So there I was, the proud owner of a tired , sad Triumph GT6. It had some MOT left but no tax so it would have been easy to put it on the road and use it for a bit. The temptation was quite strong but I resisted it. My plan was to rebuild the car and I was determined not to drive it again until this was complete, however long the rebuild might take.

It was clear that welding was going to be a pretty major activity quite soon. What experience had I got in welding? Absolutely zero. A colleague at work had convinced me that MIG welding waas a piece of cake. He was even willing to lend me his welding kit so that I could prove it to myself. The (heavy) welder and its accompanying angle grinder was lugged into the back of the trusty Escort one Friday evening and over the weekend I selected one of the many rusty areas of GT6 to have a go at.

Driver’s side Inner sill and floor with rot cut out.

The sills had obviously been replaced not very long ago but the outer and rear edges of the floor had largely rotted away. The drivers side looked least bad, so I took up the carpets and set to work carefully cutting out any vestige of rot with the angle grinder. Half and hour later, ears ringing, I had a big, but clean hole between the sill and the floorpan. I made up repair panels from suitable pieces of steel salvaged from the scrap bin at work, cleaned up all the edges for welding and bolted sections into place with 4ba nuts and bolts. I had already read the MIG handbook several times and practiced a few welds with moderate success on some scrap. But this was it. The moment of truth, actually welding the car. It all went a treat and within a very few minutes the sections we well and truly welded in. He was right! This was a piece of cake!

Having welded the sections and ground off the surplus weld I was then in a quandry on what to do with the bare metal. “Paint it” I hear you say. Well, better than nothing, in the end though I decided to flood the still warm steel with Waxoyl so that it could well and truly penetrate all the nooks and crannies in the welded joints. To this day the floor repair sections have been treated only with Waxoyl and Waxoyl underseal. It seems to work.

Inner driver’s side wing repairs. A regular jigsaw puzzle of welded sections. 

Pleased as punch with my successful weekend’s welding I returned the borrowed kit on Monday morning and on the following Saturday I took a trip to Machine Mart in Worcester and splashed out on an identical welder, a Clarke 100E. Since that day its earned its keep many times over.

The next job was to tackle the rear wing, a much more taxing job,. The inside face of the wheel arch was rotten. In particular the beefy bracket to which the top end of the damper is attached was a mass of advanced corrosion. I cut it out and welded a plain sheet of metal as I planned to fit the Triumph Sports Six Club modification kit to attach the damper back to the chassis. A very long trip to Cambridge Triumph Spares one Saturday equipped me with the wheel arch liner and outer panels and repar sections for the bottom of the wing either side of the wheel arch. The inner and outer panels were a very poor fit (I now know of course all repair panels are a very poor fit!) and I spent ages cutting and bending them to get them something like. The air on the driveway was blue by the time I had them bolted in. Bill, my long since retired neighbour had been cutting his hedge during the worst of it and must have got a good earful, the first of many over the years, but bless him, he never complained.

Boot-floor corner, after clearing out the cardboard and Chinese takeaway tins.

The back corners of the boot floor were a crunchy mess. They must have rusted away years ago and a succession of youthful and well meaning owners (the car had 14 of them!) had ladled glassfibre. filler, cardboard, Chinese takeaway tins, sticky tape, aerosol foam and of course oodles of underseal over the remains. The angle grinder made short work of the lot leaving me a BIG hole. The repair sections for this needed some imagination and more dexterity to fold up. I used my tried and trusted technique of starting with a cardboard pattern, transferring this to steel, cutting it out and bolting it into place before welding it, the bolts pulling everything up nice and clsoe.

Driver’s wing with replacement lip welded into place and ready for paint.

The bottom of the B pillar needed a dose of the same treatment and then I was able to fit and weld the wing bottom panels. Once complete I now had a completely repaired wing and my mind moved to whether I could muster the skill to prepare and paint it.  If I could muster the skill to make a decent job of this wing I reasoned, then I could probably tackle painting the whole car, albeit in stages. I ground off the excess weld and, filled and rubbed down the lumps and rollers and then flatted away with 1000 grade wet and dry. Needless to say, it needed more filler, more sanding, more flatting and then more of all of these before it looked even vaguely ready for paint.

My painting experience matched my intitial welding experience, namely zero. So it was back to the books, read up about it, think about it and finally go out and buy a compressor and spray gun, a not insignificant lash-out. A tin of pimer-filler, a couple of litres of French Blue cellulose, filters, thinners and a mask completed the shopping list. Then, one fine warm morning I embarked on my first paint job.

Welded, filled, sanded, flattened, primed and painted. Ready for paint stripping!

The first coat of primer was a shock . Its unevenness of colour showed up all the holes and uneven areas so its was back to 600 grade and more filler and more elbow grease. Eventually I got it to a standard that I was happy with  and I refilled the gun with French Blue. All the books had warned me that if I wasn’t careful it would run. I wasn’t careful and it ran. The books also said that once it runs theres nothing you can do  except wait 24 hours for it to go off  and then rub it down  before applying another coat. So thats what I did. In the end I was very happy with the result, the wing looked great. All I’d got to do now was make the rest of the car look the same. At least I’d convinced myself that I was actually capable of tackling every part of the job. How depressed I would have been if I’d have know that four years later and long before the car was complete, I’d be ladling Nitromoors onto my lovely wing and stripping it, and the rest of the car, down to bare metal.

