READER’S RESTO: Cortina
Reader’s restoration: Tony Bellamy’s 1967 Cortina GT was sold to him as an easy project just needing reassembling, but as he and son Paul discovered, in reality there was a lot of work involved…
Mk1 GT ex-rally car returned to the road.
B uying an unfinished project can be a great time and money saver since someone else has already done the work. But that’s provided the work has actually been done.
“This 1967 Cortina GT was bought for my retirement,” explains Tony Bellamy, “I bought it in July 2016 as a restored shell and boxes full of refurbished mechanical parts. The seller said he’d lost interest in it and we were after just such a project. All my son, Paul and I needed to do was put it all back together in my double garage. We’re both paint and body men, so we could tell the shell was solid, and the welding had been done to a professional standard.” Problem being this project wasn’t all that it seemed.
“We bought a rotisserie to mount the body on from Rollover Jigs,” remembers Paul, “and that was a really useful bit of kit. The shell had all the correct spot welds, but some of the other welds still needed finishing. Most of the panels had repair panels welded in. It had a new floor, inner and outer sills, tubs, hinge panels and more.”
The Cortina had evidently led a quite hard life, when it was just a year old it had become a rally car so every part had suffered from decades on — and off — the track. “We got it sodablasted,” continues Paul, “and then it was obvious it had previously been ground back to bare metal — leaving scratches we couldn’t sand out, since it would have ended up tinfoil-thin.