Here we are with summer gone and winter closing in and the Spitfire still hasn't seen the road. I'm not finding the time to work on the car as much as I'd like and I really need the therapy.

I've finally returned to the rust on the bulkhead and have removed the worst of the metal. I have to decide how much further to go with the rust around the perimeter. As you can see in the first picture, there are some areas that are holed and too thin to ignore. But I'm wondering if some of it can't just be ground down to bare metal and then have the pits treated with rust converter/encapsulator.

If there's enough meat left to weld to, I'm tempted to take short cuts. If I take out all the rust I'm going to have to rebuild parts of the vertical bulkhead to about a half-inch below where the top plate spotwelds on. That's more metal fabrication than I've ever attempted before, and I'm already pushing my limits.

The second picture is the panel I bought from Lee. I'm now tempted to remove the bubble for the brake reservior and lay the rest of the panel up against the bulkhead and cut away around it to replace as much metal as I can.

If I get my new welder soon I'll hopefully post the happy ending to this story next post. In the meantime...find a sand blaster.

I've read somewhere that of all our senses, the sense of smell is most closely tied to memory. I was reminded of this recently while working on my Chrysler Cirrus, which having originally come from the Buffalo New York area, is slowly succumbing to salt poisoning.

I was working on the front brakes which had developed a rust induced squeal that when fed back throught the speaker at a drive-through was producing noises that would have made Jimmy Hendrix jealous.

The problem wasn't caused by the brake pads and rotors. It was that the steering uprights were so rusty that where the brake pads rode, there were hollows worn out of the rust scale and metal. When the brakes were applied, the pads couldn't move flat against the rotors and they vibrated in the hollows and made the piercing squealing noises.

I went to a local u-pull it junkyard and got rust-free replacement uprights for less than twenty bucks...good deal! I also went to a parts place and bought new pads, rotors, and also wheel bearing hubs which cost nearly $200. Not so good a deal, but look, I've doubled the value of my car!

As I was removing the old uprights, I was having a problem getting one of the tie rods separated, so I got out my pickle fork and BFH and had at it. The pickle fork did the trick, but tore the rubber boot, and the tie rod let loose with a spatter of grease and a cloud of rust dust.

With the smells of the rust and old grease mixing in my nostrils, I suddenly remembered being 17 years old again in my parents garage in New Jersey. At the time I was working on a Sunbeam Alpine that I had almost forgotten I had owned. Apparently, the LBC bug had bitten me much earlier than I thought it did. At the time, I had managed to get the car running, but I never figured out how to deal with the advanced rust in the sills. The Alpine was quickly replaced by a 65 Chevy Malibu, but to this day I still remember the smell of that rusty sports car.

I recently attended a British car show in Hellertown and saw many original and beautifully restored cars including a number of MG Magnettes. I was reminded of the 57 Magnette I owned briefly when I was 20, and again it was not the look of the car (as they appeared smaller than I remembered) but the smell of the car that brought it all back.

I can't put my finger on any one odor that stands out. Perhaps was the mixture of the leather, the horse hair padding, the large amounts of wood in the dash and door trim. Or maybe it was the smell of hot oily brass and British steel, or the hint of years of barn smell than hadn't worked it's way out of the carpets. Whatever it is, these old cars have a richness of smell that brings back memories whenever I'm near them.

This "old car smell" is a natural contrast to the petro-chemical induced euphoria of "new car smell" that car dealers love to sell as a feature of their wares. I don't care for new car smell. Maybe the odor of new plastic has permanently been associated with back-to-school sales, new binders and pencil cases for me. I value the old car smell for the memories it brings back as much as for the unique flavor that it adds to our cars.

Perhaps that's why I don't want to do a full restoration on my Spitfire, because even though it doesn't have the leather or horse hair padding...it still has an old car smell that seems unique to English sports cars. And I don't want to lose that old car smell.

