Hello and welcome to our Blog-ish detailing the rebuild/rebirth of this poor unfortunate piece of automotive history (junk?). A bit of background is in order: I found this poor wee beastie languishing in my local breakers yard back in April (I think) 2009 minus engine, gearbox and steering rack and with a very tired looking interior and frankly a piss poor paint job, it was a cross between crackle finish and seriously neglected matt :-( In short I think it had been applied with a yard brush........on a cold day................when it was raining........................and blowing a gale! So I bought it for the princely sum of £150! The above photo is pretty much as bought except there is a bonnet and nose cone too. Straight away I had the insane desire to fit a seriously crazy power unit, no interest in your ancient four pot Kent pushrod lumps for this one HA HA................ So then I went and bought a 1990 Cosworth Granada as a donor for the motive power, well it was a bargain at just £361 with 8 months MOT left and a knackered auto transmission. Then it all kind of got shelved for a few months because I’ve been converting an Iveco Daily minibus into a motorhome and that really needed sorting.
We also have a forum running and you can join this for free and leave comments about this project Locust/Dragon forum
Hi all i'm back. Sorry for the delay
in updating this site but I've been having FTP issues.
Fast forward to November 2009.
Having spent every
spare hour of the last two months grinding and repainting the workshop
floor it was finally time to dig out the poor old Locust and re-
Over the last few months We had managed to strip the Granny down to a nearly bare shell, the idea being to use the bits we need and resell the stuff we don’t to reclaim some money to pay for the other stuff we need
Finally (or
should that be initially?) we dug it out of the corner, stuck it up on
trestles and stripped the bodywork off it. Although just before
that we did offer the monstrous V6 power unit up and guess what, if we
pass on the steering column and brake master cylinder it
fits....................may need a bit of re-
The truth is
that some serious re-
The difficulty
is we're aiming for a kerb weight of around 600-
The body
was made mainly of thin aluminium
sheet over a 3/4" plywood shell all mounted on the very simple ladder
chassis. Cortina front wishone suspension and hubs and a five
link mounted Mk2 Escort rear axle completed the running gear.
Most of the plywood was rotten, a lot of the fixings were rusted solid
and it seemed to have been assembled in such a way that to get one
piece off involved stripping half the car down first. Anyway after
about five hours we had a bare chassis and a pile of crap that used to
be the body! Most of the photos above show progress during that
Sunday.
Since then I've removed the rear axle and
steam cleaned the chassis before mounting the new power unit, did I
mention the power unit before? Well its a 2.9 litre V6 Cosworth lump
with a genuine 60K under its alternator belt and ran as sweet as a
nut. The power unit is presently mounted on temporary fabricated
mounts simply for position, once everything else is sorted I'll make
some proper mounts up.
I'm presently waiting for a flywheel and
bellhousing so that I can mount the type 9 five speed box and then we
can start to fab the chassis mods I have planned. Keep checking
in for updates on progress.
Oh yes I nearly forgot, we have a new name
for the kit. I absolutely hate the name "Locust" and while that
is what it was it ain't what it will be. A good friend suggested
that as we're fitting a fire breathing monster engine "Dragon" might be
a more suitable name and I have to agree. I've thought about this
quite a lot over the last week and I like it so Dragon it is!