Accolades and further progress,

I was up to Jetstream Auto & Custom this week to drop off a few things and was pleased to find that work on my BN1 has begun!

Jason and his team have done several award winning Healeys and other British cars over the years, most of which I've had the honour of doing the upholstery work for.

In fact we just finished restoring another black Healey BN2 a few weeks ago for a local client.
Of course once again, I did all the interior for it (see my article on Healey BN2 in Persimmon)

Then, last weekend upon it's debute, it won the award for best debut restoration at the big VanDusen British car show in Vancouver! - actually for the second year in a row! 

Last year the winning car was an identical black BN2 owned and restored by Trevor Parker that Jason did the body on and I did the interior.

It was wonderful to see the 2 almost identical cars sitting side by side at the show.
- Trevor's car, fitted with the LeMans tuning kit with louvered hood and strap, got the award for best in class at this years show as well!

Getting back to my car, Jason's crew have been working on preparing the aluminum panels over the past week. They filled in any unwanted or enlarged holes in all the panels, starting with the front shroud which had the many added & enlarged holes for fitting the splash shield along the front...

they smoothed out some of the dents and then gave it a coat of primer which helps expose the dents for more fettling...

they gave the same treatment to the rear shroud, hood and boot lid - all of which just needing some time with a hammer and dolly to work out the dents and get smooth again..

The front and rear fenders are all going to need some typical metal repair work. They've been blasted and primed for the time being and will soon have their new repair sections welded in to replace the corroded areas...

The 2 piece dash just had a pair of holes in the center to be filled that were probably from an old badge or something. They're going to clean up the hole for the headlight switch which seems to have lost it's original shape (round with a flat at the bottom) - They also noted the crudely shaped slot for the trip reset knob along the bottom edge, however I've decided to leave it alone for originality sake...

Of course the reason I stopped by was to drop off one more piece that will eventually be getting painted body colour with the rest of the chassis - the bonnet latch bracket and assembly. Here I took a couple of pics to show how the pieces fit together, the main bracket will be body colour while the rest of the hardware will be plated or painted black...

I've been continuing to go through the my many bags of parts and carefully clean and polish and inspect each component, the other day I cleaned up all my throttle linkage..

and a few brackets and hardware for mounting the steering gear and idler arms, of course these bolts and hardware will next be refinished in black phosphate as original -

The wall of BN1 parts is looking shinier all the time!

until next time -