1982 GTV renovation

[Anth73]

Hi , Who did you get locally to make the head lining.

Speak with Hugh Harrison at Monza Motors as he arranged it for me.

[gtvsix86]

I have the same car builders stuff installed and I also was time poor so I used an installer recommended by car builders iSorb who also installed a custom heat shield in the engine to replicate the original one which was destroyed and fell apart when removing to paint my engine bay see pictures

[gtvsix86]

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[gtvsix86]

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[julianB]

I have to say that a botched rear cross member has allowed my exhaust to be tucked up quite nicely.
Once the extractors are modified to meet the new tucked up exhaust, I haven't had any issues.
I'll try to dig out a picture

[Anth73]

Sorry it's been a while since my last update. Have been readying the next phase of my project, which I'll get to in a few more posts. But back to the interior....

With all the Car Builders insulation in place I was fortunate to source a really nice original moulded carpet from Monza Motors. I gave it the once over with a hired Britex carpet cleaner and think it came up really nice considering it's probably nudging 35 years of age! No rips or worn through sections and the colouring is still pretty consistent.

[Anth73]

I also mentioned in an earlier post that my dash had to be replaced due to some gaping 40mm or so sized holes where the rollcage  ran down along the A-pllar and behind the dash to the floor. So it was out with the old but I kept the '82 series split dash centre stack with it's orange and blue accents applied to the heater controls, whereas the later series cars have blue and green accents with more pronouced knobs. Otherwise they are functionally equivalent. The heater box still contains the evaporator, hopefully meaning I can reinstall air conditioning at some point. I know it isn't the greatest but any improvement to no A/C will be great as the car is a hot house on wheels anything above mid 20 degrees.

The Dash Doctor was called upon to retrim the replacement dashboard supplied by Monza Motors. It was a long wait, maybe eight weeks in total. The wait was worth it though as the dash came back looking very nice indeed! If only the usual glovebox alignment woes could be improved but no amount of fiddling seems to help.

[Anth73]

Whilst the dash was getting reskinned the team at Monza Motors set about sourcing and fitting all the interior bits and pieces. This included the Recaro front and rear seats, matching door trims, seat belts, rear parcel shelf, interior lights, grab handles and numerous small trim pieces I would have had no idea about if I attempted this myself.

The trim pieces around the rear windows needed the locating rivets fitted, which was very fiddly to complete. We also found that my doors were original and designed for the earlier style screw-in door trims. The latter Recaro door trims use push-in plastic clips and this necessitated the doors being drilled in the precise locations to accept the plastic clips.  This level of attention to detail was very much appreciated and a testament to the high quality of workmanship displayed by Hugh and the team at Monza Motors.

The Recaro seats have the usual green tinge to them but otherwise are in great condition for their age. I've eyed off Bonno's leather trimmed upgrade and may consider doing something similar in the future.

[Anth73]

Almost six months had passed since I left my GTV with Monza Motors to bring it back to a more suitable road going car and I must say I was thrilled with the outcome. There's a few minor things to finish off inside, such as LED lighting and a bluetooth receiver so I can wirelessly stream music. I also want to refresh the door seals and install an ignition relay. However they can wait whilst I contemplate the next phase of my renovation which is likely to feature the addition of a Busso soundtrack to the driving experience.

Here's the final before and after photos and the happy day on 29 October 2019 I picked up the GTV, freshly roadworthied and registered on new club plates (unfortunately they're not transferable so I wasn't able to use the club plates that were on the car when I bought it).

[Anth73]

With the interior refurb complete it was finally time to enjoy driving the GTV in the nearby hills and it soon became apparent that she sat really, really low. The track biased suspension setup consists of 28mm torsion bars, matching rear springs and Koni yellow shock absorbers all round. Whilst this results in go-kart like handling it also brings a really harsh ride and leaves the exhaust and sump very vulnerable.

I had a friend measure the distance from wheel centre to the lip of the wheel arch on all four wheels on his standard GTV6. The front wheels measured 37cm and the rear wheel measured 32cm. My GTV measured 32cm and 28cm respectively, so a drop of 5cm at the front and 4cm at the rear compared to standard. Trying to get a standard 8m tape measure under the lowest point of the exhaust was also futile. A smaller tape measure highlighted that I had less than 8cm of ground clearance to play with...ouch!

With longevity of my GTV's undercarriage in mind I decided to take the car back to Monza Motors to have the front torsion bars adjusted to a more acceptable ride height with matching rear springs. We eventually settled on a 3cm lift with some settling and a slight drop at the front expected once a V6 appears in the engine bay.

She still looks sporty enough and handles well without the bone shaking, exhaust scraping ride. Before and after photos are below:

[Anth73]

Another minor upgrade I made recently was to replace the interior and dashboard lights with LED's thanks to some helpful advice from Julian (AKA GTVeloce). This is a simple and must-do upgrade in my view as the results are outstanding. Whilst the 38 year old electronics mean't some playing around to get the LED properly orientated within the bulb holder, and the bulb holder properly orientated within the circuit board behind the gauges, it was largely plug and play.

For the main and supplementary gauges, as well as green coloured warning lights like the turn indicators I used green T5 LED bulbs, from memory you need 14 of these in total. For all other warning lights and for the heater control knob I used white T5 LEDs, from memory five were required. The interior lights on the B-pillar were fitted with a 36mm festoon LED. All up cost delivered was only $78!

