Javelin Restoration - Project B

[Forumadmin]

Joe brought his friend, Tomas, along today and they have been busy cleaning the muck off the chassis for a couple of hours.

[Jack]

A bit of an update on the garage work, and general progress.

On Friday a huge delivery of fence panels, concrete posts, concrete panels, and railway sleepers arrived. These are to be the materials for constructing the new fence next to the garage and some raised beds for us to dump huge amounts of topsoil into from the excavations. I had managed to escape work over lunchtime and built up quite a sweat (and some fairly sore arms) from helping Keith to get these moved down the garden ready for the building work.


Keith will be able to detail progress over the weekend, hopefully with a few photos to show off his new fence, we were away hunter-gathering underwater near Eastbourne.

On the Javelin front, because I don't think we have updated the thread, the engine is now out of the car, along with everything else in the engine bay. Chris will update you all on what he has been up to there - lots of welding, fixing, painting, and removal of bits of tin cans in evidence.

Chris has also got the sill welded in on the drivers side, and TOPIC made significant repairs to the front wheelarch and around this area.

Despite searing heat the weekend before, we managed to also get some work done on the SA, which is in need of a bit of interior restoration and TLC now to avoid the need for a rebuild in a few years time. The bench seat and door cards are being retrimmed, and I have dug out the matching harness to make things look nice in the car, which will be mounted in the same way as the passenger side for ease of removal if required. The boot needs to come out for us to weld up the boot rack to the chassis and make it solid again, and there's a couple of small pieces of carpet to be replaced for overall comfort.

I am also planning to consolidate the switches and gauges that are currently underneath the bonnet into a small panel where the drawer is currently in the centre of the dashboard, as well as tidying up the hood frame a little - a lot of winter rallies over the years have resulted in rather a lot of sealant on the hood, and the seal on the front edge is in need of tidying to make the mechanism work properly following the windscreen swap from the SC. These jobs are currently a priority in order to keep as many cars on the road as possible for the summer - if we can get the hood sorted quickly then the car is useable for days out while I redo the interior.

This has kept me away from the Javelin for a few weeks, however I think it is helping Chris for us to be out of his way while the car is in its current location at the side of the garage, and I think Jenny would like to be able to travel in comfort in the SA without a shower curtain over her legs when it rains heavily!

Note I have updated the first post in the thread, and will be keeping it up to date with latest info and photos - worth checking out the first page if you've been offline for a while to catch up again - the story seems to be getting more interesting with every week that goes by, and progress is moving at a significant pace, so bear with us and feel free to post with any queries or feedback on how we can improve the layout of the thread - I would like for it to be a reference for the future, so others rebuilding these cars can see the nitty gritty of the restoration as we go through, and also see the historical information that we have on the car in one place.

Jack.

[Forumadmin]

Each evening in the week I dug post holes which meant cutting through roots and breaking up concrete not just simply scooping out soil. Chris and I completed the fence on Saturday which is lucky because it rained all day Sunday (which is good cause it took 5 hours to watch the F1). Joe also came around and assisted pouring in the Postfix and he also started leveling the sleepers ready for the garden beds.
What I would pay for the in-car footage of Jenson carving through the field not once, not twice, but was it six times? It would be great to analyse each overtake and study the lines he took to find enough semi dry track to keep doing such good lap times. It may go down as the best drive by anyone, anywhere! This is one race that has not been one by strategy.

[Forumadmin]

The shed has been removed and base broken up to make room for Project B.

[Jack]

The shed has been removed and base broken up to make room for Project B.

Keith, the above image isn't showing up when I view the thread - same seems to happen on a couple of other threads when we link to the gallery.

Is this due to permissions on the photo, the file format, or my connection/PC? EDIT - having quoted it and posted it, I can now see the image in your post and mine. How odd.

I have to say smashing a concrete base with a hangover in the heat was not the most fun job of the rebuild so far, but remarkably therapeutic after a long week at work. Roll on the digger coming in and making short work of the rubble!

Jack.

[p.p.]

well done keep the pace up big brother wathing you......

peter

[Forumadmin]

Jack and all,
If you are not logged on to JowettGallery you will not be able to see images in the Gallery (unless they have 'public' permissions). You might get some difficult to explain situations as some links might still be in the browser cache.
If you still get the problem having logged into JowettGallery obviously let me know.
There is a possibility that the red cross might also come up because of a slow response somewhere along the line. usually refreshing the screen (CTRL+F5) should clear that.

I have been carrying on moving rubble. There is still some smashing to do so you can come around this evening!

[Jack]

Jack and all,
If you are not logged on to JowettGallery you will not be able to see images in the Gallery (unless they have 'public' permissions). You might get some difficult to explain situations as some links might still be in the browser cache.
If you still get the problem having logged into JowettGallery obviously let me know.
There is a possibility that the red cross might also come up because of a slow response somewhere along the line. usually refreshing the screen (CTRL+F5) should clear that.

