1967 SUNBEAM ALPINE V6

(ABOVE) The Alpine in final form, 1999, posed in the rear of the Mazda R&D building in Irvine, California. Guards Red paint, tan Connelly hide upholstery, Panasport wheels and 40 and 50-series tires, bumpers removed and pans filled, oil cooler, hood scoop, scratch built headlight rims. Grille and emblems removed. Not visible are the screened vents on the bonnet for heat dispersion.

God, will I ever have the energy and time to create something like this again?

This car started out as a stock Alpine that I purchased for $2800 from my long-term best California friend, Mike Andrews. Mike was the first person whose hand I shook after moving to California from the Chicago area in June. 1979. He’s my daughter Juliana’s godfather. She’s 27 now, married two years to an Icelandic computer whiz, and has just left a 3-year stint at NATO in Brussels, to head for greener pastures in Norway.

Yeah, are we THAT old?

Getting off-topic is a favorite hobby (habit?) of mine…so are ellipses…

Mike bought the Alpine non-running from a college student in Alpine, CA. It had been painted in deep green enamel rather inexpertly (wrinkles and runs) with everything else left stock. It was dusty and oily in the engine compartment. The carpets were worn, black vinyl seats very scuffed and dull. Mike spent LOTS of hours getting it running, upgrading the paint in spots, replacing rubber, making new headlight rings (more on this later!). When I say “LOTS of hours”, I mean LOTS. It had the stock 1725 four-banger and twin SU carbs. Stock four-speed and rear end, all getting rather long in the tooth, with 1967 metallurgy to boot. Kind of unreliable as a result.

After a good wash-and-wax, I drove it as it was, but after a year I realized that as far as vehicles go, there were always tasteful “improvements” to be made. By this time I had acquired a 1500 square foot space in a new industrial park just down the street from Road and Track’s offices on Monrovia in Costa Mesa, CA. (R&T is in Newport Beach, just a block over the border. Rents are cheaper in CM.)

One weekend, the Sunbeam rolled into the shop and was taped up for a 6” wide Pearl Gray racing stripe, which had to be shot in enamel so as not to craze the fencepost green alkyd enamel underneath. The car had also borne a full set of mid-1970s Capri mags, which besides being dated (it was 1989, for Pete’s sake!), were ugly from Day One, with diamond-cut spokes over a black-powder-coated base. I shot these in the same Pearl Gray. I then lowered the suspension on all four corners by removing one leaf in the rear and cutting one half coil in the front.

(ABOVE) THE ALPINE in its intermediate livery, Spring, 1995. Original Deep Green alkyd enamel paint, pale grey center stripes and wheels, Pale grey interior and roll bar, Lucas driving lights, hardtop, and emblems still in place. Original 1725cc engine still fitted.

(ABOVE) Fall, 1995. A few months after the Spring, 1995 photo was taken. Now with twin backup lamps and chromed hubcaps fitted over those awful Capri alloy wheels. Note rubber anti-rattle boot strap. Tidy!

(ABOVE) Handbuilt headlamp rims can be seen here—made by previous owner, Mike A. RAC badge on front pan.

(ABOVE) UGLY CAPRI MAGS! 4” wide X 13” diameter. Not exactly optimum performance. Design D+, performance C-.

My eventual plan was a complete jackstand restoration down to every nut and bolt. A rotisserie would have been better, but a couple of grand (pre-Ali-Express!) for a rotisserie that I’d use once would not have been good economics at the time.

I made a wood dash out of premium mahogany. Instead of setting the Smiths gauges in from the front with their chrome rims exposed, I took a clue from my ’68 Silver Shadow (whose woodwork was being restored by me at the same time), and set the gauges in from the back, with the edges radiused and the chrome rims hidden. I also constructed a center console with walnut fascia panels and the edges wrapped in black Naugahyde to match the dash padding. The slanted front panels were made to slide up and over the 2 DIN radio slot, which held a radio/CD player and an EQ. The flat horizontal surface held a stock Alpine ashtray, and a cutout for the Lokar shift lever that went along with the engine and transmission swap.

