The shoestring gets a little longer

My Triumph Acclaim was the original Project Shoestring in this magazine, one that we aimed to buy, fettle and put back on the road for an all-in price of £1500. This was back in 2021, and the Acclaim had been off the road since 2016, and only covered a paltry 454 miles between 2006 and its final MoT in 2015.

Despite a low mileage of 41,163 at that point, time had inevitably taken its toll and there was plenty of work to be done before I could enjoy the Acclaim on the road again. By the time the project finished in the June 2021 issue, we had just about squeaked under our self-imposed limit with an all-in cost of £1495.49, but only by the crafty expedient of buying six month's road tax instead of a full year.

Inevitably though, we were never going to get perfection on that kind of budget, and there has been further expenditure in the years since then, though to be fair not too much, and certainly not a lot when you consider how much pleasure the Acclaim has given me. However, when you are working on a tight budget it is almost inevitable that you end up prioritising mechanical reliability and safety over cosmetic beauty. I suspect that the previous owner took a similar path, because one of this car's worst features was that the offside rear wing had been roughly trowelled full of filler and painted an approximate match with rattle cans.

As a repair it looked reasonably OK from a distance, but seeing it always set alarm bells ringing in my mind, even though this panel is only singleskinned and I could see from inside the boot that the metal was not badly distorted or rotten. The thing is that once you start digging below the surface, there is usually no way back, but you have to forge on and finish the job properly. That was one reason why I had left further investigation of the rear wing in the pending pile during Project Shoestring, and also why it had remained there ever since.

In this case there was an added unknown when it came to the final cost of repairs because the driver's door was very faded, so much so that it looked slightly orange against the Monza Red on the rest of the car. I really have no idea why this one panel should have been faded because it had clearly not been repainted, and when I removed the plastic reflectors from the door's trailing edge, then the paint underneath was a deep Monza Red so nor do I think the door had been taken from another car.

However, I always planned to keep the Acclaim long-term, and so carrying out a proper repair was always on my agenda. I was finally persuaded to bite the bullet and ask Alan Denne to do whatever was necessary by the fact that this

year is the 100th anniversary of Triumph producing their first car, and as my Acclaim was one of the very last, (it was first registered in the month that the Triumph marque was killed off,) I thought it was only right that it looked its best.

Alan duly obliged, and as the pictures show, the underlying damage to the rear wing was as light as we had hoped. I can understand why an amateur such as myself might have used plenty of filler, but a professional like Alan was able to tease the metal back into shape using panel beating tools and heat, to the point where that over-used phrase 'a thin skim of filler' was for once totally accurate, as he needed just the merest skim to smooth out the final imperfections. He also dealt with a couple of minor scabs further forwards, one at the leading edge of the wheelarch and another in the bottom rear corner of that faded driver's door.

We'll return to see the finished results next month, but in the meantime I also splashed out on having the wheels professionally refinished by Wheelrite in Gosberton near Spalding. They removed the tyres, blasted the wheels back to bare metal, painted them silver and refitted the tyres, all for £336 which I thought was pretty good value. I had this done partly to smarten them up, but also because I just couldn't track down and cure a slow leak from one rim. I am glad to say that in the two months since this was done, none of them have lost a single psi.

ABOVE: The offside rear wing had always looked a little rough on our Project Shoestring Acclaim, with some obvious signs of filler and a poor rattle- can respray.

ABOVE: This is a single- skinned panel, and from inside the boot you could see that the panel was basically sound, but rippled at the back after being hit in that corner.

ABOVE: Finally, smoothing along the panel with a long body plane revealed any remaining high spots that needed knocking back before reaching for the paint gun.

ABOVE: With the stretched metal heated up using the oxyacetylene torch, Alan used a combination of panel beating and the application of cold water to shrink it back down.

ABOVE: Where the metal had stretched, Alan heated it cherry red. (Note the bead of weld below the torch, which was the one small split that Alan had now welded up.)

ABOVE: Taking off all the filler did not reveal any disasters though, certainly nothing structurally worse than a small horizontal split where the metal had rippled.

ABOVE: Alan started off by reshaping the metal using a paddle and dolly. The long paddle made it possible to knock down any high spots and level everything out.

ABOVE: In the meantime, Simon had taken the Acclaim's wheels to Wheelrite near Spalding to have them refinished. Not only was the paint finish superb...

ABOVE: ...but Wheelrite also used sticky alloy wheel weights inside the steel rims rather than external weight clips to ensure the paint was not damaged.

ABOVE: Sanding off the paint confirmed a basically sound panel, although the filler towards the back promised to reveal more in the way of damage.