I have been carrying on moving rubble. There is still some smashing to do so you can come around this evening!

Nice idea, but currently trying to fix a drivers side rear light on the bus that has decided to stop working. Bulb is fine, all other lights fine, earth is fine, but may need the multimeter and some better weather than last night to get it sorted. On the upside we now have a foglight that we didn't have before.

Should have some time later this week to get some smashing done - the way work is going I think I'll need it.

Jack.

[Jack]

The weather played ball this afternoon, so the rear light on the bus is now sorted. Which is nice. Just a simple broken wire near the back axle, which is good, because the rest of the wiring at the back of the bus is a complete nest of wires that I really don't want to get into. We now have a legal bus, but still need to fix the boiler before the Festival of Speed.

Once this was done, Keith came back from work and we got on with smashing up more concrete. This was very welcome after the last couple of days at work, remarkably good way to relieve stress.

The concrete base from the shed and work area is now all out, as well as the top step leading to the garage. This is effectively all the concrete out except for the few steps to get down to garage level - we have left these for now so that we can get in and out of the garage safely until we're ready to make the set of steps in the proper location.

The digger is coming in this week, so lots more work to do, but hopefully the digger will be doing the heavy labour. Once that is done, we can get on with building the extended magical garage of infinite space that has been planned, and get back to working on the cars.

Jack.

[Chris Spencer]

Images of the welding and panel repairs to the offside front inner wing section have now been edited and titled within the gallery - i have done a little more since with the transfer of the pattern to sheet metal and the make up of the repair panel - this has now been fitted and welded into place but the bumper iron strengthener has yet to be spot welded to the repaired section. The project to extend the garage and workshop space along with a major project in my day job has now put the project on a temporary hold but I keep having a few minutes on it now and again.

[Jack]

When I watched Blazing Saddles as a child, I never really understood a lot of it. Like why they were out in the sunshine working all the time, why they talked with a funny accent, and why everyone else was laughing. I was quite young, and clearly didn't get the political subplot or something.

This weekend, we decided to recreate Blazing Saddles with a scene of carnage, sweat and dirt, except someone forgot the cameras. As Lyle says (in his first line of the film) "Come on, boys! The way you're lollygaggin' around here with them picks and them shovels, you'd think it was a hundert an' twenty degree. Can't be more than a hundert an' fourteen." Believe me, it was a hundred and something degrees in that hole this weekend.

I think just about everyone is now broken and suffering a bit. 2 days, 40 tonnes of stone, earth, clay and tree roots, one massive tree stump, two wheelbarrows and 6 people.

And we now have a hole the size of Birmingham in the garden. A very square, neat hole, right next to the garage, with about 10 tonnes of earth at the end of it ready for the last stand.

I am sunburned, tired, my arms, hands and shoulders hurt, I am still quite severely dehydrated, and to top it all off it is the end of the quarter at work.

But we are almost there. The big hole is almost complete, and that means the garage building can begin soon enough.

Hopefully Keith will be along to post some of the photos from the weekend's adventures. I am going to have a bit of a sit down today - all meetings will have to be conducted at my desk

Jack.

[Forumadmin]

The pictures of the Team SC navvies at work are TOPIC here.

Main write up in comment under the Team photo

[Chris Spencer]

What a blistering weekend - Jack has not even mentioned the excavator - I sourced it through one of my contacts for the weekend - bit of a tight fit really - operating a 3.5 metre slew radius excavator in a 3.8 metre gap - then we could only use the small bucket because the larger one would have buried the wheelbarrows that the excavator was filling. Keith's orchard is 500 mm higher and he has about ten ton of topsoil to sieve through, we have completed about 80% of the dig out so that just leaves ten tonish of really hard to dig flint stone - so no chance of us finishing it by hand - the excavator will have to have a revisit in a couple of weeks after we have all recovered - back to the day job then for me - just 10,000 tons of earth to move over a flood plain to build a new fish pass - bigger excavators though - a lot bigger!!

[Forumadmin]

This weekend is also going to be a blistering weekend, so anybody wanting to lend a hand is most welcome to come along anytime between between 10 a.m and 8 pm on either Sat or Sun or both.

[Chris Spencer]

No one has yet mentioned the big dig part 2 - but this last weekend had a flurry of activity in the digging out of the area for the new workshop - well over 50 tons has been dug and loaded to wheel barrows for onwards trundling down the orchard - along with a fair sized tree root - quite a lot of general timber scrap and roots have been burnt - Keith will no doubt post some images up once he has recovered from his supervising - whilst the rest of us slogged on - but at least we are a lot closer to getting the wall foundations in.