Next was a grey Naugahyde interior with deep grey cut pile Wilton carpeting, bound in Pearl Grey, with a Light Grey heel pad. The rear “deck” area was done in Wilton, and new padded edging was made to surround what was formerly the convertible top well. I had a hardtop and detested the look of the convertible top.

This was it for about 5 years. At that later date, I ran into a dry spell in my business, so I put the Alpine into part-time status, bought a nice Pontiac Fiero as a driver for a couple of grand, and wheeled the Alpine into the shop. As it was to turn out, business got busy again, and it didn’t leave for eight long months.

During those eight months, I stripped the Alpine of every last and bolt, put everything into labeled boxes and plastic tubs, made a master list of these containers, as there were over 80, and made another list of parts and fasteners to be replaced. Somehow all this stuff was sourced and purchased from local vendors pre-internet! It really paid to be located where I was, within a couple of miles of all of  my vendors.

I then stripped the body to bare metal, using chemical paint stripper from my local body shop supplier, and my random orbital sander with #60 grit discs and finally by hand in tight spots. I found lots of skim-coated bondo on the fender tops, door edges, and one rear fin. The rest of the car was fairly clean (ZERO rust; California mountain climate originally). I clean-washed it several times with denatured alcohol and gave it a couple of goings-over with Prep-Sol, which at that time was still available, though it had been outlawed and was limited to remaining open stock.

It was time for the real live paint process, which I was itching to get to.

I started out with several coats of a thin solvent-based, non-catalyzing transparent urethane sealer, followed by a light scuffing with Scotchbrite pads. I should add here that the doors, hood, and decklid had all been removed and sawhorsed. Door shuts, and returns for hood and decklid were all stripped, filled, sanded, and detailed to a high level. The sealer coat is to seal (of course), but also to eliminate any solvent crazing problems when applying the primer coats and color, both of which use aggressive solvents which can penetrate the areas of overlap between the different substrates (paint, filler, other primers). It was especially important to remove every bit of the old enamel paint, as it is very sensitive to delaminating and wrinkling when coated with the aggressive solvents in the new undercoats and finish colors.

Next came the first of several coats of polyester spray filler. Maybe some of you see this as a “cheat”, but back in the 1970s, after this product’s initial introduction to time-is-money production shops, I decided to try it on two Cord restorations with great results, perfect surfaces, and show trophies, so I had no qualms about using it on my own Alpine restoration.

My strategy was to spray an initial Light Gray coat of this stuff, let it cure overnight, then dry-scuff this thoroughly with #220 open coat aluminum oxide 3M paper, “A” (light) weight, no block!) and follow up after curing with a coat of Dark Gray. I would then also dry-scuff this thoroughly and apply a coat of Red Oxide spray primer as the top coat of this material. I let these three contrasting layers cure thoroughly for a few days, and begin block-sanding, this time with #320 aluminum oxide sandpaper, used dry. I encourage the use of open coat aluminum oxide paper, and I say “dry” because the paper is not waterproof and the adhesive that holds the abrasive to this paper is mucilage, the “horse hoof” stuff, which is water-soluble!

There are a few types of aluminum oxide paper available, but long experience has taught me to use the tan-colored stuff. The white stuff, while waterproof, “loads up” with sanding dust and dulls quickly. Under NO circumstances would I use garnet paper, which looks similar to my preferred tan stuff, but is for woodworking and dulls very quickly and also will “load up”.

I made up a half-dozen semi-hard rubber sanding blocks, using a professional product sold under the brand “Dura-Block”. This is a high-density closed cell EVA black foam block that is precision-machined and comes in lengths of 18” to 24” and all sorts of cross-sectional configurations. It can be cut to length on a band saw. I wrap the sandpaper around it to wet-sand, and for dry sanding, glue the paper onto the block with 3M #77 spray glue. The biggest Dura-Block is roughly 2” X 4” in cross section and very stiff. It’s excellent for low-crown surfaces to get the ripples out. I bandsaw-cut this big size to several lengths: 18”, 12”, and 6”, which assortment will be idea for both short and long low-crown surfaces. The smaller Dura-Block pieces are 3/4” X 1 1/4” in cross section, and are perfectly suitable for smaller details. Dura-Block even makes a teardrop-shaped item that is good for inside curves and inside corners! I save all of my Dura-Blocks in a couple of boxes—one for the bigger pieces and one for smaller. (I have blocks ranging from 2” X 4” X 18” down to ¼” X ½” X ¾” for tiny details.)