What was left of the chassis after a good screw-driving.

With one side of the car completely free of rot , welded and partly painted I was really making progress. I turned the car around in the drive (I had no garage) and started to do a ditto repeato job on the other side. It was about this time that the second biggest disappointment of the entire project hit me. I was poking about underneath looking for rot (I never had to look far) when my attention strayed to the chassis. I jabbed at it with my screwdriver close to the lower wishbone pivot and to my horror the screwdriver went straight through.

More poking revealed an enormous hole, the wishbone was attached to a thin lattice of rusty metal. All along the main chassis rail at the rear it was the same story. The chassis itself had been filled with aerosol foam  and the whole lot painted over with underseal to conceal the extent of the rot. The underseal was not new and I reckon that this crime must have been perpetrated at least two or three owners ago leaving more recent owners in blissful ignorance of the death trap they were driving.

A quick check revealed that the other side was the same. There was no question about it, the chassis was a write off. Thanks to the Triumph Club magazine I knew replacement chassis could be obtained at a very reasonable price. I raing Chic Doig and explained my predicament, a few weeks later a virtually new chassis arrived; primed, painted in French Blue and internally Waxoyled. Thank God I had bought a Triumph and not something horribly obscure!

It was about this time that I met Andy and Angela McGowan at one of the shows. They (then) owned two GT6’s that they had completely restored, a red one called Red and a yellow one called Yellow. Red had recently been featured in Your Classic with a centre two page photo. This photo, which still adorns my office wall at work, has been a major source of inspiration throughout my rebuild as have our occasional conversations over the years. At first meeting Andy I discussed the prospect of rebuilding the bonnet and he advised me against trying to do it myself on account of its flexibility  and the risk of ending up with it permanently out of true.

He recommended a small bodywork firm in Coventry to do the work. Accordingly Bluey’s bonnet was secured to a wooden frame and bolted to roof bars on the Escort (a bizarre sight of which I have no photographs) and dispatched to said firm. The job was not cheap, but it was well done, the only minor criticism, revealed many years later when the headlamps were being fitted being that  the plates to which the headlamps are fitted were welded out of true and so the cast cowls would not fit over the headlamps. The only solution was to cut the plates, a shame after everything had been painted.

The team prepare to lift the body off!

An (extended!) driveway full of GT6 production line.

While the bonnet was away I continued bodywork repairs on the passenger side of the tub and also welded in two replacement front footwells . It was rapidly approaching ‘body off’ time, and so after a few weekends stripping the body shell of all its bits and pieces which I duly bagged and labelled I finally undid all the body mounting bolts. Recruiting some manual labour in the guise of Angela, Sandy and two of his mates, off it came. The drive was now adorned with old chassis, complete with engine and transmission, the pristine but bare new chassis from Chic Doig and my mostly welded body tub standing on axle stands at the front and purpose built frame at the back.

By this time I’d received a few polite but firm words from various neighbours about the regular emission of iron foundry noise levels and couldn’t I either keep it down a bit or take take up stamp collecting. I’d already tried stamp collecting at age six, its boring. So how to keep and angle grinder quiet? I reasoned the only way is to switch it off. I therefore turned my attention to getting the running gear off the old chassis, cleaning it up and rebuilding it onto the new chasssis. Other than the usual cursing noises this was a significantly quieter endeavour.

Quiet it may have been but it was also expensive. New springs, dampers, bushes, brake gear, rotoflexes, tyres, replacement differential, nuts and bolts. Add to this sandblasting and powder coating wishbones, driveshafts, steering linkages, brake back plates etc. Though I emplyed two different companies to do this neither did a particularly good job, spraying over inadequately cleaned parts. So I resorted to getting components shot blasted, then cleaning the residuals myself before painting with smoothrite. This has proved to be just as durable and much cheaper than power coating.

The chassis buildup was a lot of fun. Just like a big Mechano set, all clean and pristine rather than rotten and rusty for a change.The only significant problem was the usual fitting the rear vertical link to the end of the spring. The classic method of using a spring lifter was of course useless as heaving on the spring lifter just turned the whole chassis on its side. A length of angle iron, suitably strengthened by welding on bracing pieces was bolted under the diff mounting bolts so that it could be cantilevered out over the end of the spring. A big G-clamp was then used to haul up the end of the spring and a vice used to squeeze the vertical link over the spring eye bush. In the bolt went and we had an uncle named Robert. With the chassis now completed I wasted many hours just looking at it.

Rolling Chassis

Having enjoyed rebuilding the chassis it was time to get back to the body tub. Two major areas of rot remained: the front of the roof above the windscreen and the bottom corners of the front bulkhead. The roof repair looked particularly daunting, although a repair section from S.W. Classics made it look achievable. The problem was of course this meant powering up the angle grinder once more and what would that do for neighbourly relations?

So the whole project ground to a halt for quite a while and then, just like in the fairly stories a knight in shining armour or, to be more accurate two knights appeared on the scene in the shape of Simon Andrews and Jock Parffrey of Worcester Classic Cars to kick start the project once more.

Read Part 3