Couple of commitments today means not much progress I'm afraid. I did grab fifteen minutes first thing to paint the luggage box with some Country Cream Cuprinol I've had in the shed for years. I seem to recall that when I last used it it had a pretty thick consistency. Today it was as runny as John Cleese's Brie (anyone else old enough to remember that one?).
Anyway, to cut a long story short, the runny Cuprinol worked pretty well as a base coat and this evening I finished it off with a coat of Hammerite to match the chassis and subframe. With Cuprinol undercoat and Hammerite topcoat it shouldn't rot or rust...
I also spent some time pondering my instrument selection today. I had planned to use a big Herald speedo, then had second thoughts and decided to go with either a new Triumph 2000 KPH one from Canleys
http://www.canleyclassics.com/?xhtml...sl=product.xsl
or the standard Vitesse jobby for reasons which will become apparent once you see my final dash design. Having changed the final drive for a 3.27:1 from a GT6 however, it occurred to me that it might make the Vitesse speedo somewhat inaccurate. A quick check on this very useful site -
http://www.mintylamb.co.uk/gearspeed/ - showed that with the GT6 diff fitted, when my Vitesse speedo says I'm doing 60mph I'll actually be doing nearly 75, while the Triumph 2000 speedo would be telling me that I'm doing just under sixty while going well over seventy-five.
That could have a seriously detrimental effect on my nice,
clean driving licence so I started casting about to see if I could find a suitable GT6 speedo as it just costs too much to have a speedo recalibrated (around £120). I tried a couple of Triumph specialist breakers with no luck, but then found one being auctioned on the bay of e.
Now, the trouble with the GT6 is that it's both rarer and more desirable than the Spitfire that spawned it so the unique fit spares, like the standard GT6 speedometer are harder to come by.
The other problem peculiar to my predicament is that the standard four speed GT6 had a speedo calibrated for the 3.27:1 diff while the overdrive equipped cars had a speedo calibrated for the 3.89:1 final drive
they came with, which is the same as all 2 litre Vitesses. Quite why Triumph added overdrive to the GT6 then changed its final drive so the rev's in overdrive fourth were the same as the rev's in fourth on the non overdrive cars is a complete mystery to me btw. Apart from the German export model cars of course, which came with overdrive but kept the 3.27:1 differential giving a theoretical top speed of close to 160mph.
But I digress. The problem was that the seller of the ebay GT6 speedo didn't know whether it came from a car equipped with overdrive or not
So, a not inconsiderable gamble later and my unknown quantity GT6 speedo arrived in the post today. A quick comparison between my Vitesse speedo and the GT6 one with a variable speed drill set to a relatively slow setting and connected to t'other end of the speedo cable showed that I got lucky and got a non overdrive one as required as the Vitesse speedo read significantly lower than the GT6 one at the same drill speed. Phew. Ten minutes later I'd swapped the bezels over so my (mk3) GT6 speedo now has a chrome one instead of black -
Wedding anniversary tomorrow so I'm banned from the garage. More progress Thursday though...
) I wanted to put a decent sized luggage bay into it where the fuel tank normally sits. 
and while i've always been in two minds whether to fit carpets in mine or stay with the stripped out look, I've always had a worry that carpets would soak-up / trap water?
Or a few drain holes in the floor!!!
) which reads:
Linear Mode