Now we naturally come to the reason for using three different contrasting colors of spray primer, applied in alternate layers. As I begin to sand the top Red coat, I will sand through to the Dark Grey layer and then possibly to the final Light Grey layer and even down to the base bare metal of the body. There’s nothing wrong with any of this. Experience taught me that this leaves layers of contrasting colors which expose low spots and pinholes. High spots (bare body metal) are checked with a straight edge, and if really bumpy or high, needed going over with a scraper or vixen file to take them down. Since most bodies like the Sunbeam’s are a combination of low spots and high spots, a number of strategies had to be used. I stuck to one area on opposite sides of the body, so that any filler or spot putty would be curing while I was sanding on the opposite side. Incidentally, the “filler” that I use, is only for small defects and is not “Bondo”, but rather a high-density polyester tooling compound. It is not as porous as “Bondo”, though a good deal harder and more difficult to sand back. It goes without saying (I think) that this spray and sand process was repeated several times (a dozen or more!) over a couple of weeks at least, before the body and all its details were determined to have true surfaces and transitions and no ripples across the low-crown areas like the doors and hood.

At the end of each working day, I would set aside an hour to clean up and then spray-prime any areas that needed it, which would have previously been circled with a crayon China Marker.

Lastly, I applied a transparent stone shield vinyl texture paint to the rocker panels and the very bottoms of both the front and rear pans, which could only be seen from underneath the car, but would protect the paint from stone chips.

I went around in my head for months trying to decide on a color for the Alpine. It finally came down to Red or Black. Ho and Hum. The body was smooth enough for a striking Black paint job, but having owned several Black and deep-colored cars over the years, I was plain exhausted with keeping them dust-free. The only negative to Red paint was the old Cop Magnet trope. I figured it would cost me several hundred bucks per year in various tickets.

Really off-topic here, but operating under the Illustrative Anecdote Exemption that I just invented, here we go—

I had just finished restoring my ’68 Silver Shadow in Diplomat Blue (VERY deep—almost black, and its original color, according to factory paperwork) and was backing out of the local donut shop’s driveway, very slowly and carefully due to street traffic, when the car “failed to proceed” (stalled). This was NOT common, I hasten to add! It took three tries, no longer than ten seconds total, to get the silent V8 running again. As I backed out of the parking lot and proceeded down Newport Boulevard, I was flagged down by a Costa Mesa cop, who gave me a ticket for “blocking a sidewalk”. Explanations were refused, and I proceeded on my way $200 poorer. What the hell, Rolls-Royce, huh? In my ten years of owning that car, it was the ONLY ticket I ever got. I typically drove over the speed limit and parked anywhere I darned well wanted to, and never got a second ticket.

Back to the Cop Magnet thing. In the end, I decided to paint the Sunbeam  Guards Red, the brightest solid red around at the time. A Porsche color, for both nit-pickers and cognoscenti. I received ONE ticket as it turned out, in the eight years I drove it in this color, for an unsignalled lane change on the PCH bridge in Newport Beach. This cop was a young, aggressive, abrasive OCD dick without any sense of humor. ‘Nuff said. It was a sunny morning, I had the hardtop off, and nothing could dilute the smile I wore. I think the cop thought I was smiling at a personal joke involving him. Could have been.

So, Guards Red.  Catalyzing series 21 Glassomax, two full gallons at several hundred a gallon. Wow! What a transformation! Door shuts, returns on the body,  details and windscreen frame (windscreen was removed!) and backs of hood and trunk first. Four wet coats, cure over the weekend, flip over the panels, and do the car proper.

I let it harden for a full week, then I misted a couple of spray cans of matte black lacquer over the entire car as a guide coat, and I wet sanded it with a combination of blocks and bare hands. There are also softer, easily flexible sponge rubber blocks which were ideal for tight curves (fender tops, trunklid back edge, and similar surface transitions. For wet sanding, I used a mixture of tap water and dishwashing detergent. The detergent reduces the surface tension water and keeps the sanding paper from loading up.

