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We decided to remove the front clip to tidy it up and make it easier to get to the suspension and enginey bits as well. Check out the custom radiator shims - the Torana must have a shorter engine bay. We got $50 of random 202 bits of FBMP and amongst a couple other handy bits that included a near new water pump, a much better thermostat housing and the extended fan thing. Nose cone off Note the blue inner on the drivers fender i think this was replaced post restoration as the paint is overall much worse than any other panel and seems to have been painted only once bolted on - the passenger side is also a replacement (originally a pale yellow/mustard) but was fairly obviously repainted with much more prep and attention while off the car. Other than the fender rust behind the front wheels where water and mud collects, the front clip panels are entirely rust free which is nice Fenders out Pulled everthing to bits, cleaned it, derusted, and painted Pretty pleased with that, pressed a couple of dents out with the press and it seems to sit nicer too Going through the front indicators to make at least 2 ok ones inner fenders tidied up rad support seperated from the nosecone and all bits including the lamps all cleaned, derusted, unbent, painted, threads tapped and reassembled. Nose cone has similar treatment but just knocking the cracked paint off on the outside and primed it. Looks worse at first glance, but its straight, rust free and ready to bolt back on, or for body work at some future point. Need to sort the rust at the base of fenders but all that stuff is ready to bolt back on. Because my big sheet of 0.8mm is for baby cars, I picked up some 1.0, 1.2 and 1.4mm panel steel offcuts today for $15 + GST ( https://rietveld.co.nz/ - what a treasure of a place - a true barry paradise!) so ill probably make a start on patching the bottom of the easier of the two fenders next to start to ease into it.

Wait till you try a diesel! 20 Nm, 40 Nm, 105° then 105° was a bit of a nerve wracking process haha

Yeah the machinist lapped the valves in the head and did leak tests on each one Thanks for checking. Crap... I think that's an action shot, but god damn it now I have to go back and check lol. Fortunately I have photographic evidence. Yep it's an action shot. Phew

Removing the mud and giving the old girl a good bath made it look better, but also made it easier to see a fair few issues. I think this has been restored once before and there are a few rust bubbles starting and a fair bit of paint adhesion and filler cracking in all the 'usual' spots. I shouldn't have but i started to pick. The Premier sill garnish that had been riveted on this lowly Belmonts sills was holding a lot of mud so i drilled (some) of the rivets. Sucks teeth Ill think ill just put that back up there and pretend we didnt see that With the seal definitely broken i dug into all the suspect areas to see how many repair panels to put on the list . This deep crease explains the thick filler on the upper half of this quarter panel, the filler probably made the rust on the lower half worse. Removing the deep filler means the door shut looks 100x better than it did Good 5mm of filler of this too, and much the same on the other side, except that side has braze as well There were signs of lots of filler on this quarter too. It has also been (previously?) brazed some of the filler was 10mm thick Took most of it off with a heat gun, much less messy than with a whirlywoo. The panel looked like this underneath it, from a prang in the rear Spent a bit of time with some hammers and dollies and a bit of extra heat trying to shrink some spots and it is quite a lot better. Like the other side, removing the filler also significantly improved the fit of the doors to the body! So yeah, some bits are pretty much as i expected (doors) some are much much better than i feared (quarter panels, cowls) , but some i didnt even suspect, like the sills, are quite bad indeed. We will need every patch panel you can buy, which basically means its got bitten in all the usual places, but that is a nice change from not being able to buy any panels at all!

Lush, our hx prem (was Mrs' uncles) is also from fielding, had the floods go through it in the mid-late noughties then we picked it up in 2009 and its followed us around waiting for love since. Yours appears in much better knick, hoping your progress motivates mine

So point of having it stop is to have it driving is so it can be moved around. Driving a project is a good motivator too Point of being able to stop is to drive it outside to give it a good clean underneath, mainly so we can see whats under there and dont get filthy while working on it This car was driven a lot on wet gravel roads. There was a LOT of dirt underneath Quick tidy of the 14x7 and 14x8 Cheviots while they are off with some fine scotchbrite to get the worst of the oxidising off Some blue springs and matching blue ADJUSTABLE RIDE MONROE GAS shocks in the rear. Pretty sure both he springs and the shocks are completely shagged from carrying around the LPG tank but interesting to see. Didnt spot any lines coming out of them either. This thing is an absolute whale compared to the rest of the fleet Gave it a wipe down with a waxy towel Swept out and tidied up stuff And shuffled everything back to bed

