After talking with various folks and doing some more research on the internet, I’ve gone ahead an ordered the 3 Gallon Copy Cad® Zinc plating kit from Caswell Plating. After talking with the technical support guys there, i’ve also ordered an SPC-9250 25 Amp Constant Current Rectifier to provide the juice. Really looking forward to playing with this and starting on getting all our nuts and bolts plated.
Just stumbled across this while making my daily rounds on Jalopnik this morning. This is a pretty stunning restomod 1973 TR6. Although I’m not a big fan of the bumper replacement modifications, the rest of the car looks great. That BMW S50 3.0 6 cylinder engine out of a mid-90s M3 is a thing of beauty and I can only imagine how that 240+ hp performs in a TR6 that had 104 hp stock. We’re not planning on going in this direction for our restoration, but still it’s not everyday you run across a TR6 that has this much attention put into it.
So slight change of plans. Rather than gather up every nut, bold, and washer for zinc plating, we’re going to buy a small zinc plating kit from from Eastwood.
This way we can plate them ourselves as we need them and do away with the inevitable situation where we missed a bolt or two and have to delay the build while we wait for further plating from an external service. If this works out well we may upgrade to a more powerful “copy cad” setup from Caswell.
Here you can see the before and after for the rear springs. The one on the left has been cleaned with “SPEEED BEAD” blasting media that we bought from TP Tools
We have a 1964 Triumph TR4 waiting in the wings for restoration so I’m always paying attention to information and data on the TR4 as well as the TR6 that we are currently working on. This is a nice review of that classic model.
I keep referring to these guys, so thought I would place a quick link for reference. Great guys with lots of experience with a variety of British sports car manufacturers.
When we picked up the powder-coated chassis and associated parts we had a chat with guys at Sports Car Craftsmen about replacement bolt kits. I had originally thought that it would probably be better to use all new nuts and bolts rather than attempting to refurbish the existing ones that we took off during the ‘deconstruction’ phase. My thought that was because we have a mixed bag of good and not-so-good bolts, it would be quicker, and easier to source new parts. However, after chatting with the ‘experts’ it quickly became clear that not only are ‘modern’ nuts and bolts of questionable quality, they are also often not quite the right length, or have a slightly incorrect thread length.
We were advised to clean our existing ones, and anything that was too worn or stripped, could be replaced with used-parts sourced from various parts cars that Paul and the crew have in their inventory. So the plan of action today is to round-up all the nuts and bolts we can find, and put them through the media blaster. After we have them all cleaned up we’ll take them to get clear zinc plated en-masse. After that we can start on building the rolling chassis.
Today I’ve actually gotten around to setting up tumblr-based blog to allow Greg and myself to keep track of the progress on the rebuild of our 1971 Laurel Green Triumph TR6.
So far we’ve stripped the entire car down to it’s smallest components and given them a jolly good clean with the media blaster. When we removed the body, we found the frame had been bent at some point in it’s life, with a quite pronounced lateral twist that caused the left side rear suspension mount to appear a couple of inches higher than the front left. We took the frame to a local collision center and had it professional straightened and repaired. As a result the frame came back in great shape, and as the car was pretty rust free, there really wasn’t too much else needed to be done with it.
A couple of weeks ago we gathered up all the main suspension, and chassis components, and along with the now-straightened frame, took the lot down to Paul at “Sports Car Craftsmen” in Arvada, CO. Paul and his great crew made some minor repairs, and also added some welds and other strengthening elements to the frame, then they had the lot sent out for powder coating. Yesterday we went and picked up the finished results and wow, they looked amazing. We really feel energized and anxious now to get the rebuild process rolling.
- Andy
Miscellaneous cleanup
