Photography by Tim Suddard
Our primary goal at this point was to finish our entire Elva Mk VI chassis and mechanical bits so that we could then disassemble everything and paint the frame.
Before painting the frame, though, we needed to remount the body and see how everything fits. We would also get at least one front wheel mounted so that we could determine how close the tire got to the radiator as there’s not much clearance there.
While the car was never equipped with cooling fans, doing anything in a race car in Florida is easier with external cooling fans. Would we have room to mount them? We had minimal space but, if we used smaller 6-inch fans, we could make everything work.
Once the body was back on, we did notice a bit of misalignment on the right-front mount. Despite all of our measuring and hard work, something had shifted. Thank goodness we took the time to remount the body–if we hadn’t, we would be tearing into a freshly painted frame with a grinder and welder. No rest for the wicked, this would need to be fixed. Finally, though, we had something resembling a car.
Now we could remove the engine and send it to Wayne Brown of RB MotorSports Engineering. He originally built this engine while at another shop but wanted to go back in and adjust the cam timing before we ran the car. More details on that later.
The transmission came out and went to Tom Suddard’s shop where he would get the rear brakes and halfshafts mounted.
The rest would of the car, minus the body and frame, would go back on shelves. Once we fix that minor frame issue and complete the bodywork, we can paint and begin final reassembly.
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