Well last weekend we had a delivery, decided to go ahead and purchase one of those 'new' shells. As I am having a few health issues at the moment a good friend offered to do the 450 mile round trip to pick up the shell.
I waited at my mates bodyshop and after many cups of tea Steve rolled up with the shell, as you can see from the pictures 225 miles did not remove all the dust that had gathered over the near 30 years storage. A quick inspection and there were a few dings here and there, quite minor, but no rust [:D][:D]
Off the trailer and into the workshop,clean off some dust and positioned on the lift and castors welded to the skids for ease of storage.
Then work begins, all the shells at Fitchetts had sunroofs and as I always wanted a non- sunroof TR7 it was time to remove the roof skin. At this point some people are of the beleive that it is a case of chopping the roof at the pillers, it isn't, the roof skin is no different to changing a door skin, simply a case of taking the time to remove all the spot welds and then take the skin from the frame .
This job I entrusted to the bodyshop guys, I didn't panic because the week earlier I had watched the same guy do this on an almost new top of the range BMW.
Bye bye roof skin
Very little paint was found between skin and roof structure so this was bare metaled and primed/painted before moving on to the next step
And here we have the donor roof that will offer its skin
A trial fit
Then out with a very expensive piece of kit, I am informed this cost £26k, it was purchased recently when the insurance companies insisted on all welds being checked and verified. This machine is downloadable to a PC, the guys who use it have to put in their unique password, the machine calibrates itself to the car, does the spot weld and gives a pass or fail on the weld, this can be retrieved by the insurance companies if they want to audit jobs or if the car is involved in another crash and a weld is suspect etc.
Next job was to remove the battery tray, as the car is gonna be V8 I am moving the battery to the boot.
I also have a pair of brand new doors and I hope to trial fit these over the next couple of days.
I am now torn between painting the car Java green or the red of the Works cars but no blue/white stripe on.
More pics info as work progresses.
Cheers, Paul
