1966 GT40 Road Car

[DMatt]

Rick,

How did your wife pi$$ off Carroll Shelby?

[Rick Muck- Mark IV]

OK, since you asked.....at a SAAC meet in Detroit circa 1985 CS was signing stuff (free, before he charged) and she took a new Autokraft AC MK IV warranty book up and without looking first CS whipped the 'ol sig on it. He then stopped and looked at what he had signed, and then stormed off and stopped signing. This was during one of the periods where Brian Angliss and 'ol Shel weren't friendly. They went through a couple of periods when they "made nice" (during one I was interupted at home during dinner by Brian who asked me "do you know where I am calling from? I sitting at Carroll Shelby's pool!!!")
Anyhow CS went ballistic that night at the SAAC banquet about "replicas" and people "stealing the heritage, etc."

Everyone in our group blamed my wife! And she still is proud of pi$$ing him off!
Rick [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[jimbo]

Is this by any chance the car that Gary Kohs restored..the story sounds familiar. This is a great set of photos and really entertaining to look at. Thank you for going to all this trouble to post them so that we could get a look at them...I think there are more than a few Forum devotees who haven't gotten to see very many original cars.

[Bill Musarra]

I believe you are correct. Hard to remember names when you are in the middle of redoing a weber.
Bill

[jimbo]

One more question..I was a professional photographer before my change of careers. Would you mind posting what equipment you used to photograph this car...the photos are REALLY good- sharp, lucid, entertaining- I would be proud of work like this. What kind of outfit did you use to shoot it?

[BenL]

[ QUOTE ]
Would you mind posting what equipment you used to photograph this car...

[/ QUOTE ]
One interesting feature of digital cameras is that they embed information about the picture in the photos they take (Exchangeable Image File Format). If you were to save one Bill's photos on your computer and view it with an image viewer(*) that can display the EXIF info you can get the answer to your question.

Here's some of the EXIF info from one of Bill's photo

Make - OLYMPUS OPTICAL CO.,LTD
Model - C3030Z
ExposureTime - 1/30 seconds
FNumber - 2.80
ISOSpeedRatings - 134
MaxApertureValue - F 2.83
MeteringMode - Multi-segment
LightSource - Auto
Flash - Not fired
FocalLength - 6.60 mm

Some cameras will also record the date and time the picture was taken. And if you have a really fancy camera with a GPS, it can also record the location where the picture was taken.


* I use the free program IrfanView (aka iview32) from www.irfanview.com.
Some programs will delete the EXIF info when they crop (or otherwise modify) digital photos.

[Bill Musarra]

Jim,
One thing I have found out in using a digital camera is that it is all in the details. My father in law who passed away about 2 years ago, was the chief camera man for WXIA in Atlanta.(started out as a truck driver) He was well known in the news media. He had a full fleged studio and dark room inthe basement of his house. He was medically disabled but was able to get aroound. After his wife died, I built him a computer and introduced him to computers so he could email his buddies since he couldnot drive on long trips anymore. On that computer, I put Microsofts "Picture It" as it came bundled with some other software. I found it the easiest software to use to edit digital photos. When I introduced him to digital photography with a $20, on special camera that would take 10 photographs at 1.3MP, he was hooked. He went out and researched the field as he had some pretty fancy cameras and lenses.From that day on he never picked up a film camera again. He wound up buying a top of the line, mid range camera for $400. It was the Olympus Camedia C-3030 Zoom camera with 3.3 Megapixels. Nothing fancey. by todays standard. He found that to do 5x7 that was all he needed. If he was going to do 8x10, he would have to go up to 5 MP to get studio quality prints. He experimented with that computer software and his standard printer, and figured out that the quality prints had to have a quality printer. He tried all the different types of paper including canvas types, which on a quality printer look just like a painting on the canvas media. He used that camera on a movie set at Kennesaw Mountain on a historic Civil War movie and captured a shot of four horsemen comming around a bend with all four horses in the turn and all their hoofs off the ground. He submitted the digital shot in a Marlboro competition and won.
What I am getting to is this, It doesn't take an expensive camera to get quality shots. They all have settings in their internal software that will allow quality shots(EQ, SQ etc.). They just let you take fewer shots with the higher quality settings.(10 as compared to 399). The rest is up to the editing. On Picture it, there is an area that lets you alter or adjust the brightness and contrast and you can do it manually or hit the automatic button and it does it automaticly. Thats what I do and it is done. And thats how these were done except that some were cropped.
Bill

[Chris Hale]

Thanks for posting the picture Bill, they are proving most useful to reference to in my build.

