The Old and the New

And just like that we are coming into November! The lads have been hard at work again this month with some good progress being made.

Preston dropped his Walkinshaw Commodore replica into us in a bit of a sorry state recently. After blowing an engine up over a decade ago it had been relegated to the back of the property for the weeds to grow around. Finally the decision was made to drag her out, swap in a new motor and trans and get her back up and running again. Realising that he really couldn’t be arsed, the simple solution was to make it our problem! After blowing the spider webs out of it and sorting through the pile of random parts we decided we had most of what we needed and the rest we could make. While we were at it, we converted it from manual to auto and after a few weeks it began to make all the right noises and most of the right smells. Unfortunately, living in a paddock has introduced a bit of rust so now that we know that it all works, the next stop is to send it off to have the underbody blasted to reveal how much rust needs dealing to and then get everything epoxy coated to seal it up.

Rob’s BMW 2002 Baur has unfortunately begun to reveal the true nature of its “bare metal” restoration that it had in the 90’s. The repairs consist of layers and layers of steel over the top of the rusty original body, sometimes brazed in place, sometimes welded, sometimes just jammed in the rusty hole. It’s not what we were hoping to find but now we know it is there, we are cutting it all out and repairing it properly so we don’t end up with rust bubbles popping through the new paint in a few years time. Both A pillars need to be remade and then hopefully we can send it to the painters.

Peter’s KE25 Corolla has left our shop and is now gone off on its rotisserie to have a full paint job. We are really looking forward to seeing it back all shiny and new so we can start bolting it back together for the final time. Good things take time however and it will likely be six months before we see it again.

An interesting project that we have had in the background for the last year is a 2017 Mercedes AMG G63, commonly known as a G wagon. This is a pretty special vehicle, despite being the top of the range model with a 5.5L twin turbo V8, it also has portal axles, which are effectively a set of drop gears that offset the axle down by about 6 inches, meaning this thing is over two metres tall and nearly as wide. Portal axles are normally found in off road vehicles like a Unimog, however Mercedes built these things as a factory option for the G wagon and called it the G500 4×4 squared. Unfortunately they only ever made them in left hand drive which cannot be road registered in New Zealand. Our particular vehicle is a right hand drive car that has had the portal axles, body kit and all other parts fitted prior to being imported. Because of this it is classified as a modified vehicle and needs to go through the LVVTA system to have it approved. This is where we come in, we have had to redesign the way the portal hubs have been fitted, as it was pretty rough, get it driving correctly as it is now so much taller than factory and fix any concerns that LVVTA have with the installation. It has been a long and tedious process, however we are getting there slowly and hopefully we should be able to get it through and road legal.

On the Fraser front, great progress has been made on two new builds by our customers, David has nearly finished fitting the suspension and Wayne is just getting into it. You can follow their progress and our builds on “the pit”

https://thepit.fraser.co.nz/

Sue and Ian have their Fraser in the shop at the moment sorting out a few little brake issues and getting a good once over to make sure everything is shipshape before they embark on the upcoming Zig Zag tour. We noticed the car was not braking as well as it should and the fix was relatively simple, some different compound brake pads and some adjustments to the brake bias. As Frasers are all so individual, it is not uncommon for customers to just put up with things the way they are as they have no idea how much better they could be. We are always happy to assess your cars performance and offer any advice as to things that can be improved, you never know, a simple thing could make a big improvement!