The only caveat is that the light for the heater fan speed control knob can only be accessed by taking off the right side vent and I couldn't work out how to replace the two tiny lights at either end of the slide controls. Access seemed impossible without taking out the heater box. I didn't do the glovebox light as I don't have one currently fitted.

Here's a few pics of the dramatic improvement in lighting quality, with the first photo showing the LED equipped speedo shining brightly compared to the dim tacho still fitted with standard bulbs.

EDIT May 2023: Having finally got the car back on the road fitted with a 120A alternator, I found the alternator warning lamp would stay on for quite a while on startup, even with minimal electrical load. Once headlights were on and only one of my cooling fans running (drawing 13A), the motor would get a little rough. A check with the multimeter showed only 12.5V at idle and barely more than 11V under load. It looked like I would need to get the new alternator tested as something was causing the diodes to remain inactive and not charge. Then I stumbled across an AlfaBB post describing similar symptoms to mine in a 105 Series running LEDs in the dash for all lighting and warning lamps. The issue is that the alternator warning lamp forms part of the current sensing circuit and the alternator needs the resistance of the incandescent globe in your alternantor warning lamp to wake up the diodes and start charging properly. An LED doesn't have sufficient resistance, requiring a resistor to be fitted in parallel or do as I did, remove the LED, refit the old incandescent globe and presto...13.9V at idle!

[GTVeloce]

Looking good! Car is coming along very nicely. One of these days we shall have to go for a drive together, preferably both with V6 power!

[Anth73]

A few weeks since my last update and plans are now in place to add some busso harmonies to my GTV via replacement of the 75 TS currently in the car with a 75 3L V6 that Monza Motors had sitting in the back room. This engine was rescued by Hugh from a nearby wreckers yard quite some time ago and came without a timing belt, so fingers are crossed that it didn't suffer a broken timing belt at some point.

My previous encounter with a busso V6 was in the 2.5 24V guise teamed up with a 6-speed manual in the MY2002 156 I had about 15 years ago. Whilst lacking low down torque the engine was a screamer and loads of fun once the tacho was north of 4K. I deliberated long and hard over the 12V or 24V upgrade path but cost and the desire to sample the joys of a warm 12V 3L motor that everyone raves about won me over.

With the engine on the warehouse floor it makes sense to refresh all the gaskets, seals and guides, as well as fit a new timing belt and water pump. I also decided to bring it up to SZ specification with 10:1 pistons, a reground camshaft to the SZ profile, fit a 164 Bosch Motronic ECU with a SZ EPROM (thanks Festy!) and a CSC extractor exhaust sytem powdercoated to help with reducing heat transfer.  Fortunately the engine has the necessary block castings to fit the 60-2 (?) timing gear enabling me to upgrade from the Jetronic system.

A custom ECU was discussed with Hugh however at this time the additional expense to fit and tune it is beyond my budget, and probably not really necessary given the car's intended use. It's always something I can play with later down the road if budget permits and I want to explore more tuning of the engine via some head porting and the like.

Hugh gave me a tip about Wade Cams previously having a grind for the SZ and 164Q camshaft. As you may have read in one of my other threads, Wade Cams went out of business around 2014. However, Clive Cams now has the IP and is able to regrind my existing camshafts to the SZ spec at quite a considerable saving to buying a pair of new C&B cams or third party cams ground to the same profile.

Monza Motors have two engine builds to finalise before starting mine, so in the interim I'm doing some of the preparation work where possible. First up was giving some greasy looking valve covers and an intake plenum a through wash and degrease, then treating it to some black wrinkle paint. Never having done this before I must say there is a particular technique to getting the wrinkle finish reasonable even. Whilst I fudged my way through the valve covers reasonably well, the complex shape of the intake plenum was a real headache and resulted in my fisrt attempt being sanded back and redone to a more acceptable finish. Still not great but I'm happy with it.

I also decided to try my hand at sanding, buffing and metal polishing the Alfa Romeo script and cylinder numbers, pretty pleased with the result for a first timer!

[Anth73]

More photos showing the priming, painting and finishing process I went through, plus the rather lumpy first attempt with the plenum. All parts were thoroughly washed with degreaser followed by dishwasing liquid and a hand brush before being thoroughly rinsed in warm water. They were then primed using high temperature resistant primer and sprayed with wrinkle paint. All spray paint was purchased from my local Supercheap Auto.

The wrinkle paint instructions are a little ambiguous and there's a lot of conflicting YouTube videos. It's also a challenge to get just the right level of coverage so that the paint will wrinkle but not too heavy that it runs, especially with the plenum. My first attempt was too heavy with noticeable paint run, so I sanded it back and started again to achieve a much better result. I found the best result was to apply three coats, with each coat made up of multiple passes in different directions. Waiting 5 minutes between coats was recommended on the spray can. After the final coat I allowed it to air dry for two hours before putting it in my weber barbecue on the lowest setting for an hour.

I also trawled Google images for various themes to polishing the valve covers and decided to just polish the Alfa Romeo script and cylinder numbers. I initially used a small dremel to remove the paint but you could also just easily use a very small block of wood or hard plastic with some 100 grit sandpaper.

I polished the lettering by hand by progressively using finer grades of sandpaper and finally some metal polish cream. It's takes patience but I'm very happy with the result.

[Anth73]

And the finished items