At this point, I am running out of time to work on the car in our garage. My parents are bringing my dads Solstice back this month, so I had to get the ball rolling on the car. I figured that if I separated the body from the frame, I’d be able to work on one or the other when the Solstice comes back. Either that, or transport the car to another location and work on it there. Regardless of losing my working space, removing the body was the next step to continue with the restoration as there is little I could do at this point in time with my lack of finances to purchase new parts for it.

I had sent a message to my friend Mike, asking if he wanted to build a rotisserie. Minutes later, he arrived at my house with his room mate John. This was a huge coincidence, John hadn’t seen the Triumph yet so they had stopped by without any prior knowledge of my message. Having two friends over now, I persuaded them into helping me take the body off.

Now here is where the glorious Haynes manual comes into play as being not so glorious. Mike noticed that the exhaust connected to the body so I removed those bolts. We had spent hours trying to get the body off, trying many many methods to detach it from the frame. Railway tracks, sledgehammers, 2×4 pry bars, you name it – we tried it! Having their own work to do, they called it quits and went home after a failed attempt. I spent the next two days figuring out what was still holding onto the body. I had missed the e-brake cable that attaches to each drum brake which I saw when I was under the car. Although I had disconnected the rotating assembly, the cable still had to come off.

I crawled out from under the car, noticing that it would be easier to take a wheel off to get at the cable. Since my car has splined hubs, the wheels are hammer off; where you hammer the wheel lock off with a rubber mallet and slide the wheel off of the spline as opposed to removing nuts. Although the one wheel gave me a very difficult time, they came off quite nicely off of the splines themselves. Removing the first rear wheel showed me exactly why the body was not coming off of the frame. Not only did the Haynes manual fail to tell me about the handbrake cable and the exhaust, but it didn’t tell me that the shocks were attached to the body itself rather than the frame. I thought for sure it would have been on the frame. I quickly removed the nut on each side securing the strut to the body and popped them out of position. Just like that, the body was free.

I had text Mike the next morning asking to bring the guys over again to pull the body off, getting a reply that he is bringing the army of idiots over. They promptly arrived, this time with his other room mate Harrison and his friend Brendan. We moved the cars out of the driveway, opened up the second bay and had one man on each corner of the car. We lifted, walked out into the driveway, over to the next bay, and back into the garage. After resting the body down on 2×4’s, we smiled, laughed and took pictures of our accomplishment then they went on their way back home.

After spending so much time trying to solve the problem, the body was finally off.

– Sean