Welcome to another edition of things that keep us busy in the Fraser Factory, this month has been another strong one for us which means good progress on some of our projects.
Stephen’s fire breathing Fraser is now trimmed, road tested and all ready for its final LV inspection this Friday. All things going well we should be able to hand it over in a month or so but talking to Stephen, I get the feeling this car might be an ongoing evolution but it will be great to see it finally road legal.
Geoff’s BMW 2002 Restomod has had the new bonnet latching mechanism design fabricated and fitted. Little fiddly jobs like this aren’t what you think about when you look at a custom car but they are what set it apart from the rest. In this case it required fabricating cartridges that mount inside the upper chassis rails which hold the latch, the locator block, the electric release solenoid and the emergency release cable. Then, mount a plate to the bonnet to hold the other half of the locator block and the D. Then repeat the process for the other side of the car. Sounds simple enough… the hard part is getting all these moving parts to engage at the right time and in the right place. I’m pretty sure this took a few years off Bruce’s life, but he persevered and got it done! In the background a huge amount of design has gone into the bodykit which is one of the next jobs on the list to attack. We will be fabricating this entirely out of steel soon so watch this space!
Ida is especially excited about this project as a fellow Karmann Ghia owner, however in true Fraser style we are fitting a Subaru engine to Denzil’s 1972 model. As these car were originally air cooled, one of the first considerations is how to install a liquid cooling system into a body that was never designed to have one. We opted to replace the spare wheel, which mounts in the front of the car with a radiator and then run all the cooling pipes etc down the inside of the centre tunnel. The radiator has now been mounted and the body has been lifted off the chassis to allow us access to the front of the tunnel. Next up will be fabricating the cooling pipes, brake lines, clutch line, fuel lines into a nice package and feed them into place so we can drop the body back down into place.
Jack’s Mercedes G wagon is getting close to completion but we have just discovered a bit of an issue inside the front diff. We were trying to remedy a bit of a leak but have come across further issues including run bearings and damage to the axles. Unfortunately being a bit of a rare beast, getting parts can be a bit of a slow process so we might be on hold for a while until we can locate replacement. So close but so far!
