Danish

Nice progress Dave!

Very nice work Brian. As the roof paint is so nice, I would wait a while before deciding whether to go BVR. A Mk3 with BVR and side trim is a very different looking car to a base or L model with clean lines. One day I shall make a trip to Malta and see the car in the flesh!

There's oodles of space behind the pulley. In fact I may take another 5mm off the back to push it further back. But yes, hex bolts would be better, will look at that.

If I could change one thing about my car it would be to have a couple of classic car mates within a couple of miles so we could hang out at each other's garages. My resto thread kind of fills that gap, but only when there's feedback to keep my mojo going. The days of putting up a post and getting 6 or 8 replies are long gone, and at times I'm posting and the last two or three posts are mine. Rich - good idea, I could do that, don't want to cut off people who'll otherwise not see any updates. Especially as I think Dave.com said you can paste links from Facebook-hosted images... and yes, you can! Mike's DOHC pulley drilled and tapped and the trigger wheel Pete-H made for me fitted: and trial-fitted on the Pinto:

Oh no, you don't get rid of me that easily! 🙂

It's been 7 years, there's 271 pages with 5,732 photos! I think it's the second longest ever topic, behind Swampy. Quite staggering really. But for a number of reasons it's time to draw this thread to a close. I've set up a Facebook page for the continuation of the project PAL - the endurance rally Mk3 Cortina where I'll be doing some more in-depth posts and videos.

1.4mb is huge. The wet string that passes for internet here in Wales would struggle with that size of images. The ones I upload of PAL tend to be around 0.1mb. Solution - resize your photos - make them smaller width & height, and increase compression level - both will reduce file size.

Nice work from the admin team. Now I can upload photos direct from my phone! On Tuesday I delivered the boot lid and bonnet for dipping.

Indeed. Once it's been dipped I'll have the holes for the spare wheel welded up, and put a few welds inside to strengthen things up. After that for now I'll probably paint it with Bondaprimer and a light top coat of something or other to keep it from rusting until we're ready to do the next colour scheme, probably in 2021/22.

How a little job becomes a big job. I wanted to charge the Cortina's battery, but didn't want to risk the boot lid dropping on my head, so we thought to remove the spare wheel. Then found the paint was so damaged underneath we may as well strip and remove it and send it with the bonnet for dipping. The paint is right through to primer where the spare wheel cover touched it. There's not much to do except strip it back, and the soft paint would be a nightmare to sand off, so dipping seems the way forward: Fog lamp, ham aerial and spare wheel carrier stripped off: This original boot lid didn't have much in the way of bracing for the spare wheel. The paint was cracked across that side of the boot lid showing the metal has been flexing: Boot lid removed. This should make it easier to fit the rear window blind: I imagine the dipping process would take off the vinyl decals without even noticing, but I removed them just in case. Stacked with the bonnet ready to go:

Yup. The red paint I used is good - that's Halford's acrylic aerosols. But the yellow (internet cellulose aerosol) didn't ever fully harden and it's shrunk back from the decals in places. So fitting the new bonnet and boot is a chance to replace a fair amount of panels in yellow aerosol.

Our afternoon session started with filler on the bottom edge of the boot lid: The with a bit of high-build primer it's ready to hand over to the paint shop on Monday. I've done my bit painting the car, in future it will be done with 2-pack. SWMBO, the DA and the spare bonnet, dressing around 50 welds that are holding it together for dipping: The paint is hard-as-nails so presumably 2-pack. It was thick and I suspected there was more than one colour - but sanding showed two sets of colour, both the same shade: About three-quarters of the way there: Hopefully this paint can be used by the paint shop, though I'm not sure whether it's 2-pack or not. We'll be going with the same design as the previous bonnet (as per comments further up in this topic)

Since adding the roof-rack to PAL, there wasn't as much need for the boot-lid-mounted spare wheel. I never finished the gas strut modification, so the boot lid is hard to lift, plus it obscures the rear view which is already limited by the roll cage. So last year I started work to swap to a different boot lid, but that was delayed and as we all know primer isn't water proof and it had developed some rust. Unfortunately I used seam sealer and that seems to have trapped in moisture as well, so the first job was removing that: DA to take back the lower edge of the lid to bare metal: Kurust for the less bad areas. The worst bit will get new metal welded in.

A bit rusty, but definitely worth repairing as a PFL 2-door GT is one of the most desirable models.

The first job today was to prepare for a visit from Dave.com tomorrow. I'm not sure what engine this is. Maybe those 8 ports mean it's pre-crossflow? Then making a thing - hacksawing a length of 38mm aluminium: Centre tool, using the 13-25mm chuck for the first time: Turning down: Fitted to the DOHC pulley: So I can use the 'dead centre' tool on the mill to accurately locate the centre of the pulley: