Jerseygirl
Jedi Trainee
Offline
I’m going to break this up into a few posts to keep the posts a bit shorter…
Part 1:
Last winter we pulled the engine and transmission out of my Volvo to convert it from automatic to manual with electric overdrive. It was 4 months of thinking, “We must be insane”, but everything turned out great in the end.
This winter, I decided it was the Spitfire’s turn, though not for anything so drastic. In one year since I bought the car, I’ve watched the passenger’s seat upholstery disintegrate almost before my eyes. In November, I purchased new seat covers and foam to recover both seats and a new carpet set (since we’d have the seats out anyway). In addition to the seats we also planned to:
1. Install heated seat kits in both seats
2. Convert the ZS carb to the SU’s that we picked up at Carlisle last May
3. Install the Nardi steering wheel that’s been hanging on my garage wall for months
4. Replace my noisy differential with a good used one we picked up from a friend.
5. Carpet the trunk
6. Install my new headlights.
7. Install rear speakers
Fast forward to late February. We hadn’t even touched the car yet and I had already registered for the Carlisle show in May. Time to get cracking. We pulled the seats out so I could work on re-covering them. Actually, the process was much better than I had expected, even with the added task of installing the heating elements. I would have had both seats done in a weekend had I not decided to repaint the wire basket frames under each seat. Amazingly, they were the only parts of the seat frame that had any rust. The old seat straps were pretty much shot as well, but I couldn’t bring myself to spend $60 per seat for new ones so I took the cheap way out. Went to my local hardware store and bought a bunch of short bungee cords. $60 per seat dropped to $7 per seat.
While I was working on the seats, Ian, began pulling out the old, very nasty, carpet, and dropping the rear section of the exhaust to gain access to the differential. While removing the boot from the e-brake handle, we decided that it really needs to be replaced. There are numerous tears in the boot. A quick search revealed that you can’t just buy a new boot. The places I found only sell you the boot attached to that e-brake cover/armrest thingy (for upwards of $80). So, I’ve now decided that I’m going to make my own custom boot and attach it to the existing cover myself. I might even go so far as to embroider a Triumph logo or something onto that boot. And since I’m doing that one, I’ll probably make a shifter boot to match. But that’s a project I’ll dig into later…
In early March, we made a trip down to British Miles to check out a NOS Volvo roof rack that Tom wanted to show me. While there we got to chatting about the Spit and what we were working on. He asked if my car had overdrive. No… Would I like to have overdrive? Yeah, someday... How’s your current transmission doing? Well, it makes this sort of crunching noise when you shift too quickly and ALWAYS when shifting into reverse... That means your syncros are going… Crap. You know, while you’ve got the interior torn out, now is the time to do the conversion. Crap… I’ve got a couple good overdrive transmissions if you want to do the swap…
So a week later we were back down there picking up my new transmission.
If you’ve noticed, a small snowball has just formed and has begun to grow…
Some pictures of the start of the project:
Here's an unsuspecting Baldrick resting peacefully, completely unaware of his pending doom:
A before shot of the dashboard in case we never see it in one piece again:
And the area behind the seats:
Let the "fun" begin! Here's a shot after the seats are gone:
The seats before I got started:
And the after:
More to come later...
Part 1:
Last winter we pulled the engine and transmission out of my Volvo to convert it from automatic to manual with electric overdrive. It was 4 months of thinking, “We must be insane”, but everything turned out great in the end.
This winter, I decided it was the Spitfire’s turn, though not for anything so drastic. In one year since I bought the car, I’ve watched the passenger’s seat upholstery disintegrate almost before my eyes. In November, I purchased new seat covers and foam to recover both seats and a new carpet set (since we’d have the seats out anyway). In addition to the seats we also planned to:
1. Install heated seat kits in both seats
2. Convert the ZS carb to the SU’s that we picked up at Carlisle last May
3. Install the Nardi steering wheel that’s been hanging on my garage wall for months
4. Replace my noisy differential with a good used one we picked up from a friend.
5. Carpet the trunk
6. Install my new headlights.
7. Install rear speakers
Fast forward to late February. We hadn’t even touched the car yet and I had already registered for the Carlisle show in May. Time to get cracking. We pulled the seats out so I could work on re-covering them. Actually, the process was much better than I had expected, even with the added task of installing the heating elements. I would have had both seats done in a weekend had I not decided to repaint the wire basket frames under each seat. Amazingly, they were the only parts of the seat frame that had any rust. The old seat straps were pretty much shot as well, but I couldn’t bring myself to spend $60 per seat for new ones so I took the cheap way out. Went to my local hardware store and bought a bunch of short bungee cords. $60 per seat dropped to $7 per seat.
While I was working on the seats, Ian, began pulling out the old, very nasty, carpet, and dropping the rear section of the exhaust to gain access to the differential. While removing the boot from the e-brake handle, we decided that it really needs to be replaced. There are numerous tears in the boot. A quick search revealed that you can’t just buy a new boot. The places I found only sell you the boot attached to that e-brake cover/armrest thingy (for upwards of $80). So, I’ve now decided that I’m going to make my own custom boot and attach it to the existing cover myself. I might even go so far as to embroider a Triumph logo or something onto that boot. And since I’m doing that one, I’ll probably make a shifter boot to match. But that’s a project I’ll dig into later…
In early March, we made a trip down to British Miles to check out a NOS Volvo roof rack that Tom wanted to show me. While there we got to chatting about the Spit and what we were working on. He asked if my car had overdrive. No… Would I like to have overdrive? Yeah, someday... How’s your current transmission doing? Well, it makes this sort of crunching noise when you shift too quickly and ALWAYS when shifting into reverse... That means your syncros are going… Crap. You know, while you’ve got the interior torn out, now is the time to do the conversion. Crap… I’ve got a couple good overdrive transmissions if you want to do the swap…
So a week later we were back down there picking up my new transmission.
If you’ve noticed, a small snowball has just formed and has begun to grow…
Some pictures of the start of the project:
Here's an unsuspecting Baldrick resting peacefully, completely unaware of his pending doom:
A before shot of the dashboard in case we never see it in one piece again:
And the area behind the seats:
Let the "fun" begin! Here's a shot after the seats are gone:
The seats before I got started:
And the after:
More to come later...