Josef

I thought the Spit 1500s finally used 1000 TPM? But regardless I was meaning that the single rail / J type setups were different from the three rail / D type, and that Calvin’s current three rail with a change to use a 3.63 diff probably wouldn’t match any factory small-chassis drivetrain configuration. So some thought might be needed on the speedo choice / calibration.

Just note with a 3.89 diff you should be able to fit an earlier Spitfire MkIV speedo (1184 TPM) and have it be accurate (your current one should be a Spit MkIII type at 1248 TPM?), and match the Bond's other instruments. With the 3.63 something custom would be needed afaik, or at least a later Spitfire one wouldn't 'just work' as Triumph switched to modifying the gearbox output ratios leaving all speedos calibrated to 1000 TPM. There's not much variety in speedo drive pinions available for the D-type overdrive.

Re-webbing was pretty straightforward with the Park Lane kit. I used a thin screwdriver to pull the webbing hooks into place. The seat runners I had completely disassembled and re-plated quite some time back so it was nice to finally pair them up with freshly painted frames again!

Judging by the photos of the tack welds there, a little more power might be a good idea. They don’t look to have penetrated very well (you’ll be able to see if this is the case looking on the inside of the wheel arch). If you’re blowing through, striking off the last weld rather than the sheet metal can help. if you need a smaller heat sink, I use a slice of scrap brass bar about 1.25 inches in diameter and 0.5 inches thick and hold that behind the weld area. Can also cobble something together with a big welding magnet to hold it in place if you can’t reach the back of the panel and weld at the same time.

September 2021 - my seat kit from Owen at Park Lane arrived, so I went big on electrolytic rust stripping of the seat frames! They needed a few minor weld repairs but were otherwise pretty decent. I created a replacement for the long disintegrated headrest support spring from some old bits of wind chime that I put a thread on each end of along with some bits of pen barrel and suitable diameter springs. I decided to keep the late 1500 seats that the car came with. It's had them since at least 1997-98 so they're part of this car's history now I feel. I also didn't fancy paying £100s for some original style seat frames, plus £100s more for runners, if I could find them, to build up some non-adjustable, presumably less comfortable seats! (Wrigley's gum wrapper and a US stamp that fell out when stripping the seat frames make me think they could have originally come from a US car.)

I have taken everything I absolutely could back to bare metal before painting, so hopefully my reliance on the anti-rust properties will be minimal, but good to hear about it's marine performance that's reassuring!

Got the outrigger end back on this morning. There’s now a 6mm gap between the body and chassis when before they were in contact due to a combination of overplating and rust! Currently having a tea break while waiting for the primer to dry on the repair patch for the leading end of the same outrigger.

Not to mention all the kit car / custom builds that’re still erroneously registered as Spitfire, Herald etc!

Couple of bits and pieces - checking the rear toe (which was miraculously in spec with my initial guesstimate number of shims) and drilling holes for / test fitting the rear bumpers before the car was trailered off for paint.

Thanks guys. When I had ground it all down and was looking at it I was thinking I wouldn't have had the first idea how to go about fixing this if I'd seen it just over a year ago!

It was awkward to weld, and really awkward to grind, but that’s the boot corner done! Lot of effort, but it looks pretty decent so I’m glad I did go down the route of making something to fit here rather than trying to graft on the bit I’d bought.

Well yes the data set is poor (noticeably better looking for the Spit 1500s, which were all produced after centralised registration so no real surprise the consistency improved there), which means there are a lot of assumptions in my analysis, and that is why I’ve written nothing in absolutes. But as there’s nothing else available, (Barring the Spitfire Database, but that has its own limitations) a slightly more informed estimate is better than a really rubbish one!

