‘If you held a light under the rear of the car it resembled a colander’
Scarcity of parts meant that many items had to be artfully repaired or hand-made in this difficult Vauxhall Viva GT rebuild
This car was owned by a guy called Steve Walton, an absolute Vauxhall fanatic,’ says Andy Boddy, who works with Terry Forder to maintain and restore the cars in the Vauxhall Heritage Centre. ‘ He very sadly passed away a few years ago and his partner contacted Vauxhall Heritage in 2014 to give us the option to purchase it. We didn’t have one, and we liked the look of Steve’s car, so we took her up on the offer.’
Enter the 1970 Viva GT. The HB Viva was the second model to carry that name, arriving in 1966 to replace the boxy HA. With both HA and HC Vivas present in the collection, the bestlooking of the lot – the HB – was an obvious omission. And the one to have among HBS is the two-litre performance model, the Viva GT.
Vauxhall Motors has been on the same patch of land in Luton for more than a century. Yes, the buildings have changed and evolved over the years, but one important corner of the plot is more about preservation that evolution. The company’s heritage fleet lives in a heated showroom-come-workshop with extra parking outside to cope with the ever-expanding roster of recent models being taken into the collection.
But inside, the older models hold sway. From the second-oldest Vauxhall in existence ( a 1903 5HP) through the famous Prince Henry and 30-98 models of Edwardian and Vintage eras respectively, the 95-vehicle collection takes in most Vauxhalls up to the last ten years or so. But there are gaps and, despite the space and staffing restrictions, there’s an ongoing commitment to move the collection forward.
The stripdown
Mr Walton had looked after the Viva with great care while he’d been able to, but the engine had seized because of water ingress and there were rust concerns. ‘We found corrosion in the boot floor, the A pillars, the screen aperture… it was going to need a fair bit of welding,’ says Forder. ‘So we decided to bite the bullet.’
‘We pulled it apart and sent it for chemical stripping,’ says Boddy. Those few words modestly summarise months of patient work. ‘The hinge pins were a bastard,’ he says, referring to the grief he endured trying to remove the doors. ‘You have to get the hinges flippin’ hot to knock the pins out, and while one side gave in, the other didn’t and we had to make a hole in the top of the door skin to drill the pin down through the hinge.’
As they proceeded, Boddy and Forder got some help from a Vauxhall apprentice with an passion for older vehicles – Chris Smith would return throughout the job when time allowed. Meanwhile, the team were cheered that the rust wasn’t terminal.
‘Vivas can rot so badly in the sills and wheelarches, and this one actually looked pretty solid compared to some HBS I’ve seen,’ says Boddy. ‘Luckily it had already had a pair of front inner and outer wings fitted. But less luckily, they weren’t very well done.’
The chemical stripping process revealed more corrosion damage than expected, so Boddy and Forder brought in a friend and colleague of theirs, Keith May, to assess the metal repairs.
May runs Vauxhall Green Parts and would be crucial to sourcing numerous items the team required during the rebuild – but with his other hat on, he is also a skilled panelbeater.
Bodywork repairs
May reveals that most decent repair sections and panels now fetch a price that’s not far off the cost in man hours of making one from scratch. As Vauxhall had the budget for some outside help, May began by coming in a couple of days a week to start the repairs. That soon became four or five days a week.
‘From what looked like a solid base to start with, I reckon the metalwork took six months in manpower terms,’ May says. Part of the problem was the complexity of the repair sections. Some, such as the floor of the boot, needed to be formed over a jig. ‘The boot floor was very perforated,’ says Andy Boddy. ‘If you had a light under it it resembled a colander.’ The panel in question has a series of deep swages in it, but without a Seventies Vauxhall body press at their
disposal, the team was obliged to find another solution. Keith May made up a sturdy wooden base and attached a sheet of steel, to which he welded half-sections of steel pipe, giving the right spacing and depth for the swages in the panel. All that remained was to persuade a new sheet of flat steel to take on the same contours.
‘I put a 15-degree bend in the sheet to get it to lie down on the former, then put a G-clamp in the middle and worked from the centre to the outside,’ says May. He used an off-cut of flat steel bar held like a chisel, and struck with a hammer to stretch the steel over the former’s ribs. ‘It’s not difficult as long as you use the right gauge of steel,’ says May. ‘The ribs are there to provide strength, so they allow the use of thinner-gauge steel than you’d use for a totally flat panel of that size.’
Much more corrosion was discovered around the lower rear section of the body, often requiring involved repairs to replace junctions where three, four or even five pieces of metal met. The worst areas were the section forward of the fuel tank that suffered slow water torture beneath a leaky rear window, and the base of the A-pillar. The original front wheelarch liners were made of waxed cardboard and had disintegrated long ago, allowing damp and debris to collect.
In addition to all of this, one other task stood out – rectifying an original error during manufacture, rather than corrosion that had ocurred since. ‘A curved panel between the inner and outer sill had been welded on too low back in 1970, giving a permanent bulge in the sill. Good old Ellesmere Port! We released the spot welds, peeled back the sill and fixed it,’ says Boddy.
After hundreds of man-hours of welding and grinding, the shell was almost ready for paint preparation. Welding the front wings – which had been brazed-on by the previous owner – was the final job. ‘The outers are supposed to be welded on, but as a kind of future-proofing measure we’ve converted them to bolton,’ says Boddy. ‘We’ve welded studs to the underside of the wing seam and they look like spot welds from above. But the studs pass through the inner wing and a nut fixes on from underneath.’
