It began, innocently enough, with a spot of metalwork on the scuttle. The BP4W coil packs, proud and unrepentant, had made it clear they weren’t going to fit without some persuasion. So out came the angle grinder, and off came a neatly cropped section of Triumph steel – a precise little rebate, 6 cm in from the edge, just deep enough to make room for the towers of spark-slinging japery.
But I wasn’t about to leave a hole in the structural brow of the GT6. This is not a hot rod. It’s a restomod – which, as everyone knows, is the difference between "bodged" and "engineered." So I fabricated a neat L-shaped reinforcement that I bent with my metal stretcher, spanning the width of the recess like a steely eyebrow. Stiff as a Presbyterian deacon and a damn sight more useful. It will be spot welded into position with an extra brace across the front section.
Unfortunately I split the mild steel at the corners of the filler piece by being a tad too enthusiastic with the metal stretcher, but that was be MiG welded, or I can easily make another.
Job done, I thought. But the extra engine mount brackets I'd bought on e-Bay were still laughing at me from the bench – offset, awkward, and entombed in rubber that had clearly signed a non-disclosure agreement with Satan.
So I turned my attention to the Mazda mounts.
The plan was simple: drill holes in the rubber, weaken it, and then slice the rest away. The reality was more Jackson Pollock than engineering. The drill bit jammed. The grinder screamed. And before long, I had glistening flecks of molten rubber speckled across both arms and the front of my polo shirt – which, fortunately, was from a charity shop and cheap as chips. No great loss, though I did get a look from Hay later that suggested otherwise.
Realising I was entering into a battle of attrition, I changed tactics.
I grabbed a scrap of metal from the GT6’s old rear valance – a poetic repurposing, if ever there was one – and set the mount on top. No petrol, no drama. Just a gas torch and half an hour of quiet smouldering on the gravel outside the garage, the air slowly filling with the scent of regret and progress. The rubber didn’t melt so much as crumble, falling away in charred flakes until the steel bracket stood proud and free, like Excalibur pulled from a tyre fire.
I came inside for a cup of tea. That’s when Hay noticed the shirt.
“What on earth have you been doing?” I said nothing. she just shook her head with the weary grace of someone used to finding scorched valve springs on the kitchen windowsill. But the bracket was clean. The scuttle was reinforced. And I was one step closer to making a BP4W look like it belonged in a Triumph GT6 – which it absolutely doesn’t, but we’re past that point now.
All in all, a productive Thursday. One shirt demoted. One set of repurposed bracket reborn. And a car that, one finely fettled inch at a time, is becoming something delightfully irrational.
Over the weekend I gave some thought to how I'm going to mount the C brackets on the chassis, focusing on the passenger side of the chassis, which has a rebate cut into it to accommodate something from the GT6 engine. I decided to fabricate a box section from 2mm steel to cover the whole section, which will have to be repeated on the driver side to ensure both sides are level.
To get the right position for the C brackets I again test fitted the engine into the old chassis, using some wood to cover the passenger side rebate and ensure the engine seated evenly, rather than canted to one side.
That was about as vertical as achievable, even if a bit high, but I was more interested in the longitudinal position to get the chassis mounts in the right position.
The salvaged C brackets will be notched at the right angle to fit over the box section and be welded to it at 35 degrees from the vertical, which matches the angle of the engine side mounts. The depth of the notches will determine the height at which the engine sits.
Now to find some 2mm mild steel plate to replace the aluminium template.....
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