GTD Restoration completed!

[Julian West]

Here's my GTD, on the road in August this year after I've personally completed a five year restoration/rebuild. A few weeks after the car passed it's MOT I used it for a wedding car (!!) & the week after I entered it in a ASWMC sprint to give it a proper shakedown! Despite only having covered a 100miles or so the car went like a dream, passed scrutineering with flying colours & even sailed thru the noise test at 99Dba!

It started life as a standard GTD. Modifications carried out during the resto include lowered engine, aluminium uprights, rose jointed suspension, one peice peg drive hubs, ap racing brakes, full roll cage, tilton pedal box, Derek Bell/R21 trans, Rod change, 7.25 inch paddle clutch, superlight flywheel, SVO 302, full repaint, all ally panels, AC, Dockings rad, 5 point harnesses, leather & loads more. Overall the car drives, handles, stops & goes massively better than it did in standard form.

Many parts were specially fabricated locally & by various specialists all over the country. I have a HUGE list of people to thank for assisting me with the build, A big thanks to the highly skilled Brian Magee for all the help, my Wife for being so fantastic about this crazy project, and to the many other forum members (Ron for creating the forum!) and friends who gave much free advice, time & assistance, especially Mike Drew & our mutual friend Johnny Woods. I hope I can repay all the favours soon!

[Marcus]

Julian,

although I rarely give any comments on other people´s cars (...because I´d better first come up with my own one) I must say that it´s a very nice, clean and utterly beautiful car.

Congrats...also for your wife...

Marcus

[Malcolm]

Julian

I remember when you first made contact many years ago. Glad to see you have got the car to where you wanted it to be. Well done. Hope to see it soon on track?

[John Lowe]

Julian

Looks beautiful. Can I ask what colours you used, it is difficult to tell from the photo's? (I'm building an RCR later this year and am finding it impossible to make my mind up on which colour I like best!)

Congratulations on a job well done

John

[Bill D]

An excellent rebirth! I love the way it sits over the wheels. Stunning!!!!

[Julian West]

Thank you Gents for the Kind words. Malc, I hope to get a trackday in soon before the weather turns too bad!

John, The colour is 'titanio metallico' I can maybe dig out the code if you're interested. Bill, thanks for the comments, when I wear out the 245's on the rear I'll replace them with the 295's that are now available & maybe even go for the taller profile on the front.. hmmmm!

here are some more pics.. the exhaust manifold lets the car down at the moment, I'll replace it someday....

[Simon]

Very nice looking car. How do you find the rose joints over the standard suspension? some people say it's like having your fillings shaken out and others say there's no difference! I suppose it must sharpen the handling a lot.
Simon

[Julian West]

Hi Simon,

The rose joints make a big difference & the ride quality is fine. this is probably partly due to retaining the 15" wheels as I guess the additional sidewall flex smooths the ride. TBH the ride is much more comfortable than I am used to.

A big advantage with rose joints on the GTD is the ability to fine tune the geo quickly & easily. Plus of course the reduction in flex & friction over the stock rubber bushes.

[Steve26]

Stunning car! Very nice Julian, this is a car to be proud of.
Steve

[Larry]

WOW!!!!

Thats a work of art. Beautiful and very fast I am sure. Do you find yourself missing building the car and having so much extra time on your hands? BUT, These cars seem to never be finished so have fun.

Larry

[Julian West]

Now I've got a few hundred miles on the car, I'm starting to make some improvements. After altering the front geo I decided to re-check the bump steer & was really pleased with my home made laser bump steer guage....

The drawing board is placed 3 meters from the laser & shows a very small amount of toe in in bump. If I was any good at math I could work out how much!

I track the laser on a drawing board which is placed around 3m from the hub & it shows around 10mm of horizontal movement over full droop to full bump.

[Dale Okla]

Julian - You have done a wonderfull restoration. It's very rare for anyone to start a project such as yours & follow thru to completion. The GT40 crowd seem to be a cut above most other builders. The best compliment I can give is ( ATA BOY). Thats oilfield roughneck slang for good job.

Dale in Oklahoma

[Wilby]

Julian, you have a beautiful machine there,the craftsmanship shows.I hope one day to build one myself with help from super people like yourself here on the forum.I really like that bump gauge never seen one like that here in Nascar country,may have to copy the idea! Thanks for sharing the info about your car with us.

Bill (Wilby)

[Gunnar]

Hi Julian!

Stunning car!

Regarding your question about trigonometry: Search wikipedia for "trigonometry" (not sure if links are allowed here). In the "overview" section of that article you'll find all you need for calculating angles in a right triangle. In your case it's "tan a = opposite/adjacent" where a is the angle you're looking for, opposite is 1cm and adjacent is 300cm. So the formula is a=arctan(1/300).

If you open the calculator in MS Windows make sure it's in scientific mode and switched to "degrees", then calculate 1/300 and press "inv" and then "tan", you'll see that the angle you're searching for is 0.19 degrees :-)

Hope this helps (and I hope I didn't make any mistakes ;-))

Cheers

Gunnar

[Peter D]

Julian, you have done a stunning job on the car - you must get a real kick out of just looking at it, then go right over the top when you take it for a drive !!

Your bump-steer gauge is a stroke of pure genious - one for each wheel, add a bit of high-school trig & some calibration, & you have the equivalent of a $50k wheel alignment machine !!

Kind Regards,

Peter D.

[Malcolm]

Ditto, also love the bump guage!

[Julian West]

Gents,

Thank you all for the kind words, I'm really appreciative of your positive comments! & Gunnar thx for the trig lesson..! I never thought I'd find trig so usefull & fascinating!!!!!

It's great having suspension that is so easily adjustable. For my set-up equipment I'm using a combination of the Carrol smith techniques with wood & string plus a few other ideas I've borrowed & modified. I wish the laser idea was all mine, but alas no.... however I did design & make the tool!!

Regds to all

[Julian West]

I've now finished my front suspension mods. I Shortened the steering arms by 25mm to 125mm & moved the ends outwards by around 30mm to get more (?) Ackerman.

I also fitted & modified a standard GTD ARB. To make it adjustable I cut the forged ends off, binned the rubber bushes & made rose jointed drop links. I have now have about an inch of adjustment on the ARB.

I've set it up with 1.5 deg toe in,1 deg negative camber, 6 deg castor, Ride height is 3.5" from the bottom chassis rail. Hopefully I'll get a road test soon & see how it works out.

[Julian West]

The first major item to be fabricated in my rebuild was the roll cage. I did my best to use the cage to add some stiffness to the chassis. The main hoop & rearstays are 50.8mm CDS tube & the front cage 48mm CDS. The mounting feet are 6mm plate Welded & bolted. The Chassis is modified at the top damper mounts to take the rearstays. It was a very tricky packaging excersize to get it all to fit whilst meeting the correct regulations.

For those that are interested I followed RAC Blue book regulation Q 1.5.2. for sports racing cars. The cage has since been inspected & passed by RAC scrutineers. In total I reckon it adds around 40kg to the car. If anyone in the UK is thinkng of fitting a cage, I would reccomend getting a copy of the RAC Blue book, as it details all the approved designs and construction techniques for roll cages to be used in motorsport in the UK.