Always liked the Marlin, a very pretty little car, Alfaresque, if there is such a word and yours looks great in white. They did a four seater too I think, also rather nice. If I were rebuilding one I guess a Toyota 2000 twin cam and 5-speed would be a nice way to go. You could make it look very much like a period Alfa. Mazda MX5 would make a great donor also, and there are quite a few rusty ones around now.
Well this thread is working out rather well - I don't have to do much and we all just chat about kit cars; shame we can't all be enjoying a beer together at the same time. The Black Prince The Black Prince was a prototype born out of the demise of the Gordon Keeble car company. They used the 327 Corvette engine attached to a ZF 5-speed and one of these units found its way into a Vauxhall Ventora. I bought the car as a project - it had been on fire - and put it back on the road. I drove it, on and off, through much of the 80s. It was not a good car but it was FUN, wickedly fast, a real sleeper. Over that period I rebuilt the engine boring and stroking it from 327 to 355 (5.8L in new money).
Very nice , south africa got the beefy v8 versions of our cars XR8 https://www.classiccarauctions.co.uk/1985-ford-sierra-xr8 Capri http://www.perana.org/capriv8.asp Firenza https://www.streetmusclemag.com/news/chevrolet-firenza-can-am-south-africas-muscle-car/
Such a shame Vauxhall didn't produce a 2 door FD Victor, it's a cracking shape. Red Victor 3 in the build stages proves the point.......
In the late 80s the cobra kits started to appear on the market so I planned to sell the Vauxhall and build a cobra. It soon became apparent that the engine and gearbox in the Black Prince was worth more than the entire car and V8s with decent 5-speeds were very rare in those days so I kept the drive-train and sold the car off as a rolling chassis. Quite a few cobra replicas around at that time but the one that really caught my eye was the Ram from LR Roadsters. Rather than the standard ladder chassis that Dax and everyone were using the Ram had an Adrian Reynard designed tubular back-bone. This was all before digital cameras were common so I don't have a great build log, just some rather random pictures; these the early ones around 1988
Went to the Kitcar show at Stoneliegh in 85 (the yr live aid was on) I'd built a Dutton Pheaton when I was 16, and was looking for something else. The Dax cobra was far better built then the rest.
You're very kind and I will try to spend my man points wisely. The spelling is an English/Irish thing I believe; I have some Irish heritage so Myles rather than Miles. People often spell my name wrong but it really doesn't bother me. My wife finds it more annoying than I do. Years ago I did some theatre lighting and they always spelled my name 'Miles' in the program. Eventually they corrected it but they also changed the spelling of the sound guy to match - he became Gyles!
You'd be very welcome but don't come too soon, the cobra is not at the top of the project list (yet). A few more pics of it going together (around 1989-90)
https://www.brightwells.com/classic...tage-september-2017/catalogue-27th-september/ Forgot link, they wanted too much money.
I got the car on the road around 1990 and we used it for our wedding in 1992. These pictures from the late 90s
I probably won't get to do much on the car for another year or so, I'm working on my truck project but I am starting to accumulate some bits in advance. Here is a power steering column from a Corsa, a popular conversion these days Should make the car lighter to drive and somewhat safer, it has a collapsible section which the existing one (MK1 Escort) does not. A whole lot of information about wiring it up: - http://www.super7thheaven.co.uk/blog/corsa-c-electric-power-steering-epas/
The engine is an early Corvette 327 bored and stroked to 355. It has some head work and a competition cam fitted by the previous owner. When we had it on the dyno at Osellis in Oxford it made 300HP The inlet is unusual. It is an Inglese manifold with 4 Weber DCNFs as fitted to Aston Martins, Ferraris and the like. The chap I worked for at the Five Horseshoes had bought them for his AM V8 and never fitted them. When he left he gave them to me and I scoured the world for a suitable manifold. The combination of cam and this inlet does not work very well: poor tick-over and slightly flat at part throttle. It suffers from 'reversion' which is where the fuel/air mixture is blown backwards out of the carbs as the piston changes direction at BDC and is most pronounced at lower revs. The more overlap on a hot cam the worse it becomes and running it on the dyno you could see a cloud of unburnt fuel sitting about a foot above the carbs - not ideal from a fire-hazard point of view and having the mixture change direction on every induction cycle plays havoc with the carburetion. With a single plane manifold the reversion pulse is absorbed in the large plenum space AND there is always another cylinder on its induction stroke to remove the pulse. On a Weber manifold such as this one, with effectively one carb per cylinder the pulse has nowhere to go except straight back through the carb. I needed a cam with less overlap and so after a chat with Jim Inglese (who made the maifold), who is a Weber expert, I have gone for this one: https://www.summitracing.com/int/parts/hrs-181145-12/overview/make/chevrolet It's a hydraulic roller cam, quite a mild one, which makes its power between 1500 and 5600 rpm. The important number is the lobe separation angle (LSA, AKA overlap) of no less than 112°. I am hoping that this should be really fun to drive in a light road car. We shall see...
Maybe between GM Vauxhall and Holden they could have come up with a 2 door that would have been an iconic collectors car, That 2 door victor looks amazing and should have been factory made, Look at this pillarless coupe sold under the GM Ranger badge in South Africa.. Why did'nt vauxhall sell it here? The car is for sale on another site nothing to do with me lol Just looked on Youtube about Red Victor 3 and realized it seems to live across the road from me, It would certainly explain why i hear a roar and by the time i look out of the window the road is empty..
