Hayesey's red G40 restoration - J142WLS

[gaz g40]

Ye I know what you mean with the body work, mine needs new sills but that's a job for winter I think now with it passing its MOT.
Sorry but can't help with any of them but I'll keep an eye out for you for sure

[hayesey]

quick update as this is a rather exciting stage. Some paint going on! Well, high build epoxy primer anyway:







that'll then get flatted back.

[hayesey]

Time for another update, the last couple of months have involved lots of priming, flatting, smoothing etc... to get it ready for paint.

Doesn't make for the most exciting photos but here they are anyway....



















So now it's pretty much ready for paint, the next update I post, it should be red again and very shiny.

[gaz g40]

Loved the updates, can't wait to see the fresh red paint. Keep up the updates

[hayesey]

stone chip applied to inner wing and sills. Just waiting for the paint sprayer to be able to fit it in now, should be sometime in december.

[hayesey]

it's painted and been back in my garage now for the best part of two months so best put an update up!













I haven't touched it since as I've been spending some time on my black track g40 which I took to Cadwell last Friday and blew the gearbox up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-iY3iMQAIg

So I really want to build up one of my spare gearboxes and get my black polo driveable again before putting it away in storage, then I'll have space in my garage to work on the red one. First job will be brake lines and fuel lines.

[sleag40]

Shat gearbox sucks!
Looking forward to the red one going back together. 

[TOMG40]

Brilliant build thread bud, excellent work a proper job. I've used some of the bilt hamber stuff in the past and found it to be very good. Brings back memories of my old red G40 I should never have sold 

If you don't mind me asking how do you upload such high qaulity photos to your thread? I'm new to posting and I have an on going project I'd like to share and some old pictures of my red G I'd like to share.

Once again brilliant work, can't wait to see it finished 

[hayesey]

Brilliant build thread bud, excellent work a proper job. I've used some of the bilt hamber stuff in the past and found it to be very good. Brings back memories of my old red G40 I should never have sold 

If you don't mind me asking how do you upload such high qaulity photos to your thread? I'm new to posting and I have an on going project I'd like to share and some old pictures of my red G I'd like to share.

Once again brilliant work, can't wait to see it finished 

It's a pain in the arse to put the photos in to be honest. They are hosted on my google photos account. Then I create share links in Google photos, go to the share link and "copy image address" for the photo itself. Then put that into "[img]" tags when making the post. But then they are too big, so in the Google URL you'll see the sizes of the photos, I divide those numbers by two in the URL to reduce the size of the image shown.

We are still using very old forum software that doesn't seem to have good ways of uploading images, since the forum is so rarely used these days I don't want to go through the pain of upgrading to something else. I really keep the forum online because of all the information contained in it that would be lost. Facebook groups are useless for retaining information.

My made little progress with the G40 to be honest, I've been doing some zinc plating of parts so I'll update the post with info on that. I've started doing some brake lines but have had some personal issues going on recently that have slowed down car project quite a lot. It's also been a very busy year at work and I also bought a T4 camper so that has taken up some of my time.

[hayesey]

Well, it's beyond time I should put an update on here, so here goes. To be honest progress over the last 12 months has been almost non-existent. I've had things going on in my personal life and keep taking on other projects such as mt T4 Caravelle I'm using as a basic camper/day-van that I've spent time on. But now I feel motivated to get the Polo done so am starting to make progress.

I do have some parts put on it as you can see here, new master cylinder with one port welded up and then powder coated so it has the correct number of ports on it for a polo. Servo is just refurbished and painted, steering rack is a brand new one I managed to find. The bracketry I have zinc plated and passivated (more on that in a bit...). I've had to clean my socket set so I don't get dirt on these new parts 




I've been making all new brake pipes, I done this before on other cars and always used copper which is nice and easy. Here though I am using steel pipe with the dark green coating as the original ones are. It's a LOT harder to work with but once I got the hang of it, it is coming together. Stupidly, I threw away all the old pipes when I stripped the car but I have got some pipes of PeteG40 who replaced some on his to copy off.



I did find that bending the pipes without marking them and taking little bits of the green paint coating off was impossible. So in the end I just scratched the pipes and mixed up some paint to touch up the scratches which has worked very well. So much so that in hindsight I wish I'd used kunifer pipe and just painted them!



I've also been working on the fuel system to get all the pipework on. My first goal is to get the underneath of the car done and then I can put the suspension on and get it rolling.



I am re-using the original hard polyamide pipes, they've cleaned up nicely and I am getting new rubber sections swaged on as they were originally.

Nothing to show yet other than some of the pipes before removing the old rubber parts and cleaning the plastic pipework:



So the other main thing is all the zinc plating I've been doing. I decided a while ago that I would do my own zinc plating & passivating. Mostly because I just prefer to do things myself where possible rather than just paying someone else to do it and I like learning new things. But also because I knew I'd end up paying for a batch of plating to be done only to then keep finding more bits that need doing afterwards. Plus I've heard stories of commercial platers losing parts and some of these parts are not easy to find again. There's various kits and lots of info on the Internet on doing DIY zinc plating and it's not actually very hard to do, just time consuming. Most of the time is spent in cleaning and de-rusting the parts before plating them as they have to be immaculately clean.

