gemellocattivo.com

'But man, it's a lot of work', says the man who welded up a block simply to fit two cylinder heads that weren't meant to go on there...

Thanks for the interesting link - I'll go through it in the morning - I'm off to bed now (it's half-midnight here) as I just got in from having an up close and personal 'discussion' with a fox that had been killing chickens every day for the last week.

My point was that at some point along the way all you really have is left is the title. You see a lot of race cars over here that kind of resemble something that came from a factory but none of the parts remain..like that subaru. He built that pretty fast by working a lot of long nights and it has a coolness to it but its not a subaru 360 and I just worry a bit about how much your Dino will still actually be a Dino? Wider, longer, custom frame....maybe easier and better to just start from scratch with a tube chassis and carbonfiber body?

I agree - the project could go in so many different directions that I need to work out what the possibilities are and then set them out in black and white. Which is, of course, exactly why I'm talking about it here. By laying out my thoughts and then hearing what other people think it challenges me to justify (mostly to myself) what it is that I'm trying to do, and why!

It's easy to end up in a spiral of escalation my engine being an example.

If a modern engine mounted longitudinal is a requirement then it's going to be easier and better to (mostly) scratch build the car.

It using the car body is a requirement then you want a 308/328 based engine/trans.

Other paths are possible but......

My brain is doing the equivalent of chasing its own tail over this at the moment... I've got a holiday abroad coming up soon, so I'll have a chance to think it through from afar then - I can always look at stuff with more clarity when I haven't got the contents of the garage staring me in the face!

Once you get it dug out and can sit in it and really see/remember how not big a car it is then what is viable will be more apparent.

Repairing what you have is not trivial but building all or a lot of new is probably 10x the work. A custom rolling chassis with cage is probably 200-1000 hours depending what you do for suspension and how light you want it.

A custom body...you're probably starting at 1000hrs.

.....hence the the desire to use as much as possible for the original car

Agreed 100%!

Well, the project is still heading the way I was expecting (that is, slowly!). Since I don't have the funds to dive straight into it, I have to sell some stuff first - this will have the added benefit of freeing up some room too. The main item (a VW T25 Transporter that I somehow ended up with) won't generate much in the way of finances, but it is eating valuable space so it needs to go. Unfortunately, it's had myriad little issues that needed tidying up, so it's swallowed a lot of my attention recently.

I have, however, managed to get a lot more done to the garage too. Some 20+ years ago, I did a lot of work on it, including adding a pair of concrete block towers that almost reached the ceiling - these then carried a large steel girder which was intended to carry a rolling overhead gantry (i.e. something to lift engines with). Along with this, I added lots of thermal insulation in an attempt to keep the place useable during the winter.

I had a builder working on the house at the time, and decided that as I had to go off on business for a few days, I'd get him to add the cladding over the insulation so that the work wouldn't stall while I was away. I don't know what you call the boards in the USA, but here in the UK we call them Sterling boards - they're a sort of cheaper version of plywood. Anyway - he misunderstood my instructions, and when I got back I found that he'd used the girder to carry two wooden joists (beams), onto which he'd then fixed everything else. In other words, all the time, effort and money that I'd put in to installing the overhead gantry were wasted as the rolling gantry no longer fitted.

For over two decades I growled every time I went in the garage and looked up. Since I've done so much out there this year, however, I decided to get angry with it and fix the problem. In essence, I engineered and fitted some super heavy duty cantilevered joist-hangers and then cut away the offending parts of the boards so that there was sufficient room for the rolling gantry to move. It doesn't sound like there was much to do, but it took me about three weeks of hard work.

Still - it's done now, albeit it that I still need to blast some expanding foam into the narrow slot above the girder so that I don't get a blast of cold air coming in immediately above where I'll be working. The complication is that there's a Land Rover parked underneath which doesn't currently run, so I need to shift that before coating myself and everything within reach in nasty, sticky goo.

But - I have to say that being able to out there and not quietly simmer with rage is truly marvellous!

On a different note - I've been trying to assess the value of all the Dino parts that I won't be using. I'd be interested to hear what people think a complete (but stripped) 246 engine/transmission would be worth? There was one sold recently, but I can't find anything to indicate what it went for.

Looking at the other parts - many years ago, I bought a front and rear 'clip' - in other words the front and back halves of a bodyshell. They remain new and unused, and fortunately seem to have appreciated a lot in value, so it looks as though it'd be worth selling them and instead repair the original bodywork. I'd sort of come to the conclusion that it would be more sensible to do this anyway, as the wheel arches need to be flared to cover the bigger wheels/wider track, and it would be a real shame to hack the new ones around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkP_RYkUW2U

Interesting garage Paddy!