Right, picture the scene. My GT6 is currently sporting those welded door aperture braces – a little invention to stop the body from folding like a wet cardboard box while the tub’s off. They’re perfectly functional if your only aim is to maintain structural rigidity, but less so if you also want to actually get inside the car.
Anyway, I’d had yet another trial fitting of the MX-5 engine with the gearbox attached, and the verdict was in – the original GT6 gearbox support had to go in order to lower the gearbox slightly. No big deal, I thought. Just whip it off. It’s held in place by two Allen bolts. Easy. Except, of course, the nuts for these bolts are hidden away under the chassis rails, like they’ve been placed there by some sadistic Triumph engineer whose personal mission in life was to make sure owners of a certain age develop a colourful vocabulary.
The nuts can’t be reached from outside the car without circus training, so the only option was to climb inside and remove them through the transmission tunnel hole. This meant vaulting over one of my own braces – which, let’s be honest, is about as dignified as watching a walrus attempt the high jump. My left knee has been on strike ever since I spent a few hours welding on my knees last week, so the idea of bending it into the footwell was… optimistic. Still, in I went, landing squarely on the really bad knee (as opposed to the just bad knee), which made a loud “pop” like an impatient champagne cork. Miraculously, whatever was misaligned in there popped back into place. NHS orthopaedics, eat your heart out – I appear to have invented the DIY knee reset.
Spurred on by this unexpected medical triumph, I managed to get a half-inch ring spanner onto the nut and remove the bolt on one side. The victory was short-lived, however, because I now faced a new problem: I was trapped. There’s a certain indignity in realising that you’ve become the human equivalent of one of those stranded sheep you see in the news, stuck halfway through a fence. It took me a full thirty minutes to work out a method of escape that didn’t involve either screaming in agony or calling the fire brigade.
The good news is I got out. The bad news is I now have to do the other side. At least I have a 25-year-old son who’s willing to help me occasionally – and who may even inherit the GT6 when I finally peg it. Though with my luck, he’ll sell it to buy a Tesla.
And while we’re on the subject of design quirks, I think I’ve mentioned before that the original GT6 transmission tunnel was made of cardboard – yes, cardboard. It’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder whether Triumph’s design department had a sideline in packaging. Sadly, a tuned, turbo MX-5 engine is going to produce rather more heat than a Corn Flakes box can handle, so a sturdier option is needed. You can get GRP or plastic GT6 tunnels, but they a) melt faster than a choc ice on a car dashboard, and b) don’t fit the MX-5 gearbox anyway. My cunning plan? Hack a perfectly serviceable transmission tunnel out of a scrap MX-5 and graft it onto the GT6’s scuttle and floorpans like some sort of Frankenstein’s automotive upholstery experiment.
Of course, the MX-5 gearbox is longer than the GT6’s, which means it collides head-on with the original handbrake. The solution? Delete the manual handbrake entirely and replace it with a modern electric actuator – one button, no faffing. The gear selector may also need a bit of cosmetic surgery to angle it forward, so it’s not sticking up beside my elbow like an uninvited dinner guest. After all, I’m going for “restomod chic”, not “DIY ergonomic disaster”.
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