last month or so Kirsty and I have been poking away at this Got the interior back together, the Torana seats look pretty cool in brown, but there is no reclining function, they only bolt to two of the HQ factory holes and there are bits of wood under the two feet, so some factory or better seats are on the list now too. Seatbelts as well. Got it running off a boat tank off the key reliably, and next task is to make it stop so at least it can move it self around relatively safely. I like having projects be drivable, I like that they can do their main function, lots me think they are pretty much done apart from some petty technicalities. Started bleeding from the master as the pedal felt like the piston was stuck. No fluid exiting from the front port (rear brakes), rear port (front brakes) seemed fine. (Notes for later reference: PBR alloy master, cast iron front callipers, drum rear) Yep - was stuck down and full of schmoo. Got it professionally line bored Assembled it with lots of rubber grease and 'rebuilt' the brake booster Tidied up the engine bay a bit more as well Aaaaand now it leaks fluid into the booster when the pedal is pumped.. I may have assembled it wrong but i suspect one of the seals is blown/nicked or the bore is pitted somewhere (looked fine). Will need all new brakes at some point anyway so ill try to find a kit for cheap, or a new master even (seems they are around $300 from the usual places)

Is it safe to assume you fixed this before the cams went in?

Hey I really hope I've mis read but did you lap the valves to the seats before you reassembled or did they do that at the shop and had the valves labelled to fit the head? If it came back a bare head I'd be worried about valves sealing to the seats And did you leak test the valves before you put the head on the block? If the machine shop/engine reconditioner lapped the valve seats to remove pitting then just putting the valves back into the head may not seal as well as it should Happy to he corrected and I hope that makes sense Great to see progress and I hope it all goes vaxk together well

First job ticked off. Welded up a box for the gearbox cover. The only thing it does is provide access to the selector uni grub screw. Even that's pointless if when taking the engine and box out I slide it backwards. If the engineer asks me to weld it in it wont be a big deal. Just a faff around with making sure it doesnt catch fire. I have to put the rear seat back in sans some springs in the middle. No biggy.

I picked up the engine wednesday and got bizzy after work. Mmm shiny Outside not so much - I think I prefer this, because it'd fuck with me if I only had some parts that were super shiny on the outside. They skimmed the head, checked for cracks and heat issues, and only found minor pitting on some valve seats which they lapped out. Forgetting that I hadn't done this ahead of time, I went through a soapy water -> water rinse -> brake cleaner -> fresh oil routine to make sure the engine gets as little extra iron in its diet as possible. The valve stem seals go in with a socket and extension + oil... I uh accidentally put a used one in at once (visible at bottom of image above), because for some reason past tom put an old one next to a fresh one... Special tool 09916–14510 Special tool 09916–14522. If I had to change this I'd make it a little longer. The first one went in reasonably easy. I used some shitty aliexpress tweezers (might as well be made of slices of takeaway container plastic) and grease to hold the bingles in place. It made me think that this would be easy... Turns out almost all of them gave me a fight. The bingles HATE going into position and the intake side is even more of a bitch as they need to seat deeper. They'd wiggle free, pop each other out, stick to the tweezers or whatever else I put in there, and just generally be a bit of a bitch. The tool I printed left too short a window on a couple of them to keep a piece of material in there to hold the bingles down. I tried a bunch of tricks, including putting foam in the special tool and in a socket, but ultimately the best technique was to just struggle and eventually get there. The next day we aimed to get the head and the block together. We got the shop to do the rotating assembly and I think it was well worth it. Before we could put the head on there were a couple jobs we wanted to do first. First, the oil seal housing. Some internet sleuthing tells me that Threebond 1217G is equivalent to Permatex Ultra Grey. Special tool 09911–95010 helps get the seal onto the crank. Girlface finishes off cleaning the breather plate and we get that back on too. While we waited for the sealant to cure, we got the engine set up on the hoozitchacallit. Then after an hour we came back and torqued to spec. Wiping down all surfaces with brake cleaner, we busted out the dowels and head gasket... and then the engine got marginally larger! The head bolts are next. We got fresh new ones under the assumption that the old ones underwent enough plastic deformation to be unusable, but I haven't actually checked. 20 Nm, then 40Nm, fine. But then +60 degrees, which introduces unhappy metal sounds and vibrations, which is really disconcerting! And then another +60 degrees which put us completely in anoos puckering territory. Fuck me I'm glad that's over and nothing broke. Today, I set my sights on the camshafts, sprockets, chain and oil cover. I still hadn't disassembled and cleaned the camshaft parts so that was the first job. Gingerly separated the cams from their sprockets in a vice, then cleaned in the parts washer before rinsing thoroughly with brake cleaner and then a further rinse in fresh oil. The exhaust camshaft was a lot simpler to clean The intake camshaft has a bearing at the sprocket end, just the one, I guess because there are some complex oil gallery stuffs going on there. The old bearing felt fine but I grabbed a new one anyway, it's only one size. Then the cams go in! It was ambiguous in the manual whether to use oil on the bolts but I thought yes and the internet backed me up so that's what I did. Kelv later told me his gut said no. So Kelv, if something fucks up here, you were right. It was at this point I tore the garage up trying to find the crankshaft key. It gone . I remember seeing it at some stage so I can't imagine it has gone far but ugghh what a bummer, let me keep assembling god damn it! I kept going anyway and got the chain, guides and tensioner set up per the manual. Before I torqued the tensioner down I tested that everything can be removed with it in place for if I find the key / need to disassemble the head later, so that gets the ol' paint marks on the bolts treatment. The other annoying thing: the machinist said to check the valve clearances due to the lapping. I slightly fucked it up (measured at parallel instead of perpendicular because the above image didn't load first time and I'm a numpty) but I got a 0.2mm in (good) but not a 0.25mm in (bad). I also wanted to get the chain properly set up so I could start rotating the lobes into the correct positions for measuring so that annoyingly threw me off today. I'll find some way to measure those little bastards tomorrow though. I really hope I don't have to wait for new tappets and/or key from Japan... But anyway progress is progress!

