We bought our orange 1977 Spitfire 1500 back in 2011 as a daily driver. It cost £800 and ran reasonably well. However just a little digging led to it coming off the road for some serious attention.
Both sills and floors received new metal, the bonnet got a light respray and many items were replaced such as the carpets, brake and clutch master cylinders and the clutch slave cylinder.
We also made some sensible and some purely aesthetic upgrades. We added K&N air filters, a shiny new rocker cover, a full twin sports exhaust, slightly wider but period GT6 wheels, electronic ignition, an electric fan to prevent overheating and better headlights.
The Waxstat jets in the SU carburettors were also replaced with more reliable standard jets and the dash pots polished.
Replacing a broken speedo drive gear meant the gearbox had to come out and the clutch was replaced at the same time.
We also replaced the badly varnished dash with a gorgeous new one. It transformed the interior and was well worth the effort.
One day the speedo stopped working. This can be a very quick and easy fix if it’s the speedo cable or issues at the dash end. However if the problem is with the speedo drive gear, which is a nylon cog on a shaft inside the gearbox, then it’s gearbox out job! Guess what the cause of my issue was??
Thankfully removing the gearbox from a Spitfire does not require removal of the engine first, unlike with an MG Midget for example. You have to unbolt the bellhousing from the engine and pull the gearbox out through the cabin.
Once that was out I had to get access to the internals of the box, remove the damaged gear and then press a new gear on.
Pressing on the new gear required a little ingenuity using my press which was too short to accommodate the length of the shaft. I had to cut a hole in a table and bolt the press onto that. It worked well! I then had to refit the box and hope the speedo now worked! Thankfully it did!
The car then ran like a dream and sounded fabulous. She just needed paint, new bumpers, new door cards and a few other bits and bobs.
Business then got really busy and I spent all my time on other people’s cars and none on mine. I even pilfered parts of this car to get other projects progressed! In a sad state she sat gathering dust.
Then, probably a year later, I decided it was time to get her sorted so I could enjoy her again. The first job was to retrieve all the bits from the engine that I’d nicked for other cars. With that done the engine ran for the first time in a quite a while. Blimey she sounds good!!
Next onto the body. I painted parts of the car many years ago but not since I’ve had the new unit and a paint booth. The paint I used before was cellulose but I want to paint the whole car with fresh 2k. I may change the colour too. That’s currently undecided!
However before paint I need to sort the terrible panel gaps and the rusty bonnet. The seams along the sides of the bonnet have been filled over by a previous owner, probably to hide rust. To sort that would mean separating the bonnet from the wings and sorting the mating surfaces. A job I did on a MkIV Spitfire some time ago and one I wasn’t keen to repeat!
Instead I decided to try a different bonnet. I had two spares in stock. One was fibreglass which would be super light and the other was steel but needed some work.
First to try was a green fibreglass bonnet.
It fitted reasonably well in some areas but in others it was way off and being GRP I was unable to bend it into shape.
Next was the steel one. It was rusty in some places but nothing that couldn’t be sorted.
This fitted much better and sorting the gaps with the sills and the doors only needed minor fettling!
Then it was time to sort the rust and the damage to the bonnet. There was a large patch on the top where the previous owner had started to remove the paint. The metal was a little dented here, probably from the scraper the previous owner had used.
I first treated the metal with a rust converter/preventer and then added a thin skim of filler.
This was then sanded to match the contours of the rest of the bonnet. The paint on the rest of the bonnet was also bobbly with lots of tiny little bumps all over it. The whole bonnet needs aggressive sanding to get rid of them.