So, you may have come across the website HowManyLeft which displays the data on car makes and models available from the DVLA. It's a fantastic resource and interesting to poke around in. However, there is a problem: the data that the DVLA holds is patchy and inconsistent for cars as old as the Spitfire. This means the visualisations on HowManyLeft are not going to tell us the whole story. It also means people regularly misinterpret the data. Particularly eBay sellers trying to make their early roundtail look super rare. That's what got me looking at this data, seeing a number of ads for Spitfire 4 Mk1s that claimed there were only ~19 left in the UK. There was no way that could be true I thought, but how could I find a more realistic number? The data HowManyLeft uses is publicly available, so I downloaded a copy myself and played about with it using Python. I've concentrated on the car model by year of manufacture, and car model by year of first registration data sets. For simplicity I've combined the SORN and taxed numbers. What we get here is data for Triumph Spitfire Mk1, Spitfire Mk2, Spitfire Mk3, Spitfire Mk4, Spitfire 1500, and Spitfire (with no model specifier). A bit of investigation highlighted three main problems. The Spitfire data set with no model specifier includes a significant number of the total, the “Mk4” category includes cars built / registered from 1963-67 which are more likely Spitfire 4 Mk1 / Mk2, and each of the data sets contain cars where the reg / manufacture year is not known. To get a better estimate I've done the following. Corrected for obviously wrong entries (Mk4 cars built / registered before 1967), distributed any cars with unknown reg / manufacture dates proportionally based on the entries where the reg / manufacture date is known, and separated the Spitfire data set based on production dates as given in Robson: Triumph Spitfire and GT6 (Mk1: Oct 62 -> Dec 6; Mk2: Dec 64 -> Jan 67; Mk3: Jan 67 -> Dec 70; MkIV: Nov 70 -> Dec 74; 1500: Dec 74 -> Aug 80). There's a lot of assumption here, so these numbers are only a rough estimate, but comparing the data by year of registration and year of manufacture should give us a more realistic idea than simply looking at those cars that happen to be registered as 'Spitfire Mk1' and 'Spitfire Mk2'. What this gives us is a figure of 292 Mk1/Mk2s by year of first registration, and 428 by year of manufacture. So roughly 300-400 cars known to the DVLA, still a small number, but much more healthy than double figures! I will to produce graphs for the later models at some point, and there's also the data on the International Spitfire Database to have a play with.

Door completed and back on the car. Made a much better job of the skin on this one.

I can attest to welding underneath a Spitfire not being much fun so yeah I'm sure a rotisserie will help. Looking like a good start there!

Yeah you will have to trim it. It has to fit against the a-post, sill and bulkhead which're all going to be in subtly different places on each car depending on previous work, so slightly oversized is probably better!

Needs some holes drilling and primer, but otherwise ready to fit! Photo next to the commercial section for comparison. Though to be fair if you were paying someone to make the partial panel as I just have you’d be talking maybe 10x the ~£80 I paid for the panel you can buy in labour costs. Maybe these are something we should be looking at having pressed as a club, at least the lower half that rots (I expect doing the full bracket would be extra costly given the 90 degree bend).

Ground the base of the raised section so it would mate with the remains of the original bracket, tacked it in place on the car, checked against the templates and fully welded it in. Next will be a lot of grinding, and cutting out the underside (handily marked out by the welding heat!)

More door shell repairs

I can appreciate why Heralds are not repaired well in this area, the shapes are complicated and it takes a really long time to do to a standard approaching original if you make it yourself, and that will have been the only option for most people for a long time as we know. My passenger side bracket is not too dissimilar to your photo (and I’m 99% sure I’m the first amateur to weld my Herald so will have to blame a garage rather than a PO there), but I’m not tackling it right away. When the Spitfire is on the road the Herald can have some more serious attention. Shame the tub is not saveable, but that also makes it a good subject to have a practice on I guess! That was pretty much my attitude with the Spitfire, I felt I had nothing more to lose as whatever I did would be better than what was there. Though I would’ve been much more daunted if I had seen the whole thing stripped and the mess was fully revealed…

Unsurprisingly, 2mm steel is a lot harder to work! After several hours of hammering though I have something that looks reasonable, if a little hammer scarred. Got the angled section that joins to the boot size fully shaped and fitted up. Next move will be to weld the raised section to a flat bit of steel, and I’ll probably join that to the angled piece too off the car.

Well, then, that should've been time to think about organising paint right? Nope, I turned my suspicious eyes on the driver's door. It had been re-skinned in the past, but the bottom lip had either opened out or never been crimped down fully and was rusting. That in itself would probably have been saveable, but the hinge area looked as bad as it had been on the passenger side, and would've been much more awkward to fix with the skin on, so off it came. I did have a chat with Dave at the Spitfire Graveyard at before chopping this one apart. He said most earlier doors he sees now are rotting out in this area. I also asked about skinning a MkIV / 1500 door with an earlier skin. It's do-able apparently, and he recommended swapping out the area of the shell where the later cars have the door pull (top centre) as this fouls the earlier trim style and stops it sitting nicely. I still went with repairing the one I had though as it isn't actually too hard an area to fix given it's mostly just flat metal.

Post about attempting to reproduce this shape starts here.

So, on to the boot corner bracket. I've taken the photos from here and done some playing in photoshop to correct for the camera position, then manipulated the image to give me a 1:1 scale picture based on measuring the bits that remain on my car. That's allowed me to draw a template of the flat vs raised surfaces . Cutting that out and testing it in the car looks relatively sensible, so tomorrows job will be to cut out the curvy section in steel, and try rolling the edge of it using the dolly I've made for the purpose.

Not the prettiest of repairs, but the valance now fits (and I know nobody has seen these panels in at least 14 years so I’m not particularly fussed)