k24 pretty easy to get 250hp at wheels. stock engine with cam upgrade and good bolt on's

Well its been a while but I am back. Finally got my hands on another old-school car after much going back and forth on several other choices. Car arrives in mid-May. Has a 2M and 5 speed but will be swapping out for modern drivetrain later on.

I made the handbrake cable bracket. I can make the cable outer touch the propshaft flange, so I'll make some brackets to hold them away. I'm fairly confident they wouldn't touch by themselves anyway... I must decide how I want to marry the Triumph handbrake lever to the toyota cable so it's still adjustable. The handbrake is offset to the drivers side, so the cable 'just' misses the propshaft.

Saw a post on here just recently that hayholes mum does a good polishing service?

Race motor (cnc head, cams, pistons) on npd100 300hp odd (think that was at wheels too) designed for endurance racing, few $$$ involved but not crazy money.

Shit yeah great work, what a massive job this is. Can't wait to hear boosted barra harassing other lake goers!

Right then. Booked in for cert inspection in two weeks or so. This is the remaining list which I hope to cross off one item a day.

Hi Peter; You mention that you plan to nickel-plate the lovely radiator-shrouding that your Dad has fabricated. My information suggests that Bugatti radiators were customarily finished in an alloy called "German Silver". This may not necessarily apply to the T59, but it may be worth checking out before you get any plating done. The other thing that might be important to understand is that modern nickel-plating is NOT the same as what was used in pre-War Europe (the modern version was invented in the USA, and was only used sparingly there until after WWII). The 'old school' nickel-plating used on Bugattis used a process nowadays known as "electro-less nickel-plating". You should be able to find a workshop in NZ that will still do it. The result is soft and has a satin finish that will buff up quite well, but it is much more durable than the thin, shiny and brittle modern equivalent. You need to specify a minimum coating of 12 microns. The original GP Bugattis didn't have plating on many of their steering and suspension parts, instead leaving the steel in polished form. Die-hard authentic Bugattistes will still opt for this, but you need to devote regular sessions for careful application of moisture resistant coatings to the polished parts, and keep the car in a low-humidity environment. Old school nickel-plating may be a practical option, but - whatever else you may decide - please don't plate your front axle! That would constitute a cardinal sin!!! Your CAD drawing of your proposed steering box appears to differ visually from the T57 steering boxes that I am familiar with - maybe that's the case for T59 steering boxes, but I wouldn't know. The T57 steering box has radial strengthening ribs between the main gear-housing and the attached boss around the drop-arm actuator. I only know this because the steering box in my T49 project is actually off a T57, and it looks quite different to the usual touring Bugatti steering boxes that were fitted to T40, 44, 49 etc., which also look more like your CAD drawing. I'll attach a pic of a T44 and a T57 steering box to show you what I mean. Very excited to see the progress that you're making! Cheers, Michael Anderson

Have always wondered about Honda's little L15b engine in the fit/jazz... Or the J series V6.

in certain context, lime scooters on a footpath are far more dangerous than say a moderately looked after p10. seen some with absolutely bald tyres

Old guy next door who loaned me that big van, died a couple of years ago, and his daughter isn't really coping with home ownership. She's been away ~3 months looking after an ex who was having heart surgery. So I had a bit of time to think as I wombled around doing this, and concluded doing something for a neighbour was pretty appropriate for Anzac day.

It’s at this point you need to take a deep breath.

Can see a wideband sensor fitted in downpipe in above photo started installing the unit for that under dash too.