For doing big surfaces like an entire car, I use #800 3M Wetordry waterproof paper, cut into six pieces per sheet. I kept the paper very wet by dipping the block and paper into a bucket of the water/detergent mixture. I let it drip! Wet is important, as once the paper goes even slightly dry, it dulls out and wastes paper and time. The flat black guide coat is great for showing surfaces and low spots, of which there were very few and these were very small.

When the sanding was done—three sentences to describe, but one solid week’s hard and finicky work to accomplish—it was time to get out the Old Faithful Milwaukee 9” buffer. I use a foam support disc that allows wraparound of the buffing pad so the edges buff instead of burning like they do with the standard thin rubber support discs that come with the buffer. I started buffing with a wool shaggy pad and coarser 3M compound and moved on to a foam pad with finer compound and finally a very fine foam pad with glazing compound. Another weeks’ work. Really works the back and arm muscles. There are now hundreds of YouTube videos that go down the rabbit hole of buffing, but I had none of these in 1992, so it was all down to trial, error and experience. The spotless, glassy result shows in the very few non-digital small photos that I’ve posted. Total materials and supplies cost was a bit under three grand.

Previous owner Mike had made a pair of vacuum-formed headlight rims without the factory “eyebrow” detail, and I primed and painted these body color. These were amazing looking, perhaps due to the small “Lucas Prince of Darkness” cloisonné badges (tie tacks!) that were attached at top center of each rim. Decklid trim was removed and holes filled, and the Sunbeam badge on the grille lip was removed, along with the grille center bar for an open, more aggressive look. The engine was out, so the compartment was painted and detailed along with the main body finish. Small “B&M EQUIPPED” badges went onto each front quarter, just ahead of the doors. The windscreen glass was reinstalled with new rubber.

OK, paint description completed, it’s time to move on to the interior stuff.

(ABOVE) The Alpine interior in its final state, 1999. Note The hand-fabricated console with the sliding radio and EQ cover in its “up” position, Lokar shifter, centered boost gauge, instruments sans bezels, installed from the back, wood Nardi steering wheel with Harrington hub. The blue button on the steering wheel spoke activates the nitrous oxide injection. Glove box door is cut from the dash billet so the grain is continuous all the way across the panel.

I then acquired a large tan Connolly hide from my local pro upholstery outlet, along with several yards of wool Wilton carpeting in black. ONE task that I didn’t do myself on the Sunbeam was upholstery—the other was exhaust header fabrication— as these are very special crafts with STEEP learning curves, and though I did have a commercial walking-foot Singer sewing machine in my shop, there was NO way I was going to use my intermediate skills on a $700 Connolly hide victim. I therefore took the seats and rug patterns to an auto upholsterer in Costa Mesa, Roberto’s Auto Trim. Roberto’s been in business since 1964, and he’s the upholsterer of choice for all of the fabrication departments and shops who do the manufacturers’ million dollar dream show cars. He did all of our work at Mazda R&D, and his prices are reasonable. I recall paying $700 for both seats, ABSOLUTELY top quality. I think Roberto makes his profits from the contracts he had doing manufacturers’ concept and show cars. (I saw a six-figure invoice from his shop at Mazda R & D in 1992).

I covered the door and rear area panels myself, as they were simply flat with no sewn patterns or piping. I also made up three panels for the boot out of 1/4” plywood, and wrapped these in the tan hide, too. I installed a genuine vintage wood-rimmed steering wheel from Nardi, with wrinkle black-painted spokes. The wheel is adjustable: the hub is turned counter-clockwise to loosen the shaft coupling to allow the wheel to be slid in and out. The hub had a recess for a 3 1/2 “ diameter cloisonné Sunbeam Harrington center cap, for which I lathe-turned an adapter from Ren-Shape, a high-density tooling material. The boot floor was carpeted in bound black Wilton wool. I had found a space saver spare in the correct 4-bolt pattern, mounted on a lovely alloy factory wheel, on a visit to the local Ford dealer’s parts department—overstock, NOS, and on sale for $25, so this went into the boot. Lucky find. An 8” bass tube with integrated amplifier was held to the vertical trunk panel with adjustable nylon straps.

It was then time to address the mechanical and technical side of things, now that the body and interior were well-sorted!

The stock Alpine wiring was typical Lucas of the era—lots of cloth-jacketed wires with splices all over their lengths, colors faded and many joints left unsoldered and merely twisted and taped. All of these terminated in the type of Lucas fusebox with two fuses for the entire car. Yikes! I ripped it all out and installed a twelve-fuse wiring kit with soldered joints and shrink tubing covering every terminal end. Finally it was making sense as well as being 100% reliable. Lucas no more. The headlights were brighter, too…

The engine, a 2.8 litre Cologne Ford V6 that I think I paid $150 for in running condition, was completely disassembled and insected. I had the crank turned and fitted new .010 undersized main and rod bearings. I had John Iskenderian (Ed’s son, whose shop was across the parking lot from mine) grind a custom camshaft, and Costa Mesa Muffler made up a set of tubing headers.

A friend who worked at Shelby R&D scored me a prototype B&M blower from one of their GLH development mules. This looked like the standard B&M item, and used their end plates and pulleys, but was only 7” long, so it fit on top of the V6 perfectly. I machined up a 13mm thick adapter plate from T6 aluminum to go onto the stock V6 intake, and hogged out the 2 barrel manifold to match the blower output port. To top this all off, I set a Holley 650 CFM four-barrel that I rejetted. Then I made a custom NO2 setup with the cylinder in the trunk and individual injectors into each manifold intake port. The NO2 button was mounted on the steering wheel, and the first time I poked it, the head gaskets both blew in a mighty Whale Watch Whoosh and dumped all of the coolant on the street. Thus I learned the necessity of copper head gaskets, which I made up and fitted in the next week.

 I’ll describe the mods I did to the engine for cosmetics a bit later.

The transmission was a junkyard Ford C4 that I tore down and rebuilt with NOS internals and a B&M upgrade shift kit. The shifter and cable were Lokar and came up through the handbuilt center console’s mahogany top. The driveshaft was a shortened Ford Mustang unit, and the rear end was a narrowed Mustang GT350 unit with upgraded drums, bolted to the Alpine leafs. The front Alpine discs wore upgraded pads and bigger mounting hardware. Adjustable Koni shocks were fitted at all four corners. Wheels were 15” Panasports and tires were Goodrich radials in 185/50 in front and 205/40 in the rear.

The stock Alpine radiator proved insufficient to the task, so I bought a Ford truck radiator, mounted it horizontally under the trunk, and piped it through the rocker panels into the front system. This had a thermostatically-controlled fan. It cut down on ramp angle but was never damaged because I fitted a heavy expanded mesh steel shield under it all.

Interior: aside from the nice leather seats and Wilton wool carpeting, I had fabricated a custom console from maple structural pieces and curved side pieces from bending plywood, with a recessed mahogany top panel and vertical panels in mahogany with a sliding cover for the stereo system (radio/tape player and EQ unit, 2 DIN-sized opening). A cloisonné badge from an old washing machine (“HIGH POWER”, or some damned thing) was attached tp the radio cover with polished brass screws. The side panels were covered in black Naugahyde, and heater controls remained as stock in stock location. Window winder handles and interior door releases were kept as stock: Chrome-plated with black-painted bezels.

I’ve already described the dash panel, It had an opening glove box that had been carefully cut out of the dash blank and bottom-hinged, so the grain matched all the way across. This took many hours with a very thin blade. Added to the factory Smiths instruments was a boost gauge for the blower. Because the blower turned at twice crank speed, I kept the revs under 6K, but still got 12 pounds boost at 5K engine rpm!

I think I ran up about 500 hours before the car came down onto the floor again. The engine started right up and sounded healthy and crazy, thanks to the glasspack mufflers and large diameter exhaust plumbing. When I drove it and stabbed the accelerator to engage passing gear, it howled like a mad wolf and turned heads for a half block all around. This was before Cars and Coffee, dammit…

I can safely say that the only parts on the car that were not modified were the front parking lights and the taillight rims. Everything went through a modification and upgrading process. Every fastener save the lugnuts was upgraded both in grading and size. I used stainless steel where available. New trim rubber was fitted everywhere.

