How is it that it’s often the allegedly simple things that trip you up? Guido’s Project VK, our 355 stroker and four-speed auto conversion on a Berlina wagon, is getting oh-so-close, so we decided to ship the wheels – a nice set of Aeros that were looking a bit shabby – off to a polisher. Then we get the call: The polisher can’t get the hubcaps off. They’re held on by five little Allen-head screws.
So we go to drill them out – first drilling out the countersunk head, then the centre of the bolt and we then extract. There are 20 of them and I managed to do 19 before I had to get in the professionals.
The three best people I know for this job – starting at number three – are me, my father and Damien from the Thread Doctor. He got the last one out and the wheels are now back with the polisher.
Meanwhile we had another little issue, which is we couldn’t quite close the bonnet, largely thanks to the extra height required by the VN heads. We worked out we needed 13mm more clearance and the plan was to get 5-6mm from shaving the air cleaner, and the rest with the frame. There is a kit out there for this very problem, but it just consisted of some longer bolts and washers.
We ended up custom-building a set of aluminium brackets, and we’ll now drop the front sway bar a little so it clears the air-conditioning pulley.
From there we have some tidying up to do on the electrical front and then we’ll start putting some miles on it for some final sorting.
One of our other long-term projects, a lovely Lotus Elan, is up and running and will soon be back with its owner. Someone had worked on the head of the four-cylinder powerplant and stuffed it up. We’ve managed to fix it, but have had some incredible delays waiting for parts.
It still has a few electrical issues to sort, such as five purple wires which don’t seem to do anything. We’ll get there …