In part 1 of this saga I left you with the story of taking off most o=
f
the exterior paint and a discovery or two of the previous body repair=
s.
Thanks to all of you who replied with hints, advice and encouragement=
.
The encouragement is most welcome as the E still sits in my garage,
now barely recognizable as a motoring car. I have to keep to the fait=
h,
muttering the mantra =AAits going to look great one day=AB as I disas=
semble
more and more. You see, a severe case of shipwrights disease has set =
in,
or at least the following variant of it: you spend a fair amount of t=
ime
stripping something down and then reach a point where you decide, gee=
if
I've gone to this much trouble I should do this bit here properly bec=
ause
I don't want to have to come back and do it again later. The trouble =
is
that this syndrome is cumulative. Namely, now that I've gone to all
this trouble I am sure as hell not going to leave this part looking l=
ike
that, and so on it goes.
(skip the rest if you are not into all this E Type details!)
An example is the bonnet, a fine piece of Jaguar engineering. The
original intention was to paint the inside as well, but just the bits=
you
could see, hah! Stripping the outside of the bonnet was easy enough, =
all
the chrome and trim straight forward enough to disassemble. The very =
tip
of the nose of the bonnet turned out to be very bruised indeed. I sup=
pose
there isn't an E around that hasn't had someone back into its
strategically placed nose, or that has found a curb that was
marginally higher than anticipated. The damage was confined to
immediately behind the bumper bar and over-riders, but hadn't been be=
aten
out, just filled. So to fix it properly meant disassembling the bonne=
t,
but that seemed like a good idea because then I could get in and pain=
t
those air ducts properly.
The wings came off with the bonnet still on the car. The tricky part
was getting those headlamp buckets out. They are held on by 3 screws
that are well hidden in the underbody coating applied to the back of
the front diaphragm (the transverse panel in which the headlamps are
mounted). Undoing the nuts from the rear side is not sufficient to
remove the bucket, you have to withdraw the screw as well from the fr=
ont
side and you can only do that by twisting and flexing the bucket arou=
nd.
This is going to be tricky on reassembly (but I will protect the edge=
s
with tape, Bryan!).
*** Couple of questions:
I have looked in a few of my books with restored E-Types and there
isn't much consistency on the choice of colour for the headllamp buck=
et.
Some are painted the same colour as the body, others are a sort of
charcoal gray. I believe the latter is correct? Remember this is a Se=
r. I
with covered headlamps.
Secondly, the bucket has a rubber seal around its edge (not the glass
seal) and it doesn't seal at all. It indirectly lets dust and moistur=
e in
making a mess under the glass. Anyone thought of a better solution to
this rubber seal?
Once the bucket is out access to the bumper mounts is much easier, so=
I
should have done this first. Instead, I poked my 7 year old son throu=
gh
the airducts and sidelamp holes to undo them!
To remove the wings you also have to figure out how those front and
rear diaphragms (mudguards) are attached to the bonnet. When you look
under the bonnet you see there are lots and lots of screws and bolts
holding the diaphragms and air ducts to the bonnet sections. What the
manual doesn't show is that only the bolts at the corners of each of
these panels fastens the panel to the bonnet. Of course these are the
last screws to be undone because the corner ones are hidden by some
rubbery sealant. The remainder of the screws just hold pieces of
curved angle iron to the panels which follow those amazing convolutio=
ns
of the bonnet.
When both wings were off I noticed that when I raised the center sect=
ion
of the bonnet those long air duct assemblies stayed behind. They are =
only
glued to the bonnet! Or at least they were once glued, its hard to
tell because only perished rubber is left, or is it dried out sealant
compound, does anybody know what belongs here exactly?
Removing the bonnet center section would have been very straight forw=
ard
if some clown hadn't made two 2=AB welds joining it to the bonnet un=
der
panel. I knew that angle grinder would come in handy again!
Finally I was left with just the under panel attached by the two bonn=
et
hinges to the rest of the car. There is a wiring harness buried in th=
ere
for the lights. I would hate it if those Lucas connectors ever gave
trouble and the whole bonnet had to be disassembled again!
Now I was left with 14 largish bonnet pieces arranged around the gara=
ge.
They looked very difficult to strip the paint from because there are =
lots
of hollow sections and concave bits and corners, and basically the
novelty of paint stripping was wearing thin. I discovered a nearby
company in the phone book that could put large body panels into a tan=
k
to strip them, remove surface corrosion and dip them in a phosphoric =
acid
etch. This is going to cost me $390 for the disassembled bonnet. Ah w=
ell,
I wanted it done properly didn't I. If I knew I was going to get this
extravagant I wouldn't have bothered stripping the outside of the hoo=
d
first! I should get it back this week so I will report on how it went=
.
Hmm, maybe I should have given him the doors as well. There was one
place in the phone book that claimed to be able to put whole car bodi=
es
into a tank, but no, I refuse to go that far!
Up to know I had left all the windows on the car, to keep the interio=
r
clean. I figured once I removed the glass the last bits of paint woul=
dn't
take long to strip. Wrong! There are so many fiddly bits with stubbor=
n
paint in the crevices that this is taking as long as the rest of
the car up to now. All those bits with impossible to remember names l=
ike
the plinth valence facia trunnions.
I couldn't resist visiting the body shop in the meantime to look at
colours and chat to the owner. He has a Ser. I roadster in his shop
window. The first thing he asked was why wasn't I painting the engine
compartment frame. I had the answer prepared for that one: don't want
to remove the engine and front suspension at this stage, can always
come back and do it later when the engine has to come out for a new
clutch, for example. Nothing could be worse in my garage now than add=
ing
engine and suspension bits to the increasing pile in my garage. The
car may just never come together again if I did that. Oh, but I can p=
aint
the frame with engine in place, he said. Just remove the cooling syst=
em,
carbs, manifolds and the bric-a-brac on the firewall. No way!
When I got home and started staring at the faded and chipped paint on
the frame I realized he was right, damn him!
So, you guessed it, the radiator, carbs, manifolds etc are coming off
this week. After all, you can't go to all this trouble and then not
make a proper job of it, can you......
Patrick this-is-definitely-the-last-piece-of-disassembly Krejcik
PS My son just showed me in the last issue of Sports Illustrated
someone who spent $75,000 on a paint job for a Ferrari. Come on,
that's ridiculous isn't it? Shipwrights disease isn't terminal is it?
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