McArlus Cars

For some time now Simon Wells (as opposed to Simon Wills) has been building an orange Group A type sports car (McArlus), taking lots of photos along the way and sending the story out bit by bit to his friends. This has been happening for a while now, and there's lots of interesting material here. It would be a bit tricky going back to the start, there'd be volumes, but I'll go back over the last month because it's getting interesting.

This is the second car, the previous one, a yellow car now owned by Kenny Rowland is getting the occasional update, drawing on the experience gained along the way with the new one. I see in results on the internet that this car is posting really good times in Victorian sprint meetings.

Anyway, here's the first instalment and I'll include these two photos because they are of the yellow car's engine bay. I'll include the orange car's photos shortly so read the text and remember the photos are to follow.

A major milestone took place a week or so ago when I actually had the chassis sit on its’ wheels for the first time!

Finally I was ready to have extractors made, which required sending the car away as a rolling chassis with the rear bodywork fitted and the engine and some other items that would be critical to exhaust clearance. I fitted the front body panel too, since it seemed as good a place as any to store it, and of course I wanted to see how it looked!

I even got the chance to “drive” it up my driveway, with Sarah towing me of course! I think I will have to change the home made chipboard mota- lita steering wheel though!

I’m really pleased with the results. The lower and wider rollbar looks much more in keeping with the car and all of the work on the body has really nicely tidied up the areas around the engine bay and rollbar, giving the whole body a much more complete and professional look. In the rear pictures there is a section of body missing as it requires the air cleaner to be removed and there was no need for it to be there for the exhaust to be made.

The work underneath has paid great dividends as well.

The whole body tilts up and done easily and smoothly without twisting or binding, without the underbody support, the first, yellow car is a real wrestle to open and close the body work, and the as the pictures show, the fit is less than satisfactory.

Sitting the doors in place was nice too. The gaps are still the 1mm of the grinder blade from when the body was cut, so clearly it has been will worth getting as much of the fitting as possible, including making the hinging brackets and alignment pins done, before the body was cut up.

When the car comes back I need to finish drilling my aluminium panels, as well as make two more for my car and then the chassis will be ready to paint! I am already painting a lot of the removable parts while the chassis is away. Once that’s done a lot of the assembly can take place!

There are still a million things to be done, but who would have ever believed that this project might finally come to an end!

Regards

Simon