In 1989 my father, then 43 years of age decided to take on a project. He was a man of many projects. When we moved into the family home in 1972 my mother purchased a shed for him because she knew he would require somewhere to spend time on his pursuits.

The author resplendent in his infamous yellow ‘Cag’ (cagoule).

These were the days when things were fixed, could be fixed and Dad could fix and make a lot of things. Over the years the projects came and went and each, I found out later, was done with an enthusiasm bordering on fervour.

In my younger days I remember every Friday night a bloke in a van used to drop off a bunch of TVs that he couldn’t fix. On Sunday Dad would carefully inspect them using his circa 1960’s oscilloscope and miraculously return them to working order.

He was always fascinated by clocks and built one that ran via magnets and had no need for any power mechanism. For many years it was displayed at the London Science Museum.

When my sister moved to house close a huge array of wires Dad had to know and learn about it. The array turned out to be the location for Britain’s national time signal transmissions and so he built several atomic/radio clocks that used the frequency transmitted from the array.

He was a tinkerer in the old fashioned sense; building websites, learning to code computer chips, building radio controlled planes, helicopters and drones, barber shop singing, model railways, electronics… so it was perhaps no surprise to see him undertake a full restoration of an old sports car.

He finished the task of restoring the GT6 some seven years after he began and in January 1997 ‘The Courier’, the monthly magazine of the Triumph Sports Six Club published the first in a four part series on the resurrection of ‘Bluey’ a French Blue 1972 Triumph GT6.

Here follows the story in the author’s own words…