So, why am I doing this?

This post should also possibly be titled:

extra organs when i need them

  • a potted history of Fury ownership,
  • hillclimbing
  • chopping off a finger end
  • hill climbing and crashing
  • rebuilding
  • mothballing
  • kids
  • what the hell happened to my powdercoat?

To introduce my car to you, I originally nailed my Fury together and put it on the road about nine years ago, when it was Fisher Sportscars, no less.

It wasn’t an easy build, mainly down to the not so great instruction manual; the lack of quality photo resources; my expectation that things would just fit and a level of caution that meant I wanted to take it carefully. This was compounded by working away and having two kids who also took up time. It happens to us all.

Over the course of the years, I’ve found that the powder coat has started to peel off in many places, some in odd places, some in expected places, and some places not quite so accessible to an enterprising gentleman with a tin of Hammerite and a liking for solvent fumes. Generally I’ve bodged over the rust but the time has come to fix this once and for all and return the chassis to as-new condition.

As well as the car shedding it’s powder coat like a dog scratching fleas, there have been other things that have affected the condition of the car such as and crashing it at Harewood. I did this at a while ago and used it as an excuse to make some modifications. These repairs, the mods and future opportunities for modification will be described as you go through the blog. Some will be video, and some will be old fashioned words and pictures.

Wind the clock forward three years from the crash and my road car went back to the lease company (270 BHP Saab convertible). This meant having to get a new family box. Things took a positive turn when H (my wife) suggested rather than take on a new lease car, why don’t I spend the money refurbing my Fury and get a more sensible family car. Who would turn down an opportunity like that?

So, the cunning plan is a full chassis-off strip, re-powder coating, weld, build, fabricate, strengthen, engine swap, rebuild and a few choice modifications on the way. And to add some new bits.

Welcome on board.

with old hoops comes great liability

So, Simon (Cornering Force) and I have been mulling over my roll-over hoops, and there are concerns about the design. The main one being, if I did end up on my lid going the wrong way then I have a couple of problems:
1) they aren’t high enough to give 5cm clearance for my helmet
2) if i’m going backwards, i stand a chance of them ripping off. This is bad. Brief, but bad.

So, we’re going to bend up some roll-cage tubing to go in behind the seats all the way down to the floor, securing onto the mcpherson strut turrets, cross braced and then with a demountable forward bar to the passenger footwell so for track days I’ll have extra bracing to stop stuff ripping off and squishing my head.

Corner Weights

As part of the work necessary to design and fabricate my ant-roll bars (which I think will be a thing of beauty in twisted metal form), Simon and Mike from Cornering Force came around to take the corner weights. They had to do this on my pair of scissor lifts which shows they are game for anything.

Following is the breakdown of the corner weights, including the driver. It is a wet weighting, and the weights are reasonably well placed with a little bias to the right. This isn’t going to be very easy to change, but most UK circuits have a predominately right-handed bias, so I’ll cling to that as a benefit.

It’s going to be very interesting to see how the weights change once I’ve finished the build.

Proposed weight loss

So, I’ve been thinking of all the ways of getting weight out of the build, bearing in mind I am going down to a full-chassis rebuild. I also mined the excellent locostbuilders.co.uk site with this thread, which had some excellent advice.

What Approximate Weight Description
Duratec Swap 45 The pinto is heavy
Lighter Seats 5 (x2) My padded seats are heavy, but changing them may have to wait for funds/td>
lighter shocks 2 needs new shocks anyway