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]