Rotisseries and GT6s

For nearly a year I put off putting the GT6 shell on the rotisserie.

This was not because I’m lazy. Well, not entirely. It was because I had looked at the arrangement, looked at the rear overhang of the car, looked at the various bits of fabricated steel, brackets, bolts, tubes and general workshop optimism, and concluded that at some point it was going to tax me.

I was right.

There are jobs in restoration that look hard and turn out to be hard. That is acceptable. You brace yourself, get the tools out, swear in the conventional manner, and eventually metal either moves or it doesn’t. But there is another category of job altogether: the job that should have been straightforward, but only after you have redesigned the thing that was meant to make it straightforward in the first place.

The rotisserie itself is a good idea. In principle, it’s the sort of thing that makes you feel like a serious restorer rather than a man lying on his back under a car wondering which of the brown flakes falling into his ear used to be structural. Bolt the shell to the frame, lift it, rotate it, and suddenly the underside is no longer a hostile cave. It becomes a surface. A surface you can inspect, repair, clean and paint without developing the posture of a medieval monk.

That was the theory. The practice involved about a week of faffing around.

It had already had a sort of rehearsal a week earlier, when my two sons helped me get the tub off the chassis. That should have been one of those satisfying family engineering moments where several generations combine intelligence, muscle and mild concern, and the car yields gracefully.

It did not.

The tub was still attached by the handbrake cable, which ran to a triangular plate under the car where the cable split to each rear wheel. This was exactly where it needed to be if the designer’s ambition had been to make removal irritating. There wasn’t enough room to unbolt the plate. There wasn’t enough room to get bolt croppers onto the cable. There wasn’t enough room to get an angle grinder in either, at least not in any way that didn’t have the words “and then the ambulance arrived” hovering nearby.

Eventually I had to hoik the rear of the tub up with the engine hoist, straining every weld in the thing, and gaining just enough access to get the angle grinder into the confined space. I was very wary. An angle grinder is an excellent tool, but it’s also a small, furious disc of consequence. If it catches while your hands are in a tight gap, the result is not a charming anecdote about persistence. It’s a visit to A&E and a technician asking why you thought this was a good idea.

And I was not being melodramatic about this. Earlier in the year I had already acquired a nasty six-inch scar on my leg from a runaway angle grinder, which is a fairly effective way of converting theoretical caution into practical religion. Once a tool has tried to fillet you, you do tend to treat it with a bit more respect. Not fear, exactly, but the sort of respect normally reserved for unstable livestock and people reversing caravans.

So perhaps the delay before putting the shell on the rotisserie was not cowardice. It was memory.

The problem this time was the rear overhang. A GT6 is not a simple box with convenient ends. It has a tail, because Triumph were trying to make a small British sports car look as though it had escaped from an Italian design studio, which, to be fair, they largely succeeded in doing. Unfortunately, that elegant little tail is exactly where the rotisserie and the self-lifter would quite like to occupy the same physical space.

And this is where the whole thing started to feel less like restoration and more like archaeology of someone else’s design assumptions.

My suspicion is that the rotisserie was originally designed before the self-lifter came into existence. The basic frame probably worked perfectly well when all it had to do was attach to the bumper iron mounts and hold the shell on an axis. Then, at some later date, someone added the self-lifter, which is a useful device, but one that changes the geometry. Suddenly you no longer need clearance only for the car. You need clearance for the car, the rear overhang, the lifting mechanism and the path by which the lifting mechanism is meant to be removed.

This last point is the sort of thing that gets missed when people draw things in straight lines.

In the end, I had to make a couple of crush tubes for the rear, so there was enough clearance for the back of the car’s overhang. That sounds simple when written down. It was not simple while doing it, because by then every measurement had become slightly personal. The gap was still small enough that I had to unscrew the self-lifter so I could extract it from above, which is not so much a design feature as a mild act of penance.

The rear bracket really needs another 10 cm or more where it attaches to the rear bumper irons. Not because the thing isn’t strong enough, but because strength is only one part of good engineering. Clearance matters. Access matters. The ability to remove a component without inventing a new yoga position matters. A design that is structurally sound but traps its own lifting device behind the rear valance is not quite a failure, but it is certainly standing in the corner thinking about becoming one.

This is the sort of detail that separates engineering from fabrication. Fabrication is making something that fits. Engineering is making something that still fits after the next thing has been added, the user has less than infinite patience, and the car turns out to have a rear end.

Still, I got there in the end.

And once it was finally up, the thing did what it was supposed to do. The shell rotated. The underside appeared. The dreadful bits became visible, which is both the point and the punishment. There is something oddly satisfying about seeing a car you have owned in the normal horizontal sense suddenly standing on its side like a museum exhibit after a minor industrial accident.

Naturally, having achieved this triumph of access, I immediately tackled a bit of welding and then decided to remove some of the bituminous underseal with a blowtorch and scraper. This worked, in the sense that the underseal softened, detached itself from the car, and then a gob of boiling hot tar dropped onto one hand, leaving me with third-degree burns.

At this stage the casual observer might wonder whether the car is being restored or whether it is slowly defeating me by instalments.

At this point, the respectable conclusion would be something about patience, perseverance and the quiet dignity of practical work.

That would be rubbish.

The lesson is that if a bracket needs to be 10 cm longer, it needs to be 10 cm longer. No amount of noble character alters geometry. You can put a job off for a year because you suspect it will be awkward, but if the original design has failed to allow for the overhang, the awkwardness will sit there patiently waiting for you, probably leaning against the bench with a mug of tea.

So yes, the GT6 is now on the rotisserie. The self-lifter has been defeated, or at least negotiated with. The crush tubes have done their quiet little job. The car is accessible in ways it has not been for decades, which means progress should now be quite swift, once I have tackled years of bodged welding, underseal and rust. 

As you can see from this, someone planted a stick-weld cauliflower on the underside. Luckily, it can be fixed. Bloody thing is about an inch deep, with more slag inclusion than Port Talbot steelworks on a Friday night. I know my welding isn't pretty, but this takes a whole different level of incompetence. I at least use a grinder to take down any proud welds.

The old chassis is in pretty good condition and will be sold after everything usable has been tripped from it, especially the wheels. OK, the front has been surgically removed, but I have a replacement section to sell with it.

And the replacement is still sitting next to it in the garden, waiting to be united with the tub and an MX-5 drivetrain. Oh, and a Torsen 2 diff and MX-5 half shafts.

They make a nice, matching pair of garden ornaments.

And I have once again been reminded that classic car restoration is mostly the art of solving problems you did not know existed, caused by parts you have not yet fitted, in order to reach corrosion you already knew was there.