I haven't managed to do anything on the Spitfire in quite a while as life has intruded on my dreams again. The Tomato has been sitting in the back yard where it has been exiled since our kid's graduation party. It looks so sad and lonely under the maple tree. The seat of honor under our carport has been selfishly usurped by my daughter's Neon which has annoyingly decide to start randomly, and certainly not when most needed. I've been over every inch of the wiring and can't find the problem. I'm beginning to suspect that the problem is simply that the switches (including the ignition switch) on this car are too cheaply made to be reliable. I'm tempted to bypass the starter ciruit in the switch and wire a push-button start into the dash. The reason for this is that not only does the starter not crank on demand, but it sometimes will not stop cranking when the ignition switch is released.

But, this has been one huge digression, and certainly not why this has been such a tough week. The simple reason for that is that my daughter having finished college has decided that her future is with her fiancee in his native state of California and on Tuesday this week my wife and son and I drove down to Philadelphia to take them to the airport. The weather was beatifully clear, but with temperatures in the 90's and high humidity as soon as you stepped out of the air conditioning it was miserable to be outdoors.

Philadelphia airport (for those of you who've never been there) is a mile and a half long arc of four-lane roadway flanked on one side with block long terminal buildings A through F and on the other side by high-rise parking structures and commuter train stations. At the center of every terminal, cabs, shuttle buses, and the general public joust for position and sometimes pile up 3 lanes deep to unload passengers and baggage as close to the curb as possible. This chaotic dive to the curb is occasionally punctuated by some lucky survivor bursting out of the pack after successfully discharging its passengers. After managing to skirt the outer lane and passing four of these heavy-metal rave parties, we reached terminal E and like a silver shark our Caravan dove into the surf of steel and flesh. My son, daughter, and her fiancee tossed bags to the curb and my wife and I shouldered our way out of the swarm to go find the $11/day "economy" parking lot.

Another mile down the road and we had our parking spot, and ticket proudly displayed on the dash, we began the trek back to the terminal. The sun was brutal and the heat unbearable. We passed one homeless person laid out in the shade of the shrubs growing along the walkway. At least I think he was homeless, perhaps he was just some poor traveler who like us was too cheap to pay the $24 to park in the parking decks with the air conditioned walkways. Maybe he was just a poor soul who would never make it back to his waiting car. Maybe like us, he never spotted the shuttle buses that run betwen the terminals and the parking lots! No matter, we had children waiting for us and we couldn't spare the time waiting on the vagaries of parking lot shuttle buses, so with the sun beating down on those square miles of concrete and macadam we trudged back to terminal E. If I knew then what I know now, we would have only had to trudge to terminal F since there are elevated (air conditioned) walkways between the terminals, but they aren't obvious from street level so we didn't spot them until on the way back.

When we reached the terminal, we discovered our future son-in-law had been injured in the battle at the curbside when a porter had dropped a 50 pound bag on his sandaled foot. My wife produced a bandaid and my daughter showing the value of two years attending school at Temple, dressed the wound and told her boyfriend to walk it off. At this point, refreshed by the air conditioning, we proceeded up the escalators to the promised concourse in anticipation of cooling off at a farewell dinner with our loved ones. The Philadelphia Airport stymied us as we quickly found out that all the restaurants, and in fact, the concourse itself was on the other side of the gates. Only ticket-holding passengers were allowed. So we stood there, separated from the riches of fast food and touristy shops by twenty feet of steel, glass, and the sweaty bodies of travellers inching through the cattle chutes to the handful of gates at the other side. We weren't ready to deliver or children to this creeping hell without a last supper so I conplained bitterly to some poor airport employee about the stupidity of terminal designers until she offered up the Marriot hotel's restaurant to placate me.

