Scottie's Tribute A352 build

[Scottie22]

Mr T, I think most road Jags were like that in the 60's, but they certainly were not sluggish to drive.

I think the tuned racers were much higher revving. After all they won Le Mans three years in a row, beating Ferrari and Aston Martin at the time. etc.

Thanks Gary

[Paul L]

Scottie - That is a rather dashing dash board you have there.

Love the way you made the dash light, it is a vision thing.

Good luck, Paul.

PS

Originally Posted by Mister Towed

... 5000 rpm red line though???

Forget the revs, I want to know how to get my Spitfire to do 140mph!

[Mister Towed]

Originally Posted by Scottie22

Mr T, I think most road Jags were like that in the 60's, but they certainly were not sluggish to drive.

I think the tuned racers were much higher revving. After all they won Le Mans three years in a row, beating Ferrari and Aston Martin at the time. etc.

Thanks Gary

Sorry, should've made myself clearer, isn't five thou a bit high?

My vitesse motor runs out of puff at 4500 at the moment, but I do have a cunning plan. A pair of 1.75 Strombergs with Vitesse manifold adaptors await a rebuild in the man-cave...

[swifty]

Lovely looking replica dash, you must be proud of that, its the finishing touches that are very satisfying as you see the fruition of all the hard work come together.

The dash light is ingenious and looks the part, well done Scottie.

[Scottie22]

Paul and Swifty, thanks for the support.

Paul, when they raced Spitfires at Le Mans, they were doing 140mph!
Check it out on the net, you'd be surprised.

I think they tuned up 1300 engines as they have better crank bearings and loved to be thrashed. (And very tune-able)

The later 1500's (one of which is in my car) only had three crank bearings. and by all accounts cannot be tuned much, and do not like to be revved highly because of the rubber crank!

Mr T, I don't think I ever got anywhere near 5000 revs when I drove my old jags,

they seemed to have bags of power and torque and went really well, but the road cars by and large were far too heavy, the Mark II jag weighed
a ton and a half!

The D types and XKSS's weighed in around 900 kilos as race cars, but I am hoping that my replica will be around 5 or 600 kilos, so it should be quite nippy
even with such a crappy little engine.

Well, today I put in an absolutely insane amount of hours to make that final panel for the dash, and re-engineer the indicator switch and lamp,

but now it is in place and looks right.

I decided not to put the horn push on that panel, nor the hazard switch as it just did not look right.

I will place them elsewhere, half out of sight eventually.

Here is the final effort, and effort is what it took to get it right!

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[froggyman]

Fantastic looking replica dash. Your skills and ingenuity are really making this build stand out. Well done.

[oxford1360]

Very nice. Well done, matey.

[fatbloke]

Stunning work Scottie, looks fantastic.

[WorldClassAccident]

The text of the buttons on the left does line up -1 for presentation ;-)

Top work

[Scottie22]

I know what you mean WCA, however, I have yet to see any XKSS, real or replica, that has got these three lined up, BUT, I was determined that mine would line up.

Then I came to actually fit them in and tighten them!

F*****g hell! talk about a pain in the arse!

At that point I then realised why I had never seen any lined up. It is much harder than it would appear, believe me. I would not say impossible, but certainly not worth the effort.

Besides, if I lined them up, my car would be the only one in the world like that and consequently look false!!!

After a stupid amount of effort, what you see now, is my compromise.

Enough she cried, I'm satisfied.

Right! today, was for me a sort of rest-on-my-laurels day, it did niggle me that I had not fitted the horn button or the hazard switch, and I detest outstanding jobs like that, so I gave it some thought:

the horn and hazard switch had to be in the same place, be readily accessible, but not be in-your-face so's not to ruin the period look.

So I came up with the idea of mounting them together just under the dash

right next to the indicator switch, which seemed to me to be logical.

(It is life, but not as we know it Jim) (Spock)

Once the dash is in the car, the two will be close to my right hand on the wheel and should work a treat.

(The switches that is, NOT Jim and Spock)

Now, finally, I yam a happy bunny.

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[Mister Towed]

Originally Posted by Scottie22

Enough she cried, I'm satisfied.

I recognise that song -

Up and up with a level of stea-eam,

down and down with a level of cream a rum ti**y bum ti**y bum ti**y bum...

Nice dash btw Scottie, it's one of the things that gives away a lot of 'kitcars' as just that if the builder doesn't make the effort.

[Scottie22]

You are 100% right Mr T, its the attention to detail that makes all the difference, trouble is, its such a pain to do it all!

Well worth it though of course.

[Scottie22]

I am still toiling away trying to get the dash all sorted.
Unfortunately, when I've done it, most of it will have to come back out to take off the screen for painting, and the car body itself, still a long way off!

I stuck some leather on the front bit of the dash top, and got it in the right colour,also, I could not resist the urge to try it in the car, and in went the dash front,and steering wheel too.

Mmmmmm, it is going to look quite reasonable when it done I think.

I now have to make the nearside dash, and the top bit to join it all together.

Oh, one more thing, I got my logbook back from the "dreaded" today, after a long wait, and I now have the correct engine number and cc size on it.

So at least when I come to register changes, the V5c will be correct at the time.

Some pics of what I just did today:

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[Mister Towed]

Nice work Scottie. Looks just right for the car.

[Scottie22]

Yes it does Mr T, at first, I thought it would really look out of place, but it had to be there to hide all the gubbins, so in it went, and it does seem to look right thank goodness.

Of course, it will look even better when The whole dash is complete.

As I said earlier, I changed my estimate of time for doing the dash from a day to a week, but now it looks like it will be two weeks if I work hard all next week.

I feel that at the rate its taking to get it all right, I'll be sweating about Stoneleigh NEXT year!

I can really see how your build got out of hand and took you two years.

[Alpha]

Looking like the bee's knees scottie !

[Paul L]

Scottie - It must be a great morale booster to see it all finally coming together.

Good luck, Paul.

[Scottie22]

I made a start on the left hand side of the dash today.

I needed to make this bit:

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So I cut out the bits from my alloy sheet, and stuck them together with epoxy glue, which has always worked well in the past, but unluckily or luckily, whichever way you look at it, I dropped the glued up panel on to concrete, and it shattered the glue, and the two halves fell apart!

I could hardly believe it, I have never known that to happen before, but there we go.

So the next time, I re-prepared the work piece, and used fibre glass paste, lots of it.

It seems to have done a better job, but I've not tried the concrete drop test yet!

Here's where we are now:

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[Scottie22]

Well I wanted to get the apertures, (now there's a posh word for "holes")
cut out today, and it looked fairly straightforward, and I thought "this will be a piece of cake", just at that moment, the doorbell rang, and it was a friend of mine, and he handed me - a cake! His wife had made it for me!
Is that spooky or what?

Reminds me of another time when I was younger,
and I had my fortune told at a fairground, and the gyppo said "You will come into money", that very night I scored with a girl called "Penny", coincidence perhaps? I have an open mind............

I digress, so I started on the panel, what a nightmare! far from being easy, it was extremely difficult to get all the angles spot-on, and hard to get clamps in the confines I was faced with. I also had to make several small formers from wood and metal to clamp on to the workpiece in order to get good right angle bends. Really time consuming stuff.

But, as ever its done now, and that's enough for today as I have other things to do.

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[landmannnn]

Years ago the lads asked if I was I was going down the pub. I had a busy day the next day, so no, I had to be up at the crack of dawn.
I went out anyway, you can guess what happened a bit later after meeting a young lady by the name of Dawn.