Dutton Kit Cars and their owners
My New Dutton
Today I bought another Dutton. This one has a 3.1 litre Essex V6. It's MOT has lapsed and it has a number of issues, the biggest one being that it has had a front end shunt which has upset the suspension geometry, and the bonnet fit, and the steering. The last 6 inches of the main rail is crumpled, moving the ARB. Finding a good reference to work from to restore the geometry looks to be an interesting puzzle. In this picture you can see that the nearside wheel has a different camber to the offside. It was the nearside that was hit.
I will do some investigation over the weekend and post some pictures of the damage. It was dark by the time I got home, and I was worn out. The journey was 400 miles in total, all but a handful were motorway : M5, M42, A42, M1. The car was about 15 miles south of Sheffield.
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Comment by James Doulton on April 6, 2019 at 23:27
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New toys! A new pedal assembly and a new radiator. The pedals are OBP VIC17 with remote adjustable balance bar (my car has separate front and rear circuits). That will also get the master cylinder away from the exhaust and blocking N03 spark plug. The rad is a "Polo" rad, as favoured by Westfields and others. This one is a Coolex version with 70mm quad core matrix.
An old friend visited me last week and it gave me the impetus to "just do it". He has a Spartan which he has been building for 35 years! I'm not going to do that.
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I know - even if the car went fast enough the wing would be in turbulent air.
it would only be for the look of it, and to intimidate other road users!
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That picture shows that it NEEDS a big tail wing!
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It is a pretty solid affair with two extra braces going backwards to the boot floor. It is definitely not the Dutton one. The main loop is a little wide for the chassis and its lower mounting flanges very nearly touch the inside of the rear tyres.
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The upright is a front roll bar - it goes from the floor, through the dash and then hugs the windscreen. There is quite a lot of extra metal in the chassis around the cockpit and the lower mounting for the front roll bar will probably foul the cockpit brakes. With a front and rear roll bar, I'm surprised that there is no T bar. I don't think that I want the front roll bar, so I'm expecting to change that area.
There is no room to move the transmission tunnel as the box is snug next to it. The lump in the floor next to the transmission is in both footwells and was to clear the 3-into-1 exhaust manifold which merges at about that point. I shall be removing the existing rusty exhausts in favour of cast manifolds (yuk!) and fitting side exhausts, all in order to increase the ground clearance.
I don't really expect a bought pedal box to fit straight off but it might be possible for me to modify it without ruining it. I think that modifying that area will require the whole windscreen and dash to come out. I shall have to be brave and just hope I will remember how it all goes back!
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Comment by Steve Kerswell on February 3, 2019 at 17:17
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what is that tubular upright James? plus you have a few bumps in your pedal area, are they being used or could you make some space. I fiddled with a pedal box for ages for John Wilkinson, more effort than it was worth. Cutting and shutting etc. ended up scrapping the pedals ad made new from flat bar on edge and small foot bars, worked first time.
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I was looking at floor mounted ones, particularly the 'cockpit' ones which have the master cylinders below the floor level and pointing towards the driver. They look best because the forward facing ones would probably interfere with the exhaust. The current master cylinder is very close to the exhaust port on the back cylinder and it also obscures the spark plug.
These are the ones I was looking at ebay 191040372052 - the OBPVIC17 from Optimum Balance Products. I contacted them a couple of weeks ago for better dimensions but they haven't been able to come up with any.
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Having mostly finished the drivers side seat tub, I have moved onto the pedals. Currently they are not very good because they are a little too low and they are very close together. I have been looking at alternative pedal boxes but there are limitations with each. I have spent a lot of time messing around with cardboard patterns and the like but I haven't got a straight forward solution.
Then for some reason (I can't remember exactly why) I tried raising the seating position by about 5 inches. What I found was that it made a big difference to the pedals and to my leg positions. Now my feet were angled instead of straight-ish and I could get the ball of my foot on the pedals. It also seemed a bit more comfortable. As far as I can see, the only problem is that the top of the windscreen is right in the centre of my eye line. So how easy would it be to increase the windscreen height? The current visible glass is 12".
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'glassing' not 'classing'
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