Here's my DIY plating kit in use the other day:



It's like a production line, once parts are degreased & derusted, they start on the left in the steel pan which has a hot alkaline cleaner in it. Then they are rinsed, then they go into the acid pickle tub for just 2 minutes to be "activated", then rinsed, then into the plating tub for 30 minutes with the current on the power supply set according to the total surface area of the parts being plated which you have to calculate.

After plating, they are rinsed again and then swished in the passivate tub for just under a minute. Then they come out like this:



I have passivate chemicals for this yellow/gold finish commonly used on car parts from the 80s and 90s and also clear passivate used on many nuts & bolts.

Lastly, they are left for 24 hours for the passivate to harden before being handled. If it's cold, I bring them in the house for that as in this photo.

Here's some more batches I've done, some yellow and some clear:











The actual process here takes about an hour but you can get a production line going where you have some parts in the plating tub, some in the alkaline cleaner and some being de-rusted before that. So given a day you can run quite a lot of parts through it.

Talking about de-rusting, that's what takes the longest. My process is to degrease using brake cleaner and a toothbrush, then soak in hydrochloric acid (readily available as "brick acid") to de-rust. You can only buy this legally in 10% strength in the UK now so it does take a while (30 mins to 1 hour depending on how rusty). It is f**king nasty stuff so I do that outside and wear plenty of protective gear. After that I use a wire wheel on a bench grinder to finish cleaning and to bring parts up to a shine, they'll come out of the plating process as shiny as they go in.

I've been recommended to try using Bilt Hamber Deox-C instead of acid as parts can just be chucked in and left overnight to completely de-rust without any concern of removing good metal too so I will give that a try at some point.

For the plating itself you have to set the current on the power supply correctly. To help with that (and also to teach myself a mew web programming framework) I made a simple web application to work out the area of various shapes of parts and then the current need to end up with the correct thickness of zinc plate:



I put this online for anyone to use as well: https://plating.hayesey.co.uk

The basics of the plating kit I use (chemicals, tubs, heaters etc...) came from https://www.gaterosplating.co.uk/

You don't want the plating tub or the passivate tub to be too cold so I use fish tank heaters in them to get them up to about 20 degrees when it's cold. I also use a fish tank pump in the bottom of the plating tub to agitate the electrolyte to get good plating coverage.

Worth pointing out that high-tensile bolts can suffer hydrogen embrittlement from this process so if you are going to do bolts more than 8.8 tensile strength, you need to cook off the hydrogen in an oven for several hours after plating and before passivating. Since an oven costs a fair bit to run for hours these days, it's best to just not bother and buy new high tensile bolts so that's what I'm doing.

[sleag40]

 

[hayesey]

So time for another update.

The brake lines are all done, what an absolute ball-ache that was. The steel pipe is much harder to work with than copper or kunifer. If I were doing this again I would just use kunifer and paint it! There's one or two areas where the pipe routing isn't quite as neat as I'd like it to be but they are areas that are unseen once the car is back together anyway.





The fuel system is all done as well, up into the engine bay. I have reused the original polyamide lines as they clean up OK, whilst you can buy this stuff new on rolls, it wont be shaped to fit the car as the original lines are. I got new rubber ends crimped on to keep it all looking as it should. All new plastic clips to hold the lines on.



In the background of that photo, you can see the brake line is loose, there should be two metal loops that hold the brake line to the body with rubber sleeves, just near the rear seat belt mounting holes. The metal loops are not there, they have rusted and have been removed. So I need to figure out a way of attaching something to hold the line in place. P-Clips fixed to the end of the seat belt mount bolts will work but I'm trying to think of something that'll look more original. That's on the back burner while I get on with easier stuff.

Going back to the brake lines, one thing I wasn't able to find new was the plastic clip that goes around the steering rack. This broke when I stripped the car down and since it was fitted to all mk2/3 polos I assumed people would have plenty of spares around. But that's not the case and I just couldn't find an in-tact one anywhere.

Then it occurred to me that my track polo has one on it and I seem to remember that being in good nick. So I went to where that is stored currently, took off all the inlet manifold to make sure I had good access and /very/ carefully removed the clip. After 15 mins in the ultrasonic cleaner, here it is, seemingly one of the hardest to find parts on a g40!



I did put my track polo back together again, albeit with the broken clip now on it.

Next up, the fuel tank. You can't buy genuine ones and every single aftermarket one seems to be the same and they don't fit. I remember having the same issues when I put a new tank on my track polo 15 or more years ago. The filler neck is just wrong:





Argh!

So I got a proper blow torch (self-igniting torch and bottle of turbo map+ gas, totally different kettle of fish to a cheapo b&q blow torch), heated parts of the neck up to cherry red and bent it into something more like the right shape. Also adjusted the pipe for the top breather aka "pipe of doom" since as you can see that was pointing in totally the wrong direction.

I don't have photos, much swearing and trial fitting on the car was involved but the end is result is OK, not brilliant but it fits.

After that I got the tank blasted and powder coated and it's on the car.

