FHC resto nr. 65; Work slowly resumes

After moving all my TR7 parts including the '76 FHC's body earlier in the year, not much has happened to that car. This was mainly caused by work that needed doing to my other cars and sometimes life gets in between! But over the past few weeks I have slowly started to pick up work on the car.

First job that needed doing was find another insulation pad (ZKC3176) for the centre exhaust bracket, mounted to the rear bulkhead. I had one coated but somewhere between shot blasting and moving the parts to their current storage, it got lost. So I had to search for another one in the shed:

This one was sent of to have it shot blasted and powder coated a few weeks ago. And when it returned with a fresh layer of black coating, and I found the exhaust mounting bracket, it was time to add some sound proofing material to its back (as per the original):

And bolt it in place together with the exhaust bracket (YKC957). Always very rewarding work, to mount freshly coated parts to a car under restoration!

Luckily while searching through my parts I stumbled across this little box, containing the black plastic rivets for some of the plastic trim pieces. I knew about its existence but had forgotten where I had stored it!

Which meant that the next item on the to do list was cleaning some of the plastic trim pieces from my parts collection, including the front grill mouldings, the sidelight blanking plates and the sill tread plates:

After which these parts were fitted to the car. Well at least the sill tread plates, the grill mouldings and the front blanking plates. The rear ones will have to wait till the stripping is fitted!

The plans for the rest of the year are first to finish the heater (I ran into a problem there with one of the flaps so that was put aside for a while!) and start on the wiring loom. I also hope to finish fitting the striping and decals to the car together with bending and fitting the brake lines! But first I need to fit the refurbished carburettors to the DHC and see that 't Kreng passes her biennial inspection.

Judgement Day

Today my two roadworthy TR7's and the Defender were valued for the car's insurance. So 't Kreng and the DHC were together again to grace the driveway.

As for the valuation. 't Kreng's value will remain the same despite ever more signs of her hard use. This is because she still looks pretty good for a car that was restored between 1994 and 1997. And she has seen a lot of action since she returned on the road in '97.

The DHC's value has increased a little bit. This is mainly caused by the current market situation, but also by the fact that the appraiser was impressed by how well she looked after 8 years of regular and sometimes hard use since she was restored! The mileage readings were there to prove the fact!

The Defender's price will be a surprise once determined. Due to the current rather unfriendly (local) rules against diesel powered cars, prices are starting to become unstable. So that value needs some further consultation before it's finalised.

Enjoying the last day of spring

As the title states I took the DHC for a spin, to enjoy the fine weather yesterday. Spent a lovely afternoon and early evening in the country:

Next on the to do list is some work on the Defender's gear linkage, fit the refurbished carburettors to the DHC and resume work on the ''76 FHC. I made a start with the last one, some small jobs to the hand brake lever! As you can see I don't really like the original grip so this one too was changed for a different (Austin Rover) item, which I like much better. In this case it was stripped from an earlier Range Rover: