GavinR's Scimitar Historic Rally Car

[andygb]

Re: GavinR's Scimitar Historic Rally Car

Nice to see something different, I am in the process of building a rapier H120 for the northern nescro series and the rally of the tests later in the year, i always marvel at peoples fabrication and welding skills I have to rely on others to do mine !

[Graham]

Re: GavinR's Scimitar Historic Rally Car

another good result and great write up gavin, well done

[GavinR]

Re: GavinR's Scimitar Historic Rally Car

Pictures of us enjoying ourselves

[mexicotait]

Re: GavinR's Scimitar Historic Rally Car

Hi gavin

Where did you get you uprated brake shoes from ?

[GavinR]

Re: GavinR's Scimitar Historic Rally Car

Hi gavin

Where did you get you uprated brake shoes from ?

Hi,

They were TR6 ones from Cambridge Motorsport

Thanks

[GavinR]

Re: GavinR's Scimitar Historic Rally Car

2013 Update

Ross Traders Historic
After a great result on the East Anglian, I was looking forward to the next event, the Ross Traders.
Unfortunately a mixup with the dates meant George was on holiday so after a few phone calls I found another navigator, Worth Birkhill.

He is a successful driver on Historics in his Mini, having won the Ross Traders 3 times, but his car was not ready so decided to navigate instead.
The event started in the Forest of Dean with a short test on a forest track with a lot of tight slaloms to slow everyone down before we headed out on the first Regularity. We had already been given the route for this one, but an early wrong slot caused a bit of panic and we were rather late at the first control. After that things improved, Worth was doing well keeping me at the correct speeds, but another wrong slot near the end saw another minute dropped. Back to the forest, we did the first test in the reverse direction, it went well but I have trouble getting the Scimitar through the cones as quickly as the smaller cars. At the end of this Test we were 16th overall out of the 50 starters.

The second Regularity was a short one and went very well, we only dropped 8s over 4 controls. This took us to Chepstow Racecourse for 3 tests, some on tarmac in the car park and some on gravel on the infield. A third Regularity, a short loop, saw us have to stop and look at the map a couple of times at tricky junctions and we dropped some more time. Back at Chepstow for 2 more tests similar to the previous ones before the lunch halt. By now we had moved up slightly to 11th.

The afternoon was made up of 10 more tests and a harder Regularity - this went well until another tricky section where we had to stop and work out where to go so dropped quite a bit. Surprisingly at the afternoon halt we found we had moved up to 7th as other crews had bigger problems!

The final section was the sting in the tale, a 2 hour long Regularity covering 50 miles with 14 controls to finish in Ross-on-Wye for a buffet. We had been given some of the route earlier on so this was plotted on the maps but we were given the rest of the navigation as we left Chepstow. Worth then had the very difficult task of navigating me on the route he'd already plotted, keeping an eye on the time, distance and speed and trying to plot the extra navigation. I tried to help by remembering some of the route and keeping roughly to the time schedule and it all worked for the first 20 or so miles, but I was gradually catching up to where Worth had plotted and eventually we had to pull over. There were some forms of navigation that Worth hadn't seen and it is difficult to explain whilst keeping an eye on the road and driving at a steady speed! Having stopped, I plotted the rest of the route as quickly as I could and we set off again but had dropped 5 minutes here. The organisers had also put a trick at the end - a simple map reference to define a layby which needed visiting halfway through the 50 miles, but it was at the bottom of the sheet so by the time we saw it we had gone past the layby and it was too late to go back, resulting in a 10 minute penalty. I did complain to the organisers about this as I thought it was a bit harsh and was liable to put off some crews from doing the event in the future (33 out of the 50 crews were caught out by this), but the organisers were less than sympathetic...

After all this, we had dropped to 14th but got 3rd in Class. Many thanks to Worth who did very well, not having navigated much before, the only problems we had were due to difficult navigation, his timing was very good. We were 15th on the Regularities and 10th on the Tests, our best time was 5th quickest in the Car Park at Chepstow.

National Weekend
My next outing was to the RSSOC (Scimitar Owners Club) National weekend at Curborough. I hadn't been before to the National Weekend before so wasn't too sure what to expect and could only come up for one day so decided to go on the Saturday and I entered the Autotest the month before. To cut a long story short, I enjoyed a good thrash round the Autotest course but was disappointed by the standard of organisation.

Despite entering before the event, I hadn't seen any regs and it was only when I signed on that I was asked who my navigator was...
Navigators/passengers are not allowed on an Autotest but are required on a Production Car Autotest - all the documentation said the event was an Autotest. However a quick call to a Scimitar friend Jim who was there with his family for the weekend as he is every year, and he volunteered his son DJ to navigate so I was sorted.