Keep them coming,

Chris [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[Bill Musarra]

It has been a while since posting on the road car. I have been helping do maintenance and repair off and on for most of the sunmmer on Sundays that were available. Most of the summer I was on a $$$diet with my own build so I decided to
help out when I could. Only this last weekend allowed for some pictures.
The road car came without the emergency brake handle. After many calls by the owner to all of his sources, he was able to get the parts, but no one knew how the pieces went together. I took a look at it and figured out the way it worked. Here is the T Handle. The opposite side has the notches that hold it in the shaft when the e-brake is engaged.


Here is the shaft it rides in with the H bars in place.



There is a little spring that looks like the greek letter Pi that holds the two bars in place and puts gentle pressure on the T handle to hold the H bars in the notches of the shaft.



Then the problem was to figure out how to get a cable to work the mechanism, and to get it in the car.
The emergency brake handle uses a cable to attach to a clevis/bracket which is on the back of the brake pedal located way down in the cave of where the pedal box lives. Not easy to get to, and impossible to work on. So I suggested we start removing pieces until we got down to where we neede to get. First we removed the chrome cover located in front of the drivers side(RHD), and found the master cylinder resevoirs


Next we removed the center chrome hoousing over the heater box


Then we loosened the heater vent cable that opened and closed the vent.



The next step was to loosen the heater box itself and rotate it out of the way since it had the water lines connected.


This gave us a look at the top of the pedal box itself. We discovered that the pedal box is adjustable for short or long legged drivers. Notice the multiple mounting points for the box, and the flexible hoses from the master cylinders to the hard tubing.



Then it was a simple matter of using a thin guage wire to measure the distance for the cable and get the diameter of the clevis pin which we could find nowhere in the parts books that we had. Now we can obtain a 5 or 6 mm. cable from one of the local bike shops, attach a .25" rod end to the other end after trimming to lenght. This adventure allowed us to look at some of the inner workings of the car that had not been seen anywhere else. Here are some other pics that we took just for those that want to know about the originals.
The metal B pillars



The front access panel.



The front upright assembly and caliper. Not much room in there.





The steering wheel badge, since we had to take the steering wheel off to get down to the pedal box. Here it is as a whole, exploded, and back side.

[frank beuker]

perfect pictures Bill
super details
I think I'm going to use the same idear for the hand brake.
On the older opel's(gm) they had the same handle under the dash
so i can use that

Frank

[brianstewart]

Great series of pictures Bill. Thanks for posting.

[Pantera1889]

Incredible!!!
Thanks!

[Bill Musarra]

For the last 12 months, I have been helping the owner of this 66-road car documented here; complete his search for the final pieces that would make the car 100% complete and original. There are some other things that need to be done to the car due to age etc., but the car had one piece that no one seemed to have or know how to find. After about 6 years of searching and the help of several individuals both in the US and England, all the pieces have finally been located and installed. The owner would like to document here on the forum that adventure and acknowledge those individuals who gave their time, knowledge, experience, effort, and money in an effort to help him complete his car.

What he started out with, were some pieces that another owner had sent, but no idea how they went together. Their assembly is documented earlier in this thread. No cable or associated pieces that would make the setup work were available. With the aid of the schematics, which he had, we figured out how the cable was connected to the brake pedal and the handle shaft. Now all we needed was a cable, some cable adjusters, and one or two other pieces, and we could start putting them together.
With a little research at a local bicycle shop, and an old timey ACE hardware store that had about 20,000 square feet of tools and parts not to be found anywhere else in the Atlanta area, I came up with an idea that we could take a bicycle cable, as they only came in two sizes(5 & 6mm.), weld a .25 inch rod end on its end to match the clevis pin, and use it for the cable. The owner liked my idea, but wanted to search some more in order to find the original manufacturer, or someone who could manufacture the original cable. He has been looking for about 5-6 years, emailing, calling, and writing owners across the globe in his quest.
He would like to thank the following individuals for their selfless help in the quest for the parts. John Hardy (England) who tracked down a production road car in England, a very long distance from his home, and photographed the road car's e-brake system showing what an installed original cable looked like from one end to the other. John's selfless research took place over several years; Frank Catt (Wealden Engineering in England) who created a prototype cable from emails and phone conversations regarding measurements, within one week. Don Silawsky who owns a production GT 40 in Maryland/USA, who saw the quest in GT 40s.com several years ago and forwarded the owner to Sean Singleton in England; Sean Singleton (England), located an original road car e-brake cable and carried it to a cable manufacturer/machine shop and had it duplicated to perfection. Doug Kirk, who knows more about the GT 40 than anyone he has ever known and who races his Safir GT40 in Seattle, took measurements from his brake cable's components and drew prototype drawings of the cable during the early years of his search.
Here are some more pics of the ebrake setup and the effort required to install it.







