The spitfire project would be really cool but I had a few problems I was not able to solve. Main one was there was absolutely no way to get a strut front end under the spitfire hood. Second problem was I have not been able to find a decent spitfire to use
The one I have here is my sisters car and I still plan on eventually building it into something useful for her but it will mainly be just put a reliable engine and wiring in it and send it on it's way. She has said she doesn't want it turned into a geo metro and wants it to be very close to stock, just reliable. I guess seeing the insane stuff I have done with other cars she is afraid of what it would be like if I went nuts on it.
I still make no guarantees that I will end up with a metro convertible when I am done. I had to weld some 1 inch square tubing all over the bottom of my xfi though to keep the doors lined up close enough to actually close. It has some really serious issues with rust so really this is a matter of I have to do something and it needs to be running this fall at the latest I figure. I have been looking for something easy to build my drivetrain into and this car happened to be cheap and made it into my driveway first.
Converting an existing car to a tube chassis is way easier than scratch building a chassis. I just have to start with the roll cage and go forward to catch the existing engine and suspension mounts, then go rear and get the suspension mounts. From there just hang the body on it and it is ready to reassemble. Everything fits since it was made to fit together properly to start with. Scratch building a frame takes a lot more effort since there are no existing mounting locations to use. It took months to build the chassis for the kit car and that was cheating and using existing subframes. The body was installed on it probably 300 times getting everything lined up.
After I get this one done I might decide it isn't finished and cut the body off it and make it something else later on, that airplane canopy site was a bad link for me to see.