Preparation and paint
The team was keen to put the shell through the ‘tank’ at Vauxhall’s van plant, where an electrolytic paint process creates a tough, long-lasting finish. Sadly, those in charge felt (perhaps with good reason) that sloshing an old Viva shell around in their immaculate tank might compromise the finish of the next vans that went through.
So the shell was returned to the stripping company for a final acid dip and etch-priming, after which it was laboriously skimmed with fine filler where necessary and sanded down using a long block to achieve a consistent surfaces from one panel to the next. Next, Vauxhall’s regular partner BASF took on the job of painting. It went to the company’s training facility in Milton Keynes where primer and then colour coats were applied.
The tricky decision to move away from the original Sebring Silver to another GT colour, Monza Red, was one made by Andy Boddy, Terry Forder, Vauxhall’s PR Manager Simon Hucknall and the Director of Communications, Denis Chick.
‘We have so many silver cars in the collection,’ says Forder. ‘We decided we needed something different. And of the other original GT paint options – Goodwood Green, Elkhart Yellow, Monaco White, Le Mans Blue and Monza Red – the red is the brightest.’
Trim
Any Viva GT is scarce enough, but this is a MKII version without the matt-black bonnet and with other changes. Some parts seemed to be altogether extinct. Though Keith May unearthed certain items, the team had to get creative once more. ‘The dash top had chunks out of the foam,’ says Boddy. ‘The bits that come down either side of the dash were ruined and I had to build them up with glassfibre before we could get the whole thing re-covered in leather.’ He had an even greater task with the centre console, which in the end was made up from ‘a mixture of broken bits and others we’d built from scratch,’ as Boddy puts it. Thankfully the Mkii-specific black headlining could be saved, cleaned and put back with original sprung rods.
‘The seats and doorcards were re-trimmed by the previous owner, but he ran into some bother too,’ says Boddy. ‘It looks like he couldn’t find the right MKII items so the rear side-trims are MKI, with the armrests two inches higher up.’ We’d never have known. Tiny items such as the correct wash-wipe switch (very hard to source) and the silver finish around the glovebox and dashboard instruments (hand painted with a brush) soaked up yet more man-hours, but at least the team had increasingly useful assistance from the young apprentice, Chris Smith. He had been May’s occasional shadow through much of the metalworking, learning as he went. ‘Keith would give me a task, a bit of welding say, and I’d do it four or five times until it was coming out right,’ says Smith.
Engine
His on-the-job education moved swiftly on to engine stripping, including the use of a press to free up a piston in one badly rusted bore. Before long, they had a heavy slantfour engine in pieces, and it was time to decide how much to keep. ‘We thought we could probably save the original block if the 0.040in
overbore took out the corrosion, but the crank was done for,’ says Forder. It was already undersized, so further machining to correct the corrosion would mean the crank journals would end up too small for the available bearing shells. It was time to replace it.
A spare two-litre slant-four donated a healthy crankshaft. During the build-up Smith learned the mysteries of using squashed Plastigauges – skinny waxy plastic sticks – to measure plain bearing clearances. Forder and Boddy finished the engine build, but not without running into some problems. ‘Although it’s a well-known engine, parts for the slantfour are getting harder to find,’ says Forder. ‘We had to get a dipstick blank from a Bedford CF van. But the oddest thing was the trouble with a valve.’
The team used an all-new set of valves from May but, when setting the tappets, Andy Boddy noticed a problem. The tappet adjustment in these overhead-cam engines is taken care of by a threaded wedge inside a bucket-shaped object. The wedge screws in across the middle of the bucket and has a flat side that rests on the top of the valve stem. If you need to reduce the valve clearance, you wind the wedge further in, and to increase the gap, wind it further out. But Boddy couldn’t get anywhere near.
‘Even with the fattest wedge wound all the way in, it wasn’t touching the valve. I had to remove the cam carrier and the tappets and put a straight edge across the tops of the stems. Sure enough, one of them was low. It turned out to be a manufacturing error – the flare from the stem to the valve head was too large and it was gripping in the valve guide.’
Running gear and oddments
With Keith May’s hands-on involvement finished, the courier’s van must have worn a trench between his premises and Vauxhall’s Heritage Centre. As Andy Boddy and Terry Forder rebuilt the front and rear suspension, steering and brakes, May supplied every bush, most braking parts, oil seals and gaskets, plus a number of minor oddments. And when ‘hen’s teeth’ items like a heater valve were required, the time spent searching could add up – unless they got very lucky.
‘We actually found a heater valve in our own stores,’ says Boddy. ‘It’s about the only time that happened.’
A neoprene crankshaft rear oil seal came from Australia to prevent the familiar Vauxhall slant-four oil patch on the garage floor, while GAZ had to supply dampers at each corner because the originals are no longer available. A new windscreen was ordered as part of small batch created by Triplex, replacing the deeply scratched original. And when something really couldn’t be found, pragmatism took over. ‘We re-did the wiring loom, removing the bodges,’ says Fordham. ‘But you can’t get the right wrapping tape for it. It’s green, but we ended up settling for the wrong shade.’
As a sting in the tale, many of the items labelled and stored two years previously had suffered a strange mishap. Masking tape used to identify them was frustratingly blank, the ink mysteriously bleached.
After two years, what started as an easily fixed addition to the Heritage Centre had become a timehungry labour of love. Obsessions over correctness ocassionally had to be put to one side, and the Viva was finished in time for a debut at the Classic Motor Show in November 2016 at the NEC. When you remember that the team had been maintaining and running more than 70 other vehicles in the collection during this period, its dedication to Vauxhall’s mobile heritage hits home. Perhaps they deserve a breather before filling in the next gap. Thanks to: Simon Hucknall, Andy Boddy, Terry Forder, Keith May and Chris Smith