Seemingly only another mile away with an obstacle course of three terminals, one train station, a parking garage and a skyway to navigate, carrying only two overstuffed carry-ons, we managed to make it to the Marriot's lovely Sculling themed restaurant. There we had a pleasant dinner of $14 hamburgers amoungst the ambiance and weak air conditioning. Refreshed and cooled off, with deadlines looming, we started our walk back to the terminal. Thinking to avoid the obstacle course on the way back I suggested that we go directly across to the terminals and walk along the terminals to our destination. This was not wise as it put us on the outer diameter of the arc of the airport and I was still not hip to the skywalks between terminals. Our refreshed state quickly gave way to soggy determination to reach our destination through the searing heat and occasional swarms of debarking travellers at each terminal entrance.

We reached our terminal with plenty of time for our brave flyers to experience the TSA's government mandated "Hours O' Boredom" waiting to board their flight. So with everybody saying their goodbyes through the hugs and tightness in our chests we watched our daughter and future son-in-law wade into the crowd to be quickly lost from sight.

We quickly decided that since the flight was still hours away, instead of waiting at the airport to guess which departing airplane held our loved ones, we'd get on to the business of trudging back to our waiting vehicle. Wanting to delay returning to the heat until the last moment we walked to the far end of the terminal instead of leaving by the nearest entrance. At the far end of the building I finally spotted it...a sign which simply held the words "Terminal F", and an arrow pointing to an air conditioned walk-way. Mentally kicking myself, we walked to and through the nearly deserted final terminal of the Philadelphia airport.

Back at the parking lot we noticed that our fallen traveller/homeless man had managed to gather himself and move on. Relieved that we hadn't left someone to die in the heat in our rush to get to the terminal, we moved on to playing PAC-man in the parking lot maze with the shuttle buses playing the part of the ghosts. After a short time of avoiding being run down by the omni-present omni-buses, we escaped to the next level...avoiding getting run down by everyone on the streets of center-city Philadelphia. Believe me, in Philadelphia, a GPS is less a navigation aid and more of a frustrating distraction as the signal gets lost between the high buildings and the GPS only pops back to life 30 seconds too late to tell you that you should have changed lanes 20 seconds ago.

Despite this, we managed to make it back to our daughter's now vacant apartment where my wife would spend the rest of the week cleaning and packing until I returned on Saturday with a rental truck. After a quick provisioning run, I headed home to several days of trying to build a reporting system on top of years of data entry errors and missing information, while my son returned to yet more graduation parties and a week of hanging out with friends and beautiful young ladies everywhere except home. On Saturday, my son having a pressing Streetlight Manifesto concert to attend, my 79 year old father-in-law and I found ourselves at u-haul-topia where the counter person informed us that we had to have the truck back by five because it was rented out again a six. Now feeling rushed, we jumped in the truck and scurried down to Philly where we did our best to kill ourselves loading furniture and boxes from the second floor apartment while my wife stood guard.

It was bad enough that the apartment was on the 2nd floor, but every piece had to be carted or carried down a hallway through a 90 degree turn into a stairwell to another 90 degree turn on a landing down another set of steps and out the side door into a narrow fenced in walk-way around the back of the building to the front again and across the street through Philly traffic to the waiting truck. After doing this about 50 time we finally had the truck full at 3:00 ready for the hour and a half ride back to the Lehigh Valley and Bethlehem. For anyone not doing the math, that left us a half hour to empty the truck, sweep it out, fill it with gas and return it by the appointed time.

When we got home, we literally threw everything on the front lawn and tasked our son and his friend (all freshly scrubbed and groomed for their concert) with getting everything inside before they left. reaching the U-haul store only a few minutes late, we dropped of the truck. Realizing that I hadn't eaten anything all day (and that nobody else had eaten since breakfast), we invited the in-laws out for dinner on us and returned home for showers. We returned home to a house that was barely navigable but at least have air conditioning. Ignoring the piles of stuff to be sorted, we went out for a fantastic meal at the Coopersburg Diner and then home to collapse from exhaustion.

