RESTORATION OF A DB4GT BACK TO ORIGINAL CONDITION AND A PEBBLE BEACH WIN

Transcription

1 Reprinted from The Vantage Point Magazine of AMOC North America Fall 2007/Winter RESURRECTION! RESTORATION OF A DB4GT BACK TO ORIGINAL CONDITION AND A PEBBLE BEACH WIN Part 1 of 2 By Bjorn Nordemo & Nick Candee The GT was no longer a race car, and with the modifications it was no longer a concours car it was somewhere in the middle, reflected Chris Greendale to Nick Candee. Greendale had asked Candee for two years to sell him the Aston. Candee had extensively raced the GT over his 17 years of ownership , and had installed a roll bar, fuel cell, Halon fire system, the AM Racing Services suspension including telescopic shock absorbers (with which the DB4 was homologated in the 1960s) and other safety devices. Over those years, the GT competed in vintage races at many venues, and also won the inaugural New England Tour Greendale acquired the GT in mid 1999 and sent it to London where it was fitted with several modifications including wide fender flares, a huge oil cooler,weber 50 DCOEs on the motor, while retaining the competition suspension. The Halon fire system was replaced with a powder extinguishing system. The paint was redone with a distinctive medium metallic green and the regular seats were recovered in an unusual pumpkin color leather. After a couple of years, GT130/L was sold on to a gentleman in McLean, VA, who had it refinished silver. It is not clear whether the Aston participated in any road events. Roberto Quiroz of Houston (and Monterrey, N.L. Mexico) acquired the GT at the end of 2006 and asked Sports Leicht Restorations of Pinehurst, NC to return the GT to original condition the essence of restoration. As one might expect for a business branded SLR, their fame is for the Mercedes Benz roadsters of the 1950s and 1960s ( President Bjorn Nordemo began researching original elements of the GT, and worked with Aston Martin of New England and Richard Williams as Heritage specialists. Photos by Bjorn Nordemo

2 For Nick Candee at AM of New England, it was a pleasant development to work with his colleague Kirk McNeil in supplying SLR with parts and perspective on the project. Credits also to Steel Wings and to Bob Millstein s company Briarcliff Motors. After considering returning the GT to its original Fiesta Red paint, Quiroz decided to explore other period-correct colors for the Aston. AMNE was commissioned to document just what colors GTs were painted in the era. Quiroz chose Black Pearl paint, with Red trim a handsome combination. SLR returned the suspension to its original lever-shock configuration, and returned the thin gage aluminum body to the normal dimensions for the rear flanks.the brightwork was renewed or replaced. Quiroz was also keen to obtain information on the DB4GT, and the companion documents went beyond a copy of the Factory Build Sheet. ON THE LAWN AT PEBBLE: Several observers expressed amazement that the restoration was completed in a mere seven months! The Quiroz DB4GT took 2nd in Class, a remarkable result and not a bad testimony to the skills of SLR.The Peter Livanos DB3S/9 took 1st place, reportedly tied in points with the GT, but with an edge in its race history which included 2nd overall, 1st in class at Le Mans 1956, Moss & Collins at the helm. From the second week of January 2007 when SLR first saw the GT, until completion on 6 August 2007, the firm labored to complete a ground-up restoration. This is the overview; details will follow in the second installment.

