Update by Tim Suddard to the
Tornado Typhoon project car
May 29, 2014
We have a long way to go and not much time. Check back in for regular updates.
We laid everything out to see what we had to work with.
After the shock of being invited to Amelia wore off, reality set in. We had 10 short months to restore our Tornado Typhoon well enough that we didn’t look like fools.
Last time we got a car invited to Amelia, we restored it in six months, so the timeframe isn’t impossible. But that was a Triumph GT6 with plenty of parts and advice readily available. This was going to be a bit different.
We immediately grabbed the carcass of our Typhoon out of the pole barn where it had been lying dormant for nearly a year–since its coming-out party at the Carlisle Import show last year.
We started really looking things over and developing a plan. We determined that most everything was there. Again, we were still missing some of the steering components. We thought we had a super-trick, period-correct steering wheel, but it turns out that it was a wheel from a ‘70s Opel that doesn’t look quite right and invariably won’t fit anyway.
We realized that the last constructor had done a really lousy job. The paint was terrible. The dash was crudely made. Yes, things were a mess. If we wanted this car to be Amelia-worthy, we would need to basically start over.
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