Top bring this back to the subject of Spitfires, the highlight of my day yesterday was meeting Bill Chapman (Chappy444) from this very forum. He and his lovely wife (Anne? damn my memory for names) had driven up from Maryland to deliver a set of beautifully preserved Spitifire seats, and met us at our daughter's apartment. After some confusion about which of the many u-haul trucks, parked up and down Diamond street, belonged to us, we got together to exchange money and seats and talk briefly. Bill said that he was going back to Maryland to pick parts off a Spitfire in a junkyard in Mt. Airy. His wife confided that she finds she enjoys picking parts off cars in junkyards. I'm not sure which is rarer...a Spitfire in a junkyard, or a wife that will accompany her husband on a junkyard expedition. In either case, nice find Bill! It was great meeting both of you! And the seats are awesome!

There's not much happening with the Spitfire right now. I'm being run ragged preparing for my kids graduation party (among other things). My son Kristofer has graduated from High School and his older sister Michelle has graduated from college so there is much celebrating to do...which translates into many errands for yours truly.

See Kris, I mentioned you in my journal, so I don't love the car more than you!

So as my daughter prepares to head out to start her adult life, and my son prepares for college, I may find myself with plenty of time to work on the car...after the party (I just won't have the money!).

More pictures of the bulkhead repair to come.

I spent all Sunday morning with a spot weld drill and a dremel multi-tool picking apart the master cylinder tray I bought from Lee Seltsam via the trader forum on this site. True to his word, the panel was in excellent shape with only minor surface rust. The only dodgy part was the metal near a bracket welded to the back of the panel near the relay bracket. It looked like the metal had cracked from stress and then started to rust a bit. This piece of metal will get some extra attention when I start to reassemble the shelf.

The replacement part came from an earlier Spitfire; a 71 or 72? and I noticed some differences. For one thing, the flying buttresses that brace the panel and surround the brake cylinder are higher on the earlier spitfire. In addition, the dimple behind the brake fluid reservior is smaller and stamped right into the panel whereas on the 1978, the dimple is wider and deeper, so it is a separate stamping which is spot welded in place.

In pulling all the bits off the panel I gained some insight into how this must have been assembled when the car was being built. There are so many fiddly pieces that could only have been spot welded if the welder had access to both sides of the panel that it's obvious that this panel was assembled off the car, and then spot welded on as a finished assembly. In addition, there must have been a certain amount of stick welding done around the hood closure panels. These were certainly labor intensive cars to build.

The actual mounting brackets for the clutch and brake masters are still bolt-ons, and appear to be unchanged. Lee threw them in, so I now have an extra pair. I've cleaned and painted these parts along with the flying buttress and relay brackets that had to be drilled off the panel. If anyone needs any of these brackets let me know.

I'll add a picture later.

Edited July 31st. The extra brackets found a new home last week with another forum member out in Utah. So those brackets had to travel from Colorado to Pennsylvania to Utah to find a new home. They're more well traveled than me!

It's been bothering me that now that I have my Spitfire running that I haven't been able to get it running better. It feels and sounds like it's running on two cylinders. I had confirmed that that was the case by pulling the spark plug wires in turn and the two front cylinders were making almost no contribution to the engine.

When I pulled the wires previously, I followed up with a compression test expecting to find something horribly wrong with the two front cylinders, so I was surprised to discover that they had higher compression readings than the two back cylinders.

This time I followed up by checking for spark. I thought maybe I had two bad wires & it was just a coincidence that they were next to each other. But no, there was a nice fat spark from each wire.

Standing there scratching my head and looking across the engine at the dual carbs and manifold, it occured to me that the answer might be staring me right in the face. So, I pulled the air filter off the front carb, and after restarting the engine, I sprayed carb cleaner down the throat of the carb.

The response was immediate. The RPMs climbed, the engine smoothed out and stopped sounding like an extended death rattle and snarled like a Spitfire should.

It was pretty awesome that I could control engine speed by pressing a spray button on an aerosol can. The bad news is that I think I have some carbs to rebuild. Something to think about later...it's late and I'm tired.

Good night all.