Air Horns....

The standard 5 GTT has a single air horn fitted, the compressor sits bolted behind the header tank on the passenger front wing and the trumpet is behind the bumper. Mine wasnt performing great and I found this twin FIAMM air compressor sitting in my garage.

Id already moved the header tank out as im fitting that in the drivers side bulk head, which left the old bracket and horn compressor looking a bit unsightly on the inner wing. The relay and wiring is long enough, so I have mounted the new horn & trumpets in the space where the original trumpet was just under the passengerside headlamp.

Foolishly I have not tried to fit the bumper, indicator or headlamp yet so I may well encounter some problems in the future if the new horn fouls things, but we shall see.

It also means that side of the engine bay has more space in it now, so I can experiment with where I put the air filter.

Some people build an air box by panelling off that part of the engine bay between the passenger strut mount & the front of the car and fit the air filter in there. I might just bolt it straight onto the turbo and direct cold air to it via some ducting...

New body kit / wheel arch mounting.

As anyone who has taken the bodykit off a 5 GTT will know, the mounting bolts tend to pull out of the plastic kit. And sure enough no matter how gentle i was and how much penetrating oil I used, I found nearly all of my bolts ripped out.

The back arch you can reach the nuts inside the wheel arch easily enough, but on the front you need to remove (or twist out of the way) the black plastic wheel arch liner to reach the bolts.

What I did was to buy a pack of M6 stainless bolts. Then I cut the heads off the bolts and glued the remaining piece into the hole in the bumper where the old bolt used to live. First though I drilled out the hole slightly bigger than the size of the bolt. I then used some EVOSTICK number 5 adhesive to bold the new bolts into the holes. It looked like in the pic above. Not a bad result. I then used some new washers and M6 locking nuts on the inside of the arches to hold them in place.

Getting the old bit of bolt out which remained attached to the carbody was a bit fiddly and involved my angle grinder with a cutting disc. I did scuff up the bodywork a little around where the bolt came through, but as this is all hidden behind the wheel arches, a lick of rust preventing paint should hide things nicely.

The actual side skirts themselves simply slip onto clips which you clip to the rivits on the side. The OE kit is then rivited along the bottom to the bottom sill. I used some self tapping screws instead in case I ever need to remove it again.

Sorting the interior out - stripping out sound proofing & a repaint.

Well its been a while since ive updated the blog - 2 months to be exact. And thats not because ive been lazy its been purely because ive had very little time to get into the garage due to work & family commitments. I did manage 4 hours one Saturday and a couple of odd hours here & there, but not really had the time I needed to make some decent progress.

However, I did manage to make some good progress on the interior. Id already stripped all the stock interior out way back about 10 years ago, but there was still a lot to do. Firstly I had to chip out all the bitumen slabs which makers seem to glue on the floorpan in the car. Theres no end of it. All in the boot floor, and 3 separate slabs under the seats. The best way I found to do this was just a screwdriver & a hammer. Most of it chipped off cleanly. Some bits were a nightmare though, especially around the gearshift tunnel, so for this I used a blow torch and a wall paper stripper tool.

  

 Above you can see the car as im nearly finished. The black squares are where bitumen came off leaving the black original shell paint. I also stripped out the remaining red carpet and tons of foam soundproofing from behind the dash.

Once done I painted the whole inteior with some rustoleum grey paint. Its pretty good stuff. I opted for grey as I thought white would be a bit too reflective and highlight any imperfections. Black would be too dark. So grey is a good halfway house.

 The grey actually turned out lighter than it looked on the tin which was an added bonus. I painted all the cage and rear strut brace also. The grey actually seemed to blend in nicely with the rest of the remaining original inteior like the door panels. Ive not decided yet if to keep them or replace with something else.

I then drilled all the mounting holes through the re-enforcement plates id welded to where the cage bolts using 12mm drill bit, and used some brand new high tensile m12 bolts to bolt it all into place. Screwfix turned out the cheapest place for the bolts. Fitting the actual cage wasnt too bad. The rear half bolted straight in nicely. My cage also bolts to the top seatbelt fixing points which were a bit tight, so i had to hammer the floorpan slightly down to give clearance. The front cage and the doorbars fitted fine, but I did have problems with the top parts of the cage which connect front to back. They needed some "adjustment" with a lump hammer and pry bar before it all lined up. Still, its all done now.. and wont be coming out again in a hurry.

I also now need to workout how to bolt in my seats. Ive a pair of old Cobra Monaco bucket seats in blue (one here pictured lying down in back of car, hence the rollbars looking strange). I can either buy some universal subframes and try to get them positioned correctly, or just weld some cross members/angle iron/boxing across the floor pan and bolt them to that. Either way it might take some experimenting to get the positioning right. Im also now wondering if these seats are a bit too tatty for the car. They come complete with lots of fag burns and marks from the old owners. Will have to have a think...