Inside job

The rebuild of my GT6 has started with the interior. It's a satisfying job, because the interior's the bit the owner spends the most time looking at and touching. Most of the replacement trim has been hunted down over the last two years and squirrelled away, waiting for the body shell to come home. Refitting it has been a slow process though. The first step was to line the floor and bulkhead with lightweight Dynamat to keep the interior temperatures down. The roof was lined with half inch thick Dynaliner.

The wiring loom runs the length of the car under the carpet, with branches to the seatbelt sensors and passenger sensor in the seat. Once that was laid out, the interior carpet and seat frames could be fitted. Each moulded piece of carpet has to be glued into place, with weights and clamps to hold it in place while the glue dries. The driver's side is complete, and now I've moved the car across the garage, I'll be able to finish the left half of the cabin.

A major part of the rebuild has been converting it to RHD, as it was originally a US-spec car. The section of the wiring loom for the large gauges and steering column had to be extended. The steering column had to be fitted before I could see exactly where to drill a hole for the lower column. We reached a milestone this morning when I was able to fit the lower column to the rack and, for the first time ever, steer the car from the right hand side.

Most of the components of the right hand door have been refitted, and I've added central locking as a hidden extra touch. No more scratches in the paint under the door lock! The rear window and quarterlights have been refitted - they're attached with rivets and took literally five minutes each side to refit. The bottom rivets were the trickiest.

The headlining has been clipped in place, but needs a lot of stretching before I'll be happy to glue it. I also need to buy a rear vision mirror before gluing the front section down. Actually, that's a problem I keep running into. I can carry out a part of the rebuild to a certain point and then find I need a fitting that was missing/broken/manky, or that the original screws are rusty and will look 'orrible in the new cabin. So every few weeks, Canley Classics or Rimmer Brothers get an order for various mall bits and bobs. The whole car is a pile of half-finished jobs waiting for parcels from the UK!

Many bulkhead components have been laid out to make sure there's room for everything. I'm keeping the US-spec tandem brakes, meaning that Joe the painter had to modify the bulkhead to accommodate the larger reservoir. The last GT6s had brake boosters on the front brakes, and I'll do the same. I had to climb into the engine bay and close the bonnet to see where the VH44 booster could fit - fortunately no one saw that! Or the grunting and swearing as I struggled to lift the bonnet again...

The shelf behind the seats was covered in thick tar paper. I never bothered lifting it before the car went to the painters, but with a bit of Dynamat left over, thought "why not?" It exposed the last remaining piece of Damson paint, and a small rust hole. Bugger! So that section of the interior will have to wait until I've cut out the rust and welded in a repair panel.

Lastly, Bradley on the Club Triumph forum has been asking about the drilling of the Revolution alloys. You can sort-of see here that the wheel stud holes have been drilled to a smaller spacing than the original casting was designed to accommodate. Will the rims be strong enough? I hope so because they're beautiful, but we'll see.