VA969 Mike's Early Sprint Restoration.

[sprint95m]

Excellent Mike.
Now the real fun begins.

I have greatly admired your dedication and hope this is rewarded with further enjoyment of your car for a long time
to come.
Next week sometime I'll read this thread again from start to finish.
You'll feel you have so much time on your hands?

[hutch76]

Well done Mike! Bet your grin was a mile wide on the first drive?

Thank goodness Mart and others are still building away, as I thoroughly enjoy the build up threads more than anything.

[Mad Mart]

Well done Mike, it looks fantastic. You've had all the fun restoring it so hopefully more fun to come driving it.

[Jon Tilson]

Such great news after a long and hard road. Well done and hope you have some great drives ahead of you.

Jonners

[ToledoZombie]

Mike, i am in absolute awe! You have done a fantastic job on this. The likes of you and Mart on this forum are truly inspiring!
I shall be reading this whole thread again from the start as its utterly brilliant.
I just hope my own project may turn out half as good. Well done!

[tinweevil]

Congratulations Mike, superb dedication.

Whats the thinking behind running a new camshaft at 2K rpm on startup?

Arghh, there's an excellent site by someone in the UK who build Ford engines, his speciality being gas flowing heads. He has a number of very informative articles on his site and bedding in cams is one of them. It'll come back in a day or two or Lewis might beat me to it. Basically although the temperatures in an engine are very low compared to the melting point of steel by running the cam moderately hard you get a work hardening effect on the new metal. If you ran it briefly you'd tend towards an annealing (softening) effect.

[TahitiSPRINT]

Congratulations Mike, very impressive!

It's a beauty

Cheers,

[Reg]

Mike, I salute you sir.. The car looks fantastic..congratulations to you. =D> This thread has been one of the best i've ever read, thank you for sharing your highs and lows with us all in cyberspace. To cap it all, some fab photo's of a lovely car in my mostest favourite place in the whole wide world..the Lake district. It's a place that I need to go to at least once a year to re-boot and re-charge my mind.

[TinDog]

I can hardly believe that it has been over 2 and a half years this you started this thread, Mike, but I can bet there are times when you have felt it was much longer.

What can I say......??

I have never been a particularly wordy person and TBH I am struggling to put something in to words that would be a worthy comment to describe this car. Words like "stunning", "awesome" or "unbelievable" hardly seem to scratch the surface.

Surely VA969 has now got to be considered, with no disrepect to other Sprint owners, the best restored Sprint in existance. The attention to detail throughout the build and your determination to keep the specifications as built (typified by discussions regarding the correct colour for the gearbox cover and the removal of the brand new freshly installed cooper brake pipes) are, for me, the things that made this restoration stand out from others we have seen in the forum.

I hope that you will enjoy the fruit of your labours for a long time to come.

[JPB]

correct washer pump

A quick look at the July 1973 parts book suggests that any of the following three types could have been fitted to your lovely vision of yellowness as original equipment, excuse the photos, this was a quicker way to produce images than repairing a scanner that didn't want to play tonight:



I noticed that you mentioned in the washer pump thread that you've non-working examples of the one with the motor that runs under water, like mine.
I had to rewind the motor in mine a while ago, it was a fiddly job, but a suitable (very long...) length of lacquered wire was cheaper than buying a new unit from Kit Car Supplies and then the break was only a couple of inches from one end so I'd have got away with simply shortening the wire and reattaching afterwards. It's a fiddly task, but not hard to do and as long as you're careful to seal the motor up after the repair, will last. New brushes for mine are the carbon wipers from a couple of scrap volume pots harvested from old radio sets.

[mbellinger]

Absolutely wonderful Mike, and a credit to your determination and attention to detail.

I hope the drive was not anti-climatic (I know so many people who have nut-and-bolt restored cars over the years and then said that).

A wonderful outcome and a car that truly stands out, even among its peers. Whatever else you do, please enjoy it.

[straylight]

This thread won't close here; I need to fit carpets and there's some snagging (door hanging, rear plate light wires, quarter light action, window sliders, correct washer pump. wire jubilee clips etc.etc.) and tuning to do so more to come yet.

5 hours each for those.



the pics are fantastic.

stu

[sprint95m]

I may well have a repairable washer pump of the correct spec.............
will look and see for Monday.

[DoloWIGHTY]

Absolutely wonderful Mike, and a credit to your determination and attention to detail.

Hear, hear. Well said.

This car and it's owner are true ambassadors for the marque, hopefully whoever sees the car will be inspired by it.

[matienzo]

Scout Scar seems a very appropriate place for 969's first photoshoot! It would be really nice to get a few cars lined up along that edge!