Here's another update from the TVR Grantura Restauration. In November it looked like we made progress quickly. Now things have become more difficult. To set the context it needs to be understood that this is a fiberglass car where body and chassis are bonded together. Over fifty years many things have happened and it's not that clear whether you can just cut off the body from the chassis without totally braking it. So, to give the body more strength we added a number of support tubes. While doing this, it became more and more clear that a few things are terribly wrong here. The right side of the car suffers from serious stress.
Sometimes during its "career" the body must have "fallen down" a bit and since then it's not symmetrical any more. Many stress cracks clearly indicate that this has been a problem for quite some time. Also we found out that some fairly important pieces were missing, for example the rear end of the chassis and part of the rear end of the body as well, not to forget quite a few of the chassis tubes.Other things were just not placed correctly or not really mounted. Looking back I have been really lucky to not having driven the car before taking it apart.
With all of these things missing and that many things being wrong there was an additional need to find information on how it should have been.
Luckily enough we were given access to a sister car, neither in pristine order nor "concours", but highly original. So, using this other car, we are able to "reconstruct" the missing pieces and making sure that at the end our car will look right. So quite some time was spent analyzing the sister car with a yard stick and a digital camera.With all this experience we have now much better chances to rebuild our car correctly. So the next step now is to partially "reconstruct" the rear end of the body. After this finally we should be able to cut off the body from the frame. But this is another story and will most probably be told in January I hope.
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