking the car up, reaching in underneath trying to slip them up between the propshaft and over onto the top of the chassis rail, but I got there

thats really good work and well done. as for other stuff... the late cars like yours had a very bizzare rear spring arrangement with a center roller arrangement which was pretty terrible in all respects. the early cars had a traditional leaf spring that worked a lot better. what i and others did was replace the std spring , regardless of which type with a simple 3 leaf arrangement which the local spring shop would make for me... on the race cars it was 3 leafs ( leaves ?) 3/8 thick with a total arch of about an inch. on the strreet cars it was the same arrangement with one 5/16 leaf and 2- 3/8 and a lot more static arch . you adjusted the ride height with spacers under the spring which were simple al blocks with an allen head so that it located in the diff. i repositioned the trailing arms way way forward on the chassis such that they effectively lined up with the axle u joints and this solved all the bizzare geometry issues . on the race cars i made special axles where there was a sliding joint at the ujoint vs a rigid one as std and then added a second rearward trailing arm to the back of the chassis to form an effective lower wishbone. combined with a rigid rear spring acting as an upper wishbone , this gave a very accurate geometry and simply eliminated all the toe steer. i know using the word " geometry " to describe a swing axle isn't really accurate because the camber gain is a function of ride height and not geometry at all but what it did was allow the wheel to operate in a pure vertical plane with no toe steer at all. it all worked very very well even in street trim. the street car loved the koni red hydraulic shocks and on the race cars i used the koni alum body double adjustable ones which were nosebleed expensive even then. the front geometry suffered from excessive camber gain once the ride height got reasonably low. this was solved by taking the upright and sawing 1/2 " out of it in the center and then tig welding it back together . this effectively lowered the ball joint a 1/2 " and really improved the geometry tremendously. what also helps was tipping the towers outboard by shimming them at the vertical attachment and making tapered spacers for where the attached at the horizontal points. this caused real problems with the motor mounts because the rules did not allow relocating the motor but some judicious cutting and welding of the front plate and spacers resolved that ... obviously not an issue in your case. we were also allowed to use the gt-6 brakes all around. if you plan to run a low front ride height you can relocate the front sway bar to the top of the chassis around the radiator mounts so you don't tear it off all the time. i actually still have an original set of minilites for that car in north carolina... i would post a pic of the 79 championship car if i had any idea at all how to do it. i set a lap record in that car at road atlanta in 79 that stood until they physically changed the race track in the early/mid 90's

oh... one other important thing.... make sure the gas tank has a proper vent. when the late cars like yours came to the states , they had a lot of emissions controls and one of those was a vapor canister arrangement to capture tank fumes. this would fail all the time and on more than one occassion... TWICE right before my very eyes, the tanks would get near empty on a hot day and then cool off at night and litterally collapse into themselves like you would take an empty beer can and crush it in your hands. the problem was that the fuel pickup inside is shaped like a spike ... a 3/8 tube with a sharpened punji stake looking point on it that when the tank collapsed would drive itself thru the bottom of the tank dumping all the remaining fuel into trunk and on the ground... i'm not making this up. i saw it happen twice with my own eyes. you are running efi so you will have a hi press high volume pump with a return , i presume. i won't make a prediction on how that will all work except to suggest that you remember that that tank arrangement was designed for a mechanical pump with no return and probably no adequate vent and will require some thought so that all your good work doesn't end up being someones barn fire someday...

CroppyBoy1798 wrote: »

Thanks for that info ! Very helpful, been looking into it a bit more and it seems the best route is to buy an after market tacho and take the guts out and fit them to my original dial. I'll be sure to let you know how I get on!

the individual clocks (temp, tacho ) ( should! ) be held in by screws in the original toyota dash

+ , - , and signal passes through the screws so you can just put ring terminals on them

Good man , thanks for taking the time to update.

A big milestone alright and a wise choice of engine , size wise , power wise , age wise( not overly complicated ) in fact a sweet spot of ICE evolution.