BAY OF DREAMS
CLEAN AND MEAN
Shaved and wire-tucked engine bays have become a very popular thing on the modifying scene in recent years.The aim, in essence, is to hide away everything possible to create the impression that the engine is almost floating.To do this, it’s necessary to hoik the engine out, and put endless hours into welding, shaving and smoothing the bay before treating it to a fresh coat of paint.Then you can relocate everything possible — in this instance, the battery and washer bottle have been moved to the boot — and tuck away all of the wiring inside the inner wings to keep it out of view. Further efforts can be made to relocate other ancillaries, but it often requires a little ingenuity; here, Fraser has hidden his fuel regulator, wiring loom and various other bits — the finished product is smooth, clean and fully custom. And yes, it all still works just as it should.
See this Escort here? His dad, Ian, bought it as a knackered shell back in 2004. It cost £350 and it was, making no bones about it, a bit rough-and-ready. Even back then £350 didn’t buy you much Escort.
Wing command
“When my dad got the car, it had no engine, no gearbox, and a lot of holes,” Fraser recalls. “It needed a lot of work, to say the least! He finally got it road-worthy in 2005, and drove it like that right up until Christmas 2016, when he agreed to let me fit the Mexico wings that he had bought previously.”
Now, this particular chapter in the Escort’s history may sound innocuous enough — after all, if you’ve got a complete, runningand-driving Mk1 then the notion of swapping on a new set of front wings mightn’t sound like that big a deal. But let’s not forget that Fraser is a tenacious type of
“THE CROSSFLOW IS SUPREMELY APPROPRIATE FOR A 1969 ESCORT”
the old school, with a keen work ethic passed down from his father, and the act of fitting said panels revealed a rather more involved undertaking to tackle.
“I started stripping the car, and realised that it would require quite a lot of attention,” he remembers. Fraser knows whereof he speaks here, having had a hand in more than a few automotive projects over the years. He’s primarily into Japanese fare, although he’s also built a couple of Mk1 Fiestas in the past (there’s still a half-finished one sitting on the back burner, complete with steel widearches), and he’s currently building a Fiesta ST150 track car with a Honda K20 motor hidden inside. Fair to say that he knows his way around a Blue Oval project, then. And that’s just as well, as the guts of the Escort turned out to be a total horror-show.
Laid bare
“What began as a simple plan to swap on some new wings turned into a full bare-shell restoration, a total nut-and-bolt rebuild from the ground up,” he laughs, with the gallows humour of a man who’s truly earned the right to do so. “Near enough every single millimetre of the car needed work.” And so, bloodied but unbowed, Fraser set about removing everything from the car and drawing up a full assessment of what work would be required. Which, as was becoming increasingly obvious, was rather a lot.
“Dad let me do whatever I wanted with the car, as long as I didn’t put a modern engine in it,” he says, and this sort of carte blanche is a really handy thing to have with a project of this scope and magnitude. Evidently Fraser wasn’t seeking to reinvent the wheel, but given how much work would be required, it provided the requisite freedom to be able to treat the project as his own.
“The engine bay was really bad, probably the hardest part of all to get right,” he continues. “I made all the repair panels myself, and it’s turned out like a brand new front end.
I really wanted the bay to be clean, so the battery and washer bottle have been relocated to the boot, and it’s all been rewired so all the wires are tucked away behind the wings, with the fuses inside the car. The fuel regulator is behind the driver’s wing with a cover plate, the servo’s under the dash, and the inlet manifold was modified so that the water and vacuum pipes come off it neatly.”
The engine choice is a supremely appropriate one for a 1969 Escort — a 711M Crossflow with twin 40s, barking through a four-branch manifold and making all the noises a Mk1 likes to. With a Type-9
’box and an RS diff, it’s a supremely usable package, and Fraser has been thorough in his choices throughout the chassis to ensure a fusion of the tasteful and the functional. The suspension set-up comprises GAZ coil-overs at the business end, and Avo dampers with decambered leaf springs out back. The brakes are similarly upgraded, packing RS discs and 9 inch drums respectively, and the overall result is a package that represents a timeworn formula for Escort upgrade success: all the right bits, doing all the right stuff. With fat 13 inch Minilites completing the chassis makeover, the aesthetics are very much on-point – which is particularly impressive given that Fraser hadn’t tackled a full repaint before.
First time
“Yep, that was my first time,” he beams, rightly proud of his work. “I did all the work on the car myself, and the repaint included making sure every nut, bolt and washer was treated too. My dad helped with building the car back together, and I have to admit that some jobs were more fun than others — I didn’t really enjoy fitting the headlining.” All worth it in the end though, eh? The interior finish is spot-on, with the RS-alike upgrades joining the OE-spec seats to create a sort of greatest-hits of specs. The decisions and execution throughout have all been superb, but it’s the bodywork which is undoubtedly this car’s party piece.
“The panel gaps were a pain, but they turned out well,” he says, with impressive modesty. “I’m pleased with the bumpers too — they were new items, and I thought they stuck out way too far so I made custom brackets to tuck them closer to the body.”
This attention to detail is symbolic of the insistence upon perfection throughout the car. It would have been so easy for Fraser to simply bolt the new Mexico wings onto the rotten but running Escort and leave it at that, but his values are rooted in a different age. This car’s been done properly because, for people like this, that’s the only way to do it. Classic values for the modern era.
“THE PANEL GAPS WERE A PAIN, BUT THEY TURNED OUT REALLY WELL”