The last GT I had was a white car and came from way up nth in N.G. The lady who owned it had kept it registered for many years, even thouh it had sat in a shed for most of them as her husband had died. The boot was a surprise being full of brand new spare parts, for steering rack, rubbers, joints etc etc.
The plans for it were to fit a Piazza Turbo 2L engine. Piazza's are none too common but I found an engine and started to fit it to the GT. Since, to my knowlege, this had never been done before, it was a learning experience. Again using an old front cut from Peter, the engine was dummied into the front sheet metal. LOT's of issues here. You will see that the rear of the engine has lots of pipes protruding backwards. This meant the motor needed to mounted forwards to clear the firewall or cut the firewall. Not keen to do the later but lots of measuring shows that engine is a bit shorter than a Bellett anyway so no problem there. Engine mounts fabricated ok without any drama EXCEPT that the oil pump regulator or whatver it is on the R side of the motor hits everything ! The obvious solution was to rotate it around 90degrees to clear engine mounts and the sub frame, so i did a metal casting course and cast up a new section to rotate things about. New brackets had to be made to fit the alternator to the other side of the motor also.
Next issue was the intercooler. The original one fitted under the mudguard area o i think of the Piazza but no matter, i didn't have it anyway. I got one from a Turbo RX7 (at great cost I might add, wreckers thought they were made of gold at the time) I managed to get that mounted but had to move the radiator backwards a bit also.....anyway, lots of work and fabrication later I decided to sell the car (now regretted !) due to space constraints with another project going on also. My plan for the conversion was to make all reversable, in case the original engine ever went back into the car.
I had done a fair bit on the GT already but happy to see it finally find a new home and I think pretty close to getting back on the road. When I got it, it had some very strange aftermarket rear lights on it, after obviously suffering a hit in the rear. This was repaired and original lights re-fitted.
glenn
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