Welcome to the 21st century, the email list is no more. :-)

Even though we're well into the rebuild of the Monza now, I thought I'd start the blog off with a post I put on the Autobahnstormers forum last weekend, at least it's a good intro for anyone else who happens to come across the blog in the future.


About 18 months ago I started noticing the car wasn't having a good time. The left front tyre was wearing badly on the inside edge, the bonnet was beginning to have a V shaped gap between it and the left wing and the left (driver's) door was starting to touch the B pillar at the top. I couldn't work out what it was until I moved a wiring loom on the top of the left inner wing, between the strut and the outside edge, and saw a split. A little more investigation and I noticed that the spot welds that hold the brace (runs from the strut tower area to the door pillar) to the inner wing were pulling off too. In fact, the front suspension was being held up by the wing rather than the brace!

The car got parked up and a brief 9 months of denial followed, during which time we used our Manta every day.

Eventually I took the car over to the local body shop and they agreed to do the work. The only problem was that they needed pretty much everything north of the A pillars taken off the car to be able to get to the inner wing to do a proper job (TM), so that meant a lot of dismantling.

You're probably putting 2 and 2 together by now and working out how to match the title and the last paragraph, right? Yup, there were a load of projects I'd been holding off for years because we used the car every day and because each one of them needed more than a day's work. With one thing leading to another here was an ideal opportunity to do the lot at once. Here's the list:

• The dash had loads of cracks on it and I had had one recovered a while back down in LA (http://www.justdashes.com/HowWeDoIt.htm). It's a pig of a job with all the wiring on the Monza so I'd decided to wait for an opportune moment.

• The heater had started to gurgle strangely. I'd assumed it was just hard water choking the flow, but to change it needed the dash to come out...

• I had a 3.6 crank, rods and pistons sitting in the garage and the engine had done 240,000 miles.

• I wanted to convert the car to use ABS, but that was a big job to do by itself.

• I also wanted to convert the car to use either the Monza catalyst injection system or the one off the Gold Top Senator to try to help me through the emissions tests here, but that would have to be done with the ABS since they share the same loom

• The seats needed re-foaming and re-strapping. I'm probably most kindly described as a lardy-arse (lived in California too long) so 100,000 miles with me driving hadn't helped the Recaros.

• And on and on

So a couple of weekends of dismantling and it was off to the bodyshop again, with a trail of power steering fluid coming from it because the steering box was about the only thing left in the car!

Here’s the inner wing off the car. You can just make out the brown line outboard of the label on the strut tower and the tear in the side next to it.

At the bodyshop with the new bits attached. Luckily I had a strut brace they could use to hold the whole lot in the right orientation.

A few weeks later I had it back in the garage and the long slow reassembly started. First off was a brand new firewall insulation mat that I’d scored off OCP. It’s not the exact right one for the car (it was for a Diesel Senator) but it modified easily and really made the car look new. At that point, any chance for a quick rebuild disappeared and it started to be a full-on restoration!

Insulation just held in place with nuts and bolts. Looks good, though, doesn’t it?

A short while later and I’d got it modified to suit the car. Power steering, pedal box and braking system were next to go in.

See how bad it got? EVERYTHING is being cleaned and painted or renewed

As I said, it’s getting really bad now. Since I was in full-on restoration mode everything started coming out of my stock to make it look perfect. Things were either cleaned and painted or brand new bits were used. I’m also a sucker for cad plating, so all the plated parts were painted in clearcoat to keep them that way!

I got a little fed up doing the engine bay so I moved onto the inside to keep the interest up. I’d removed all the insulation when I dismantled it as it was either brittle and had fallen apart or would have done so when I put it back in. I’m also a sucker for Dynamat (I used it on the silver Manta that Andy Clears restored for me) so I got a load more and started on the Monza.

First layer of Dynamat

Second layer of Dynamat and then the A/C system and wiring could start

My car was used as a demonstrator for a chap who was going to import them into the USA so it has absolutely every option available for 1983, and every option needed wiring. Yup, it was going to be epic.

First off was the injection loom. Previously the car was just a simple 3.0E with a home made oxygen sensor add-on box to keep me legal over here. Now I had ABS and a different injection system to use. The major choice was which injection system. I hummed and haa’ed about it for a long while until a friend of mine in the Netherlands (Louis van Steen) called Irmscher for me and found that they had one last C36NE ECU and I could have it for a nice price too.

Well, that solved all the problems since there’s nothing easier than just assembling bits that were meant to go together, right? Pretty much. But I now had an automatic C30NE (Gold Top) wiring loom and a Monza 3.0E Jetronic wiring loom for cars with ABS to blend together. Luckily I’m not at all worried by wiring so I spent a “fun” weekend in the garage, stripping the two looms and making one new one out of it.

The problem was, now I had a nice new looking loom sitting in the engine bay, all the other looms were looking decidedly down market, so I ended up stripping and rewrapping most of the looms in the end.

Engine bay with most of the new looms in place

Back inside the car I started on the alarm wiring. I’d bought a Toad Ai606 in the UK a while back as I had them on the Mantas in the UK and they work pretty well (although Andy didn’t think so when the one in my black Manta went off half a dozen times outside his house one night!). Like this post, that was one of those epics that seemed to go on forever and I must’ve put a good three or four weekends into it. Still, finally I got it in and the new dash could go on and it started looking more like a car again, rather than a box of bits.

Finally got the dash on

The car had tinted side and rear windows when I got it, but I wanted to change it over for something a little better and so had the sides tinted with 3M Crystalline film. You can’t see it on the car but it makes one hell of a difference in the sun. I’ll get the front and rear done when the car’s drivable. Anyway, last weekend I decided to build up the doors, so the glass went back in (carefully, it’s got a scratchable film on the inside!) and then I spent an inordinate amount of time cleaning, re-greasing, Dynamatting (of course) and refitting. And of course there was the ever present wiring – the doors have electric mirror and window wiring and I have tweeters on the front corners of the door.

Would you believe you could spend several hours getting a door built up?

So that brings me pretty much up to date. The last thing I did last weekend was to test fit the centre console and of course had a problem. The console wouldn’t fit under the dash and when I had managed to force it there the angle of the bottom of the dash didn’t match the angle of the top of the console. I think I’ve finally worked it out. The dash was put in with the windscreen in place, so it probably isn’t fitting as far forwards as it was originally. Since the dash is held onto the dash panel by a couple of screws, that means it has rotated downwards compared to where it should be, and that’s why it’s too low and the angle of the bottom of the dash is wrong. Add that to the thickness of the Dynamat I’ve used and you can see it wasn’t going to fit.

A quick engineering solution was to use a strap with a ratchet on the bottom of the dash to pull it upwards and outwards. I’ve left it under tension for the week and it does look like it’s getting better. Over the weekend I’m going to get the instruments back out and loosen off the nuts holding the top/front of the dash below the windscreen and hope that I can muscle it back in place with a bit of grease and a plastic scraper. Still, I thought you’d like to see the lash up with the ratcheting strap… :-)

An engineering solution to the problem…

More when I’ve got some time.