3 Reprinted from The Vantage Point Magazine of AMOC North America Fall 2007/Winter RESURRECTION! DB4GT: BACK TO ORIGINAL CONDITION AND A PEBBLE BEACH WIN! Part 2 of 2 By Bjorn Nordemo January 2007 My client calls and tells me he just purchased a 1960 DB4GT and is having it shipped to my shop. Can we have it ready for Pebble Beach, he asks? Having spent over 12 years restoring cars to Best of Show winners I think: why not? How hard could it be? What is the condition of the car I ask? 95 points I am told, and the pictures confirmed it. NICE CAR! So we agree: let s do it. Reality sets in! The car arrives and it is indeed a beauty, but wait a minute, where is this car going? Pebble Beach? How will it be judged? What class will it be in? OH NO! It is a vintage racer, highly modified during the 80s and 90s. Is there such a class? Alas no, only original as it came off the assembly line, or as raced during the first ten years of its life. In spite of, or maybe because of, winning the speed record for class D at the 1961 Bonneville Salt Flats time trials, fresh off the showroom floor, the only choice is back to original. The fun begins Never having worked on an Aston Martin of any kind, never mind one of only 30 left hand drive DB4GTs in the world, what does original mean? We knew that the Halon fire suppression system, the electronic ignition, the roll bar, the fuel cell etc. did not come from the factory. What else and how to find out became the most important question. Former owner and The Vantage Point editor Nick Candee was very helpful with records, photos and research, but more was needed. My head mechanic John Whitlow and I packed our bags and headed for England to meet with Richard Williams, world renowned Aston Martin restorer. As we toured the RS Williams facility and were able to see, Photos by Bjorn Nordemo touch and photograph numerous examples of the DB4GT it became clear that we needed a lot of parts to bring the old girl back. Richard was kind enough to allow us to rummage through his barn in search of missing parts. WOW that experience alone was worth the trip, never mind all the parts we acquired. With volumes of knowledge, hundreds of photographs and tons of parts we headed home. Just plain hard work! Before we left for England, the car had been totally disassembled and body reshaping had begun. The body flanks had to be flattened, the nose reworked to be level, the grill opening reshaped to fit the grill shell, the fender lines moved to sit level and a Can we have it ready for Pebble Beach, he asks? Having spent over 12 years restoring cars to Best of Show winners I think: why not? How hard could it be?

4 new trunk floor and brace fabricated.who ever had done the last rework just riveted in a flat piece of aluminum as the trunk floor.while all of the body work was being done, the rest of the shop was busy with electrical, mechanical and interior issues. Thank God for old contacts and the Internet. The bumpers we had were pretty beat up and wrong.the new ones we ordered had been replaced by a newer version. Out came the cutters and welding equipment to make modifications to the new bumpers prior to chroming.windows are scratched, are there any new ones? NO. So we have them made to order. Wiring harness, made to order. Carburetors, they can t just be ordered, they don t exist. Had to search the world to find DCOE 45-4s and then they had to be rebuilt. Distributors were even more fun. handmade out of the various materials and polished.what a job this turned out to be. We needed an original radiator, oil cooler, exhaust system, hoses, clamps, air tubes, a three wire windshield washer bottle. Sure glad this started as a 95 point car. I can t image the work we would have had to do otherwise. Choices! Are we all done? Let s see: what else do we need? Agh, wheels and tires. It turns out that while we had nine wheels and tires only four were the correct Borranis and no tires were correct.this should be simple: we will order a new 3511 record Borrani. Guess what? I received a new properly marked wheel. The only problem was that it did not look like the old original ones. The shape was different, the build structure was different and it was laced differently. After many they don t exist statements I found one in England that they thought was what I needed. Happily it turned out correct so I proceeded to have all five wheels rebuilt. For tires, my new friend Richard Williams came to the rescue with more items from We had them, but the internals were gone. Have you ever tried to find all the little parts that go into a distributor? How about two distributors? We were very thankful that Jaguar used the same ones on the XK150s, which made life a little easier but almost impossible none the less. One of the lessons learned was that since only 101 DB4GTs were made and all are accounted for, you cannot go to your local junkyard to find much of anything. Take for example moldings: there are stainless steel moldings, aluminum moldings and stamped moldings. None of these are available new. Luckily the material that the sill finishers were made of is still available as a Heritage part; all we had to do, ha ha, was fabricate them. The rest of the moldings had to be There aren t too many choices that can be made when going back to original with the exception of color.as long as you stay with color combinations that were available when the car was made they will be accepted at all car shows.toward this end I commissioned Nick Candee to prepare a list of all DB4GTs with the original color codes, both interior and exterior. With this information at hand along with leather swatches and sample paint chips my client and I spent considerable time going over the various possibilities until finally settling on , Black Pearl paint and Connolly 3086 Red leather with complementary Grey Wilton wool carpet trimmed in light grey leather. The headliner is a creamy white vinyl. Oh yes, this now meant that we had to completely rebuild the entire interior. Of course there are no kits available so once again we had to make patterns, cut and sew all the covers, panels, carpeting and miscellaneous pieces of leather and vinyl used to cover the interior. And, lest we forget, the steering wheel and license plates also have to be refurbished. the barn, five N.O.S./new old stock Avon Turbospeed tires. These are perfect for concours but I would not like to drive a lot on them. The rubber meets the road This is where it all goes together, final assembly. When you start to put things together you find out if it fits, does it line up, where are all those fasteners, why isn t something back from a subcontractor etc. Boy do the Fed-Ex and UPS bills start to mount up when you need everything yesterday and you don t even want to think about the overseas shipments. Time is critical and cannot be wasted. While the suspension systems are being installed, the seats are being built. While the engine is

