‘IT’S ONE OF MY ALLTIME FAVOURITES’
Fuzz Townshend takes us behind the scenes of the latest series of Car SOS. This week, how a Cavalier Turbo 4x4 won his affection
Back in the 1990s I began to get left behind regarding my knowledge of thenmodern cars. After all, on a lowly musician’s salary, I’d have been an unlikely showroom visitor, with so little cash to flash.
No, my own transportation remained rooted in distinctly pre1990s fayre, which is why I had no previous experience of Vauxhall’s Cavalier Turbo 4x4, at least not until we picked up Darren’s muchloved example and transported it to the very special workshop of motorsport guru, Ric Wood and his crack team, near Stockport.
The reason for once again calling upon Ric’s assistance was that some major surgery was required to the Vauxhall in order to help Darren back into a car that he hadn’t set foot in for more than a decade.
Unfortunately Darren had been involved in a major road traffic accident back in the late 2000s, which had left him with lifechanging injuries, rendering him tetraplegic – unable to move any parts of his body below chin level. Assisting 6ft 2in Darren into and out of his Cavalier with the least fuss and without causing him injury was the goal.
One very obvious obstacle stood in the way of success and that was the nearside B-post between the car’s front and rear doors. Removal of this key structural component was a given but doing so also eliminated the rear door’s original hinge points and the front door’s striker plate together with its locking mechanism. The only way this could be achieved was to integrate the B-post and rear door, and to hinge the latter from the C-post.
Attaching the B-post involved cutting a complete item from a scrap car, fabricating some attachment plates and bracketry and then welding the components together.
Then tapered insert wedges were formed into the top and bottom of the post to allow them to dovetail into correspondingly shaped receivers in the sill and top rail.
Ric’s scanning and CAD facilities allowed him and his team to design and fabricated a ‘floating ’ rear door hinge, which allowed the door to open outwards and away from the body in the same plane as the front door, the end result being a sort of ‘barn door’ effect.
I was used as a test dummy (I’m a similar height to Darren), which revealed that in addition to the aforementioned work, the sill would need to be lowered by a few millimetres to accommodate an outward-hinging wheelchair seat base-receiving baseplate, the latter being an item kindly supplied by Braun Ability of Sweden.
Of course strength needed to be added to the now-gaping aperture. This was achieved by cutting open the sills and lower sections of the A- and C-posts and inserting high quality T45 twin tubes, conjoined by welded gussets, which were then themselves welded into the openedout sections before the whole strengthened sill was covered over once more.
There is so much more to this episode, which ranks among my all-time favourites. Remember to wear your chin straps, folks – it’s an absolute jaw-dropper.