I needed to find the bumper irons for the GT6. They’re required to mount the rear of the car to the rotisserie, so I can swivel the car and attack the underside without lying on the floor like a stranded walrus with a wire brush.
So I searched through the first of many boxes of bits, the cataloguing of which could charitably be described as experimental. Totally unrelated parts in the same box, obviously, because order is for people with labelled drawers, free time, and an unhealthy belief in the future.
By some miracle I found the bumper irons in the first box, but only one of the eight bolts that go with them. So I did the sensible modern thing and ordered twenty on eBay for a tenner. I placed the one original bolt in the required captive nut on the car for safekeeping.
This will become important later, because apparently I like leaving myself clues and then ignoring them.
Naturally, a second rummage in the same box during a period of ennui recovered the lot. Or so I thought. They were badly corroded, but they looked plausible, and in classic car restoration plausibility is often all you have before the swearing starts.
At which point the problem appeared to be solved twice. I had the rusty originals, and I had twenty replacements on the way. A rational person would have put the kettle on, congratulated himself on a successful outcome, and moved on to the next unnecessarily awkward job.
Instead, the next day, I spent four hours cleaning the originals by soaking them in citric acid.
The task no longer needed doing. The replacement parts were already on their way. The economic argument had collapsed completely. But the old bolts were sitting there, looking reproachful, and some small deranged part of my brain said they came off the car, so they ought to go back on the car.
There is a strange Zen to it, though. You start off thinking you’re restoring bolts, but after half an hour you realise the bolts are restoring you. Mostly by removing impatience, hope, and any remaining belief that your time has a market value.
Then it becomes a competition.
The new bolts are in the post, somewhere in the vast logistical digestive system of eBay, Royal Mail, and a man with a padded envelope. So the challenge is clear. Can I renovate the old ones before the new ones arrive?
I did. And they were gleaming.
The observant among you will notice there are nine bolts, six of one type and three of another. Don’t ask me why. They’re all the same thread, which was enough to give me a false sense of competence. Perhaps there was an off day in the Triumph factory in 1972. Perhaps I had found bolts belonging to another artefact entirely. Perhaps, and this is the painful one, I should have compared them with the one actual correct bolt sitting in the captive nut on the car.
Naturally, I did not.
I then tried fixing the bumper irons into the car with my beautifully renovated bolts.
They were too small.
So there we are. Four hours restoring a set of completely unrelated bolts. Any sensible person would first have compared them to the known correct one. But any sensible person probably wouldn’t be restoring a GT6 in retirement, so we can park that line of enquiry before it becomes hurtful.
When you’re a pensioner restoring a classic, time is an awkward thing. Time left to live is the enemy, because every seized bolt, missing bracket and mysterious previous-owner bodge is quietly eating into the available supply. But time is also something that has to be filled, preferably with something more absorbing than watching daytime television and developing strong opinions about the neighbour’s bins.
So you clean the bolts. The wrong bolts, as it happens.
Not because it makes economic sense. It doesn’t. Not because anyone will ever see them. They won’t. You clean them because they belong to something, because they’re still usable, and because for a few hours the world has narrowed itself down to citric acid, rust, threads and a small achievable improvement.
Having never dismantled the car in the first place, I then thought I should inspect the box for other treasures. This is how classic car restoration works. You start by looking for eight bolts and end up conducting an archaeological survey of someone else’s dismantling decisions.
I found some brackets, the purpose of which completely eluded me. So I did what any self-respecting restorer does in a moment of uncertainty. I asked a chat group full of other saddos.
Within five minutes, the answer came back.
They were for the old seats. As I’m replacing those with custom-covered Mazda MX-5 seats, they are now superfluous to requirements, which is restoration language for I’m not brave enough to throw them away.
So they went into a box marked “To sell at a later date”, which is where car parts go to consider their future in silence.
Some parts get restored. Some get fitted. Some are identified, declared surplus, and put in a box for a future eBay listing that will almost certainly never happen.
This is one of the strange comforts of old cars. Somewhere, at any given moment, there is a man who knows exactly what an obscure pressed-steel bracket does on a Triumph GT6, and he is only waiting for someone to ask. He may not know where his reading glasses are, but he knows that bracket.
One correspondent advised me to get a parts catalogue from eBay, which seemed sensible. So I searched, found one for £25, pressed Buy, and only then noticed it was in what my brain still insists on calling Czechoslovakia, or at least somewhere with postage rates suggesting it was being delivered by mule through the Carpathians.
Total cost: £46.
Immediate cancellation.
So the day’s progress was this. I restored bolts I didn’t need to restore, ordered replacements I probably did need after all, identified brackets I didn’t need to identify quite so urgently, and nearly imported a parts catalogue at a price that made me briefly reassess the value of knowledge.
This is classic car restoration at its purest. Not fixing things economically. That would be vulgar. It’s spending hours doing something unnecessary because the original part might have been there, it might have come off the car, and some small part of you insists that if it did, it should probably go back on.
Unless, of course, it turns out to be the wrong bolt entirely.
The replacements will probably arrive tomorrow, gleaming, cheap and faintly judgemental. By then I’ll have a lovely clean set of unrelated bolts, which means I can put them carefully into a box of totally unrelated parts, where they can mature undisturbed until someone else starts swearing at them.
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