5 being installed, the headliner gets installed. While all that takes place, the Perspex windows are being made and fitted. In the midst of all this, the wiring harness has to go in along with the heating system, the dash has to be assembled, covered and some of the instrumentation fitted before it can get installed.there is a gigantic orchestration of many skills that goes on much like a symphony. If one note is off the entire symphony is affected. Very much the same with assembly, if you use the wrong sequence you may have to start over. My deadline for the car to be finished so that we had time for testing was June 30th and all systems tested with car ready for shipping was July 31st. Deadlines approach My guys are good, but June 30th came and went without the car being ready for test. My biggest concern was sending the car to Pebble Beach with things that I knew were wrong but unable to do anything about them. One of those was the interior rear view mirror. A very special and unique mirror with a turn knob for day/night operation was not something found in your local junkyard, in fact I could not find it anywhere in the world no matter how many experts I spoke to. I even went so far as to ask to rent one without success. One day my mechanic was speaking to a friend of his in upstate New York and mentioned this mirror only to be told that the friend has an original in the original box. Needless to say we acquired it after some negotiating. It is funny how some things work out.well, June 15th came, and we had the car running. Not everything was installed but we could start testing all operational functions. This, as it always does, brings out the little things such a gap too wide, a piece of rubber misshaped, a minor imperfection in the paint, something not tightened securely, an item installed but not aligned or not working, such as a light bulb burned out. It is quite surprising how many things that were just rebuilt or replaced fail the first time you go to use them.we were unusually lucky in this area. The only failure we had was an extremely rare stair step sealed beam headlight which had one burnt out filament. How do you find another impossible-to-find item in less than three weeks? We sent out an SOS and in the meantime installed a pair of original Lucas Le Mans European halogen bulbs that we had acquired as backup. Finally change history. This is just a short synopsis of what goes on behind the scenes. If you would like to play a part in one of these resurrections, just give me a call and please, a little more time than seven months would be appreciated. EDITOR S NOTE: since this was my GT for 17 years I took delight in the SLR restoration process. In 1983 I had the safety equipment installed, after pulling a guy out through the windscreen of his Alfa Disco- Volante on a Pittsburgh hillside, as gasoline dripped out of the Webers But I always expected that down the line the Aston could be brought back to originale and that slices into the original steel for roll bar mounting, fuel cell mounting, seat belt brackets, etc. could always be reversed. I sold the GT in mid 1999 and the Aston was further modified with very wide rear fender swells and an oversize oil cooler. So as Bjorn and team reversed the changes over time, DB4GT/0130/L is a great example of the resilience of the Aston Martin chassis, frame, body and engine. August 3rd arrived before we knew it. Everything was installed, everything was working, everything was clean and everything was polished. Now to concentrate on all the peripheral items such as tool kit, done, owner s manual, done, (my client acquired an original leather-covered one), work shop manual, done, display book with pictorial and historical information, done, paint chips and leather samples, done, something to lay it all out on, done, (we used a piece of leather hide) and last but not least a fire extinguisher (required at most shows). Finally at long last the car is done, six days BEFORE the transporter arrives. Not much leeway, but it could have been worse. NOTE: the final stair step headlight arrived early on the day of shipping. Epilogue Those of you who read part one know that the effort was worthwhile. We ended up 2nd in the race car class, tied for 1st in points and losing out to historical significance (the top Aston had placed at Le Mans with Moss and Collins). Not bad for a first time try at the illustrious Pebble Beach. While my people are good, even they can t