A little project finally finished.

[HEYzipupyourfly]

I wanted to share a build I've been a part of for the last few years, I think i shared some pictures once before but per request of the owners we wanted to keep exposure to a minimum during the build because the car was thought to had been scrapped after a wreck in 1969. where in reality it was parked in a garage till a few years ago when we rolled her out onto the trailer.  finally got the website up and running, its a very extensive website that has a lot of information and history. A lot of the parts had to be re cast and machined or just built from scratch like the roll bar and little things all the way down to the fuel cap. So if you find some time take a look and enjoy.

http://www.longlostcooper.com/

[Axle]

that is an amazing restoration Tony!

[Ian]

Is this the car that was at the shop where we swapped over the beadlocks in marblehead?

[HEYzipupyourfly]

no ian, Same owner though, he owns two Formula 5000 cars, that one you saw was the mckee which he hill climbs. Same era but tube frame rather than tubbed like the cooper. recently crashed the mckee pretty bad. thats now at the shop being brought back to factory, similar as we did with the cooper.

[Ian]

no ian, Same owner though, he owns two Formula 5000 cars, that one you saw was the mckee which he hill climbs. Same era but tube frame rather than tubbed like the cooper. recently crashed the mckee pretty bad. thats now at the shop being brought back to factory, similar as we did with the cooper.

they are all pretty cool cars

[SPYDER]

that's a work of art....great job

[HEYzipupyourfly]

thanks, knew you guys could appreciate this, thats why i shared. i know i posted some stuff up before of it because its been a long on going project spread over the years. But now that the websites up and the profesional pictures we had taken are up, it really shows a lot more than i ever could write.

A few cool little bits about the assembly of the car. Some of it is shown in the pictures but not fully described, but hundreds of rivets were replaced when we re-skinned the rear section as well as the firewall and other sheet metal parts. All the rivets were bought to match the same size heads that were originally in place. Even the larger and odd sized rivets we turned down on the lathe to match what was there.

Almost all of the rivets replaced were all buck style and one tiny slip of the gun would have led to a big problem. The boss And i actually practiced for quite a while before tackleing it on the real thing. it was a painful process getting inside those tight spots with the bucks.
Not nearly as painful as it was getting those fuel cells up and around the shift linkage. inside those pods. There are two oval access holes on the side of the pods that the cells get installed through. And believe it or not the fuel cells are full size of the interior dimensions of the two side pods AND foam filled.

Another cool part of the project was the front and rear uprights which were originally magnesium but we had them casted out of alum. I did all of the machining for the bearing races, brake calipers, upper and lower arm mounts in the bare castings. had to jig each one up separately.

The wheels were also magnesium and were cleaned up for show use but we had aluminum wheels made for track days because magnesium; while it looks good on the outside has a tendency to corrode and break down on the interior way before it ever shows real signs of weakness. kind of like me.
The headers are the original hand bend headers from 1969. bent by filling with sand and caping the ends, heating hammering and stretching. thats how they did it then. Nowadays its only us off road hacks that do crazy stuff like that; and the english, because they do everything the hard way anyways.

Also Jay at wicked sticky did a great job with re-creating the graphics for this car.