We are preparing Bill Prout’s Sebring Sprite for the Lime Rock fall festival coming this labor day weekend. If you are unfamiliar with this great event, it’s well worth a visit, with great vintage racing Saturday and Monday, and a wonderful concours car show on the track on Sunday (Check out more on the event here). I’ll be there for the car show Sunday with my Bugeye we call “the egg,” it’s iris blue with a blue hardtop and looks like a baby robin could pop out at any second. Hope to see you there!
Anyway, Bill’s Bugeye has been in our shop for a new 1275 engine, five-speed conversion, rear disk brakes and lots of other sorting to prepare for this event. There is still a lot to do with just one month till the flag drops. This week, we fit a flip-forward Sebring style nose, which is now at the paint shop for a few coats of British Racing Green.
This fitting is among the more difficult procedures to do well, as nose fit is never easy, steel or fiberglass. This glass nose first needed to be aligned with the steel body, then fiberglass flanges all needed to be trimmed to fit, and then, as pictured here, the driving lights, grill, headlight buckets and park lights all had to be fit. Symmetry is essential, especially since the front view you see in these photos will be seen by thousands when the car is parked on the track at Lime Rock and at other future shows. Of course the fiberglass piece is not exactly symmetrical because it was probably molded from an old metal sebring nose that was hand rolled and hammered in the 50s or 60s. So drilling the holes you see in the photo album was a somewhat stressful event. We wanted to get everything positioned just right. Thankfully, lot’s of Sprinzle Sprite pictures are available for reference.
We’re really happy with the result.