Now I'm making a push to get it rolling again. So as of last night, it is sat on it's rear wheels!





Someone pointed out that actually from factory, the axle bolts go through the other way to how I have them there so yes I do feel I must drop the axle brackets and put them the right way...thanks Pete...



Hooray, it's sat on some wheels instead of axle stands for the first time in a long time.

Tonight I will be getting on with getting the front struts on, I already part assembled these until I realised I'd used the new hubs I bought on my track G40 some time ago so had to wait for some more new ones.

[hayesey]

What I didn't say in the post above, all the progress in that post after the brake lines, was in the last few weeks. In March I fell off my bike and broke my wrist quite badly, it had to have metal plates put in. So for a good few months I was unable to do any work on the car and even now I have to be careful with my wrist, doing up the stub axle bolts was painful.

[hayesey]

quick update, this weekend it's back on suspension and 4 wheels







and now I can move it around easily on the wheel skates, it has it's friend in the garage to keep it company:

[hayesey]

Another update, I am still making progress even if it is very slow!

The engine bottom end is cleaned, painted and rebuilt with new bearings all round and new piston rings:










Next up was the wiring looms that go in the engine bay. There's three sections of loom, one is the main engine/ECU harness that connects to the ECU and all sensors. The longest loom is mostly connecting to the lights, fan etc... and then one connects various other bits and pieces such as wipers, heater blower, coolant sensor for the dash etc...

My process was to strip all the old loom tape off, remove a load of horrible sticky insulation tape that had been used to re-wrap part of the loom in the past (note to anyone reading please don't use insulation tape in an engine bay!!!!). Clean up all the wires with IPA on a rag to remove any sticky crap.

Remove all the connectors using the relevant pin removal tools, cleaned all the connectors in my ultrasonic bath. Here's one of the looms in progress of being cleaned up:



Yes, in the front room as you need a large clean space to work on it (and an understanding wife).

Then carried out some repairs where wires were damaged as is very common on old looms, damage typically like this where insulation has become brittle and cracked, leading to the copper inside starting to corrode.



That's the connector for the black temp sensor for the dash, still working but that damaged wire is a failure waiting to happen.

The only proper fix is to cut back the wire 50mm+ back from the furthest damage from the end so you get back to clean and shiny copper. Connect new wire (I bought correct sized and correct colour coded wire from ebay) and then crimp a new JPT terminal on the end, or whatever terminal needed some are just spade connectors - you need a specific tool for the JPT terminals.

For connecting the new section of wire I use solder joints. I know lots of people say never use solder to join wires on a car as it'll fail with vibrations but I've never had any issues many years. I've been repairing wires in looms like that for a long time, including on my track car. I think a well done lay-to joint with clean copper and good quality solder and correct size heatshrink after will give a good join no more likely to fail than a crimp joint. A good quality, temperature controlled iron with a selection of bits & 30+ years of soldering experience helps too!

After that, I re-wrapped the looms in proper TESA tape designed for high temp engine bays. I found amazon the best place to buy this, 2 rolls is probably enough but have 3 to be on the safe side.



The looms are all fitted into the engine bay now.

Next I have cleaned up the heater blower casings. Carefully take it apart making sure to not break any of the plastic clips holding it together and then it went in the dishwasher to clean it up.

I put a new heater matrix in since they're not expensive anyway.

That just left the fan motor itself. Mine worked OK but looked a mess and the metal motor housing was corroded. I initially attempted to pull it apart to re-plate the housings but the way it is pressed together just means I couldn't get it dismantled without damaging it.

I found someone on ebay selling a replacement motor kit consisting of a new motor which isn't the same as the original but looks decent, then some 3d printed fitting parts to make it fit into the blower housing. I was sceptical about it as I've not been impressed with the finished quality of a lot of 3d printed things I've seen but I took a chance on this. I think the results are very good, the 3d printed parts fit very well, are strong and look good quality. Kit came with good instructions. You reuse the original fan blade, drill it out and use some special plastic nuts with the kit to make it fit:



Here's the finished thing, I had it connected to my bench power supply and ran it up to 12v to make sure the fan span with no noise or scraping. So I'm very happy with this:



I need to remake those 2 wires as they need to be longer, the kit came with some crimped wires but I'm not using them as I want to make wires that look like the originals, just longer.


I'm also working on the wiper mechanism, for the motor, you can just buy them new for not a lot of money so I've got a new motor/gearbox assembly for that rather than trying to clean up the old one.

Ideally I would re-zinc plate the mechanism but it's just too big to fit into my replating tanks so I've had it blasted and am spray painting it. I'm yet to decide if I'm happy with the results or if I need to do something else, I'll update once I'm happy with it!


That brings me to yesterday when there was a major milestone, all the body panels are now back on.

Steve (of did all the bodywork and paint fame) kindly offered to come round and help me fit the panels and get them all properly lined up. So we spent a few hours doing that yesterday and this is how it now stands:



I'm hoping to get the glass back in over Christmas period. You might also notice the gearbox casings in that photo, they've been vapour blasted so need a lot of cleaning out and then I'll get the box back together as well.