This is one of the best cars I've ever owned, and I'm sad to see it go. Nothing special, it's a 1.9 TDi 5speed B5 Passat - common car - common motor - common everything. I'd got it from a friend of mine for doing an engine swap and it was tatty but useable. In went a half-leather interior from another B5 Passat I had
You know what one of the best movies of all time is? Absolute classic. I digress. Hemi in again to check how many issues the radiator is going to give me and I don't think it's going to be too bad. The condenser will need a little bit of relocating, but the width is just fine and the height will work too. It's thrown up a
I want to use the fan that came as part of the original 300 climate control, and I've been working on getting the condenser for the A/C and the heater core to work with the spaces and holes I already have in the Jensen. Here you can see a basic mock-up of what I think will work. I've made the 300 system fit (I still
The entire Jensen is covered in black 1/2" think foam which was glued to all the metal. Over time, what it has been very effective at is trapping moisture against the metal (and degrading). It's a mess, falling off, and falling apart, and the only thing for it was to attack it with the good old wire wheel. Luckily the steel underneath is okay in most
When you're sitting really close to a driveshaft, the last thing you want to really be thinking about is how little protection you have from that shaft you know, taking out your legs. When they built the Jensen Interceptor they moulded the tunnel inside the passenger compartment from fiberglass. It's actually been made fairly well, but it won't quite work with the new transmission - so out
The process of getting an engine to work in something it was never intended to work in is tedious. I guess you could say it's easy and all you have to do is make mounts, and that anybody with a welder and a grinder could do it - and you'd be right. To a point. What I'm interested in is getting things not only to
The goal with the Jensen is to make a car that just 'works' so with that brief in mind I'm keen to see if I can reuse as much of the HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) system from the 300c as possible. This will mean that there is climate control and all the other things we just take for granted in cars these days. To
The Audi A8 4.2 is a great motor, and this example has over 220,000 miles on it. It needs some attention and TLC for sure. So first up was a full set of front brakes and huge rotors. They had to dust off the boxes at the parts store when I picked them up, I guess there aren't much of a call for these parts!
Spent some time cleaning up the engine bay in the Jensen. 40+ years on the roads has meant that grease is everywhere, plus I think someone was a bit overzealous with underseal at some point in this car's life. It may need media-blasting before paint, but what I want for now is something clean enough to work with. It's an interesting frame setup, utilising two 'tubes' linking
So Wednesday of this week entailed stripping the engine from the Audi 80 2.7tt and rebuilding the entire thing on the block I picked up Monday. By the evening I had it all back in, leaving Thursday to fill it with fluids and such. The scariest moment was probably when I stripped a head bolt torquing down the left head. It was one of many
