We’d been maintaining Chris’ late roadster for several years when he decided it was time to do it all up pretty. We knew the car was in excellent condition, virtually rust and damage-free, as we had been all over it before when doing brake and suspension work. I think we ended up with a little spot in the floors and some small dogleg patches.
Aside from that, he wanted it to look and feel like an early car. So we went with a Moss chrome number conversion kit, with the slatted grille. To lower the car, we went with de-arched lowering springs in the rear and lowered supple springs. I had a chrome-bumpered subframe, to keep the geometry right and we changed to the lowed bump-stops. Being a late car, the caster angle was already modified, so there was no need for the wedge shims.
We replaced the steering rack with a new CB length one to match the early, lower subframe. The only modification needed was a slight notch to be cut in the steering rack perches to match the lower geometry of the late steering column. We even did it with the rack in place, using the two alignment cones as per the manual. Two short passes with the plasma cutter on the side of each perch leaving a short “hinge” remaining at the front, push the rack down until the cones line up, two tack welds each side, remove the rack, weld fully and touch up the paint. Bob’s yer proverbial uncle. I can probably find some photos of that.
The following documents the chrome bumper conversion, as that seems fairly popular. We started with the engine bay stripped, because we were going to paint it anyway.