E-brake rod.



Cable in the cabin.



On rod.



In front clip



Threaded housing and cable adjuster





Next we had to get the rod end and the cable end adjuster down to the brake pedal. The brake pedal was dislodged, and turned sideways in order to get hands down to it. This still proved to be a challenge.





Getting the rod end inplace,putting the clevis pin with washerson both sides and the cotter pin in place took a lot of patience, balance and holding pieces still while moving others.
Doing these is like doing Laparoscopic operations in surgery. Having access to those instruments makes these steps a lot easier. If you can get someone in surgery to get you some of their old instruments, they will come in handy in tight spaces.



While working that day, I got to feeling pretty queasy, from some greasy doughnuts and wasnot able to completely put all back in its place. So another one hour trip is planned soon to do that and hopefully get the car on the road. I have more pics of the car itself and its various parts which I will post later. Meanwhile he and I will finish with his other classicd cars and get them on the road as well. I am also trying to get DRB#5 closer to completion. My wife wants me to have it finished by summer. Will post some progress on it soon.

Bill

[Pantera1889]

Awesome pics!!!! Thanks for sharing.

[Bill Musarra]

Well. I went over this last weekend to finish up the car as I got a little sickly last visit and could not find the energy to get the steering wheel and heater box back in place. So did and we fired it up. Was having some trouble getting it to fire. Squirted some fuel and it fired, boy did it. The throttle was stuck at mis point and we shut it off quickly. A little lube fixed that. Next we tried out the e-brake and it worked like a charm. A bad one. As we tried to take the car for a spin(first inover a year), the car would not move. The brake would not release. Soo, we had to manually pull it back. Then we got out on the road. We toured the local neighborhood to let all warm up which did. We then headed out to the bypass for some fun. The car ran wonderfully. That little 289 will really scream once given the chance. There were some hesitations along the way, but once cleaned out it ran flawlessly. I must say that the acceleration in fifth gear from about 50 or so was much stronger than I thought. without noticing, we were at 110 and it felt like at 50. We now know that the speedo is off a bit as at 80 some people were even or passing us. The average speed on the bypass as I drove home was right at 70. So, a new gear is in order. The tach also needs some work also. We went down about 4 exits and turned around to go home. He asked what he should do about the old gas in the tank, and I told him he should drive it out(the car needs the exercise). As we pulled of the bypass on to his exit we noticed a drastic loss of power. As we rolled to a stop, we could hear the fuel pump just whinning away. Yep, out of fuel. So another thing to work on. Seems they never end. But let me tell you. Ther is no other experience like that of a 40. I just hope mine runs as well as his. For now that is about it, as I need to get back to mine. My wife has graciously said she wants it done by this summer. We have experienced a few of "Lifes little inconviences", and now they are past(I hope). So I have been doing some panneling in the off time to pass the non buying time, and I will post some progress soon. Also I hope to post the saga of the 930 soon as we hope it will be drawing to a close.

Bill

[allanfeldman]

Thanks Bill
For the great Photos. I have a rather old Imac Apple computer. I got all your second batch of pictures just fine. But the first Batch just showed up as boxes is it just me??
Regards Allan

[Murray Cowley]

Yeah, me too Alan, not just you.
Wonderful pics, lots of hard work going into the project.
Thanks Bill.

[Bill Musarra]

Anyone wanting pics which have somehow disapeared, just let me know and I can send them as attachments. I know some of the DRB#5 photos disapeared also. Just have a lot of mailbox space for them to be recieved.

Bill