I sure wish that I had larger, higher-resolution photos of this car, especially the interior, trunk, and engine compartment. When it was finished after a couple of years of on-again, off-again restoration and modification labor, it was a stunner for a daily street-driven “sleeper”, with performance to match.

After the engine and transmission were dropped in and the car was running well, opening the hood usually gave me a twinge of disappointment. The Cologne V6, sourced from a ‘70s Mercury Capri, had to have been the ugliest motor on the road, with all of its brackets and unused bolt holes for attachment of various ancillaries. Though it was clean, and every hose, belt and wire had been replaced with new and often upgraded pieces, the engine simply had zero presence, so I got to work dreaming up a cosmetic package that would stand up to the exterior’s visual promise.

I owned a prototype industrial design model shop with lathes, milling machines, and a full inventory of wood, metal, and plastic fabrication tools. I decided that I  would add some parts to “convert” the motor to a faux V12 that never existed IRL..

(ABOVE) Very sorry for the pre-digital low resolution photo! Close inspection reveals six spark plug wires for one bank of the V6, three of which are functional. The Holley four-barrel carburettor sits on top of the hand-fabricated T6 aluminium adapter plate on top off the modified 2-barrel manifold. You can just make out a couple of acorn nuts that secure the “cam covers” to the “cylinder head”, and to the right, half-hidden, the “Isotta Fraschini” script on the “cam cover”. The nose of the B&M blower can be seen, as well as the stock radiator and the vacuum tank for the braking system. Note hood scoop. The headlight trims are also hand-fabricated by Mike A., the previous owner of this car. Note also the cowl vent scoops, also made by Mike, who was a whiz at vacuum-forming.

I began by making up a plate composite structure to cover the existing cylinder heads. To this (basically a rectangular boxlike thing, with flat surfaces) I attached a new fabricated faux DOHC “head” on each side. These multi-piece “cam covers” were attached with acorn nuts and washers, and a cork dummy gasket was sandwiched between the faux “cam cover” pieces and the box underneath. Recessed into the “cam covers” on each side was a raised script in engraved aluminum that read “Isotta Fraschini” (a defunct classic Italian marque) in the Isotta brand factory script. The entire assembly was finished in wrinkle black, and the scripts were leveled off and polished so they would stand out in bright silver. The wrinkle black finish was then carried out throughout the entire engine compartment—blower, manifold, vacuum tank, and a scratchbuilt distributor with twelve spark plug openings that exited horizontally in two levels. This machined faux distributor with 12 output terminals was actually a cover for the stock 6-sleeve distributor. Six of the spark plug wires on the new distributor were functional, and six were dummies. The “heads” had fabricated spark plug boots; again, six dummies and six functional. As a bonus in the “cylinder head” design, the entire DOHC assemblies were wide enough to fill the engine compartment side-to-side, hiding the six-outlet tubing headers, which could still be seen from below the car.

The only photo I have of this (pre-digital) is a small, pre-digital, low-resolution one, but by looking closely at it, you can make out a whole lot of wrinkle black stuff with a Holley carburetor perched on top, and twelve yellow spark plug wires. The acorn nuts holding the “cam covers” in place can be seen, along with just the edge of the silver raised script hidden behind the brake booster. All of the hoses were jacketed with black woven nylon covers.

The ugly motor was transformed into a showpiece that baffled everyone that looked at it. I had a lot of fun at car shows standing back and watching as the “experts” peered into the engine compartment, saw the fake V12 and expressed confusion and opinions, all of them wrong. They would crawl underneath the car (4” ground clearance) in an attempt to decipher the mysteries of this engine swap, but nobody guessed how it was pulled off. The car had the sound and speed to back up the fakery, though. Fun to drive and especially fun to display!

After 15 years of ownership and countless hours of paint and fabrication work, I sold it on in 2002 to a young guy in Long Beach who I understand installed a 5-speed transmission. I shudder to think what else has happened to it since, as despite many attempts to locate its current whereabouts, I’ve come up empty-handed. It deserves a good photo session, but may never be seen by these eyes again.

Don’t ask me what I sold it for on ‘02. Today, it would easily bring $50K (still a fraction of parts+hours) on BringATrailer, but it’s not about money, but rather intrinsic worth—priceless.

RIP, Sunbeam.