Hello GT Forum friends. As promised and if you don’t follow my Facebook / Dutch tread, here’s the next installment of my Opel GT build story – and I have so much to tell you since my first post. Although I introduced you to both the cars and the project two years ago, there were some details I decided to omit. Well, sort of anyway.
So, before you continue to read this installment, maybe you should go back and visit the introduction post.
To recap on the build – I’m building a one-off Opel GT that will be used for a number of things in 2015 and beyond, including a role as a track-ready car. It’s being built in the Netherlands, here we go then…
So as you can see from this pictures, it all starts at the bottom, My floors are great, no rust, from inside the floors not too bad, some minor dents needed attention
.
If there is rust; There's only one way to do it, cut the rust out and replace the metal!
After this nose repair we loaded the bare chassis on our trailer and took it south to the paint shop.
We've found that stripping entire panels using a sand blaster is too messy and can easily damage the thin metal. I used chemical stripping and sanding.
The cage itself is pretty much done, but there is a lot of work remaining.
It’s hard to find a wheel that works in more applications than the timeless BBS RS. The wheels are fully rebuilt and measure 15×8-inch up the front and an enormous 15×9-inch in the rear with an offset of 3. Both the barrels and centers have also been coated in a black finish that contrasts beautifully with the color of the center caps.
The C20XE has become the popular engine to swap into small and light cars, we have seen them fitted to various generations of Escord’s for example with awesome results. I decided to switch from the X20XEV to C20XE cause a number of reasons. It was quite a challenge to get the alignment right, without cutting more metal in the engine bay.
BONUS Images, to be continued