I span on the first attempt at Test 1 but my second go was a lot better. Next was Test 2 and I got confused by the instructions (it was different to any Autotest I'd done before) and went through the same gate twice getting a 10s penalty. After chatting to DJ I knew what to do on the second run, but there was no second run, we just had one run at Test 3. There was a large entry so I wasn't too surprised we only got 4 runs, but as most of you know, you always have a minimum of 2 runs at each test and the fastest time counts, it's defined Blue Book and was stated in the event regulations as well, but it didn't happen on this event

Anyway, after the Autotest I bought some parts, looked at some of the other Scimitars and then went to see Jim who invited me to join their party for Christmas dinner which was excellent and I was very grateful to be included (the theme for the weekend was Christmas). Later I headed to the marquee as the schedule stated the Autotest results and awards would be given out Saturday night, this schedule was enlarged and posted by the door to the marquee. A few minutes past the allotted time I asked the RSSOC Chairman Kevin Cooper what was happening and he said it was a mistake and as happens every year they would be given out Sunday evening and he couldn't tell me when the results would be out, so I headed home.

I expected a bit more from a large club such as the RSSOC - if you're going to charge £25 for an MSA Autotest, at least have the decency to run it properly...............................

On a final note, when I saw Jim a few months ago he presented me with my award for 2nd GTE, a 'Sword on a Board', which is now on the mantlepiece, and I finally saw the results in Slice at the beginning of December.

2014
I have a few winter jobs to do on the Scimitar, change the coolant hoses to silicone, swap the 3.77 CWP for a 4.55 CWP out of a 2.4 Jag, either fit the spare gearbox or fix the current one where the overdrive has a mind of it's own and it's leaking a lot of oil, and hopefully paint her a bit better than I did last time!

Plans are similar to last year - it looks like my first event will be the East Anglian in June - George has recently started a new job and is very busy until the end of May.

[Graham]

Re: GavinR's Scimitar Historic Rally Car

well done, and great read as always gav

[alladdin]

Re: GavinR's Scimitar Historic Rally Car

well done, and great read as always gav

X 2

i think i had (still have somewhere !) a novice pot from the ross traders circa 1985

no, thinking back it was the hereford hospital rally, started in ross

[GavinR]

Re: GavinR's Scimitar Historic Rally Car

I've now entered the East Anglian Classic, which runs on Sat 21st June 2014, so time to get her ready for this year's events

I'd never been happy with my previous aerosol paint job, so this time I wanted to try and do a better job

First, I had to clear some space in the workshop by stacking 2 cars at the back...


Then partition it with a large tarp to try and stop the dust getting everywhere


I started sanding down and investigated a crack in the front wing which has been there for a while, and the wing has bulged out. The inner wing has come away from the outer wing and underneath I could see where the fibreglass had separated, and it didn't take much force to push it back to where it should be, so I rigged up the portapower to hold everything in place while I added more fibreglass mat to reinforce the inner and outer wing joint


Left it a couple of days to set and it stayed in shape after releasing the hydraulics It's a fraction further in than required so I can build it back with a little filler


The roof is probably the worst area with hundreds of blisters, so I spent 2 days sanding through the top coats to get back to the factory green primer, or so I thought. Only the front section to the b-pillars had this green primer on it, everything else was a mixture of fillers under a few layers of red paint and other primer. Curiously the roof above the green primer was pretty good with most of the blisters over the filler. Presumably it didn't come out of the mould too well, so Reliant had to skim the roof with filler before painting it Anyway, it's a lot smoother now and just needs a bit of filler in a couple of places where I've reached the fibreglass


Plenty more to do on the rest of the body, mainly around the front where I believe she has been repaired previously, but I won't need to sand all the paint off like the roof, just add some more filler

[alladdin]

Re: GavinR's Scimitar Historic Rally Car

fussy git

[GavinR]

Re: GavinR's Scimitar Historic Rally Car

It's when you line up at the start and the other 40 cars are a lot shinier than mine, so I'm going for a 10 yard paintjob not the current 50 yard one

Now what were you saying about high build primer, I've got 10 litres here, hopefully that will be enough...

[GavinR]

Re: GavinR's Scimitar Historic Rally Car

Well she's now redder than before...

More sanding





Lots of filler and many hours sanding I was happy enough, then complete disaster when I put the first coat of cellulose primer on as it reacted with one of the previous coats of paint. The roof was fine as I'd gone back through the previous coats but on the front, sides, doors, bonnet, etc, where I had only sanded the bads bits, there was lots of crazing in the primer. I don't have time to start again, so after reading about similar problems on the internet, I went to Halfords and bought 5 x 500ml aerosols of their grey primer (which is acrylic so seems to cover anything) and used up 4 of them to cover the crazing, which worked but obviously the crazing can be seen through the halfords primer



4 top coats of Radiant Red, some bits have come out shinier than others (it was difficult to see while spraying, I could have done with an extraction fan or two!)



Crazing effect



Did the headlight surrounds and bonnet as well





Just got to bolt everything back on ready for Saturday's rally...

[mexicotait]

Re: GavinR's Scimitar Historic Rally Car

Thats bright
Shows how much the original had faded

[GavinR]

Re: GavinR's Scimitar Historic Rally Car

I think the previous colour was similar to the original Reliant but I wanted something brighter so went for Ford Radiant Red

[alladdin]

Re: GavinR's Scimitar Historic Rally Car

never good to be prepping / painting to a deadline its too unpredictable for us amateurs.

its looking better tho and you always notice less imperfections once its all fitted up