altezzaclub

So I instantly instigated 6.45am mornings and work until 9pm at night, 7days a week! The parts car gave up its cross-member, hubs & discs, castor mounts and many odd parts. Naturally nothing fitted and it all had to be filed and ground! After some hours of fighting we had out first success, a cross-member in place!

I headed back to Orange and left him another list, starting with "finish rust welding and a quick paint of engine bay". There was hours of cutting and welding in a jigsaw around the firewall, and then the painting was no quick job! After three weeks I went back up on Nov 8th to find that the car looked beautiful but no actual building had taken place!

Things looked pretty good as we patched them in.

Meanwhile the boy was busy at the front, welding in chassis rail and plating over the bottom ones-

The tank support was welded up out of some odd angle, and we doubled it at one end to make the tank slope so it drained. I grabbed an inner tube from a dirt bike and sliced it up, then glued it to the tank base so it sat tight in the frame. A trip to the saddler in Walcha with a trailer tie-down gave us a double-thickness belt to strap the tank into the frame. An old 4L drench container gave a splash tray.

Steve started a tech course to learn welding, but seeing I've always used oxy-acetylene we used that. When the acetylene ran out we moved to LPG/oxy with a leaking old barbeque bottle, (which was hopeless!) then when the oxy ran out we move to MIG. Weeks later when the cover gas ran out we used old-fashioned arc, so he got a good education! We braced the turret before we welded the rails back in.

and plated over the lower chassis rails from the giant scrap pile outside the woolshed. I don't know why farmers have scrap piles outside their woolsheds, but this one had plenty of angle and 1.6mm flat sheet.

We cut the chassis top rail out of the donor car and replaced the bent one......

I took the tank up to make sure it all fitted before it was welded, and we launched into welding plates on the chassis for a few days. Luckily he has a perfect-condition spares car, the ugly liftback, but everything except the rear body fits the the rally car.

The engineer also made 4 stands that go from 400mm high to 800mm high, giving some serious working space under the car. That all totaled $800odd. The Echo filling gear was scored from the wreckers when The Girl and I went shopping, along with a Landcruiser front steering bar, to get left and right-hand threads in a pipe, and a set of Sigma LCAs.

We pressure tested it before delivery and made sure the newish Toyota Echo filler pipes sealed.

The Build- I drew plans for the little 33L in-boot tank and had it made up by the local water tank place here, then welded by my engineer. With a tiny 350ml surge tank being fed down through a piece of 40mm filler tube, the pump can always draw fuel

The brake pads were cooked, but looked burned hard and chipped rather than very worn. So at the end of the week I left him with a car in a thousand bits and a long list.. New suspension arms, new shocks, raise ride height, repair chassis, weld over rust, new crossmember, fix carbs, make cross-strut bar, new seat mounts, new rear brake lines, new rear slave cylinders, move lines into car, new fuel tank, battery sorted, remake throttle cable setup & move pedals to suit new seat position... and on it went! We had until Nov 23rd to finish it before the next rally!

The car never idled, it stuck around 1500rpm and the throttle return springs were stretched so tight one broke, and they were so big it took a lot of grunt to move the throttle through its tiny travel of about 40mm, like a light switch! The fuel and the throttle cables both traveled around the carbs then back into a connection, so there was a lot of excess wire and lines everywhere. Taking the carbs off found an obvious problem.

With the cross-member rooted the motor came out, only to find the sump had been grooved right across by rubbing on the cross-member and we were lucky it wasn't split through. The motor wouldn't earth properly, and the exhaust manifold leaked.

The wheel arches sat at 660 and 630, on Kings springs, so the drivers side of the car was lower front & rear. The castor rods had worn the round hole in their front mounts into large ovals.

Rusted in the top corner of course, and down by the bumper mounts...

The mudguards didn't fit properly and the bonnet wouldn't close without rubbing along them, and having stripped the guard off I found the upper chassis was bent from a road accident years ago, and the strut tower moved back.

Under the bonnet was a disaster- I took a wheel off and noticed the horizontal bolt attaching the LCA to the crossmember was not horizontal at all, it sloped forwards. The sump guard had been mounted onto two towers welded down off the back of the crossmember, but the pathetic KYB shocks with 10Kg gas pressure were the same as the rears and sucked the car down onto the ground. As it hit everything with the sump guard the force drove the mounts upwards and they tilted the cross-member by crushing the chassis where the cross-member bolted on.

Inside, the hood lining was still in the car and the cage was 75mm below the roof, so even lying back in the seat his helmet touched the cage. Having lifted the seat for the Orange rally he was jamming his head up between the top side cage rail and a diagonal. It still had a heater in (disconnected) and the fan didn't work, and all the wiring with its 20-odd warning lights was in there. I could see the ground through the rust around the steering column once I took the cover off. While the brakes had too much travel, the accelerator had a 100mm high pedal stop that left it with about 20mm between idle and full throttle.

The chassis cross rails were smashed flat under the seats, and a hole had been smashed through the floor under the driver's seat. The gearbox crossmember had been smashed shut instead of an inverted "U" shape. The fuel lines were still under the car and amazingly they were intact. The rear brake line ran under the floor to the diff, from the diff into the car then forwards to the handbrake, then back to the diff, so the brake line ran down the car three times! The brakes were soft and the pedal went so far down so they needed pumping to stop.

The diff had been smacking the 2& 1/2" exhaust pipe flat and the diff nose had been grinding into the floor.

Underneath, all the bushes in the arms on the rear axle were completely destroyed, and the bump stops had been smashed to bits.

The rear shocks had moved around so much they had widened each hole where they came through the boot. The shocks were completely the wrong sort, Monroe GT Gas that had 5Kg gas pressure and sucked the car down onto the road at every bump, so completely the opposite to what we needed. The rear wheel arch ride height was 650mm on the passenger's and 625 on the driver's side.

I planned an in-boot tank to solve all that, and put a surge tank below it in the wheel-well. The only way I can make sense of my ideas is to draw them on the back of an envelope then make a model, so I did that...