Bodywork and paint-part 1

I have next to no bodywork experience but I have to start somewhere. I put glaze on all the spots where I welded up holes

And smoothed out the ridge left by removing the drip rails

And the hole where the boot button used to be

The aluminum hood has been crunched pretty good at one time. I have no plans on making it perfect again because it would require large amounts of heavy bondo or large amounts of money for somebody who could smooth it out.

Last minute decision to remove the door handles and weld up the holes. The handles are suprisingly heavy.

Weight Removal

I need to get some weight out of the car so I started cutting holes in everything I could

Front crossmember

Frame rails

Rear frame

Here's all the metal I have removed-only 32 lbs for all my work :(

Disassembly

This pic was taken after about 2.5 hours of taking everything off

It took another 1.5 hours to get the pedals, transmission and engine out

Here is the weight of the engine by itself-yikes!! There may be an aluminum V8 in my future.

Fender Vents

There is a lot of underhood heat with the big V12 and from my dyno experience, I learned that heat robs power.  I wanted to cut some vents in the front fenders but was worried about messing them up so I practiced on a piece of scrap sheet metal and once I was satisfied, I tackled the fenders.

I started out by measuring the area I wanted the vents

Then I started to cut with a cutting wheel

I cut 12 vents into the fender

Then bent them up

I'm pretty happy with how they look

Dyno

Ok, finally got her on a dyno. My goals were 275 hp/300 ft/lb torque and I almost got them with 255 hp at 5468 rpm and 300 ft/lbs at 4086 rpm. The first few pulls were to only 5000 rpm to solve a fuel pressure issue (stupid glass fuel filter was too restrictive) and then we moved on to timing. There wasn't enough timing in it so I had to re-index the distributor to get more advance and initially we were confused because power numbers were dropping drastically with each pull. Of course this throws off any useful data collection and we speculated that the liquid cooled (heated) intake manifold was causing the power drops because of heat soaking. We let the engine cool for 5 minutes and picked up 8hp and 30 ft/lbs torque so imagine if the intake charge could stay cool. Also, to get the intake air hot, Jaguar engineered two 90 degree bends that maximized the incoming air's exposure to the hot intake surface and these proved to be very restricitive. Power fell off above 5500 rpm so the only run where I went to 6000 rpm was the last one. I have already dropped off the intake manifolds to a fab shop and they are eliminating the liquid cooled part of the intake and the two 90 degree bends at the same time. I am also sending the cams to XKS Unlimited to be reground to their road race profile and that together with hp valve springs will raise the powerband to 7000 rpm. Listen to the video then imagine another 1500-2000 rpm-oh yeah!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsjvR5eZUTk

Here is a pic of the passenger side carbs. The air goes through the carb into the silver aluminum liquid cooled housing, makes a 90 degree straight up then another 90 degree turn to the right and into the intake and engine. I am eliminating the silver aluminum part, moving the carbs up and attaching directly to the black intake manifold: