March has been a very productive month on the Marcos. The vehicle undersides, wheel wells, boot floor and front radiator areas have all been painted glossy black using POR15 – a hard-wearing paint that sticks tenaciously to fibreglass, hair and skin and cannot be removed with any type of solvent once dry (I needed a hair cut anyway!). With everything now painted, the assembly side of things began by feeding the hard brake and fuel lines through the left hand side sill. The right side will contain the battery cabling and wiring loom, but that’s a way off yet. The pedal box was fitted up under the dash and both master cylinders installed with new bundy tubing bent up and fitted into place.
The rear subframe was built up using rebushed trailing arms, adjustable suspension mounts, new brake components and shockers. It was then raised up into position under the car using a pair of trolley jacks, and bolted through the body onto the internal roll cage structure. It took a bit of fiddling to get it all to mate up, but now that it’s in, the rear of the car can now ride on its own wheels again.
After stripping down 2 Cooper S, 4-synco gearboxes in the hope of finding enough salvageable parts to make one good one, I was still in need of useable or unworn second and third gears. Luckily, I found a reasonably priced, new-old-stock third gear at a local parts supplier, but the second gear was harder to source and eventually came from the Netherlands at three times the price of the local third gear! Four new syncros, a new layshaft, new bearings and bushes were also fitted together with a new 3.1:1 final drive and cross-pin diff centre. Along the way I also managed to strip three gearbox casing threads, one for the mainshaft bearing retainer and two where the diff output shaft cover plates bolt up. The bearing retainer one I simply enlarged from 5/16 UNC to 3/8 UNC whilst the other two were treated to Helicoils. Another problem was with the 3.1:1 finial drive pinion – it’s physically larger in diameter than the standard 3.4:1 pinion and requires the mainshaft bearing retainer to be relieved or machined to enable it to fit over the pinion before fitting into place against the bearing.
I’m a sucker for bling, so the new polished alloy, flip-top petrol cap is in position, as is the alloy radiator expansion tank and aftermarket alloy engine steady bar. All very pretty stuff.
The next stage is to complete the Cooper S engine strip down (now that the bench is free of gearbox components) and measure it all up to see if I can get away without a rebore, new pistons or a crank grind. Once again there’s two or three motors that could be used as parts donors, but I’d prefer to keep them intact if possible.
Mini Marcos GT 