Donovan Aluminum Bonnet – Part 7 – Sleep is Over-rated…

What an adventure!

Time was running out last week, and I had to find the time to finish the bonnet in time SOMEWHERE, so I did something I’ve never really done before in 42 years – I basically just stopped sleeping altogether…

Now, keep in mind that I’m a guy who NEEDS a good 8 hours of sleep a night.  No more, but certainly no less either, and when I do 2 or 3 nights in a row of say, 6 hours, I start to get “weird”…  Well, as the clock ticked down last week, I just had to keep going – and trading sleep time for work time was the ONLY way to get it done.  I guess I could have let the date slip into next week, but they really needed to get the bonnet onto the car, and all I kept hearing in my head over and over was me saying “Don’t worry – I won’t let you down” when I picked up this bonnet in December.

So, Saturday night, I slept 8 hours, Sunday – 4, Monday – 7, Tuesday – 1.5, Wednesday – 6, Thursday – ZERO.  When I finally got into bed at our place in Upstate NY on Friday morning at 7AM, Janie said, “How did it go?”  I said, “Good – it’s on there.” and then slipped into a coma…

We finished the bonnet at 4:00 on Wednesday afternoon.  Brent and I carried it outside, weighed it (58 lbs.), took some photos, and then loaded it onto the truck.  I did take it easy on Wednesday night, and finally fell asleep at 11:00.

On Thursday, I got up at 5:00 AM and drove to Donovan Motorsports.  Thankfully, the drive was uneventful and I arrived at just a little after noon.  Brian was happy with the bonnet, and we wasted no time getting it onto the car – at which point the “fitting adjustments” started right away.  First, there was an oil cooler mounted in front of the radiator that I never saw when I picked the bonnet up – it was off.  Luckily, the adjustments we had to make for that were minor, but we still spent a few hours on it, taking the bonnet on and off a hundred times…

Next, we had to get the back edge fitted, and get the rear sections of the wings wrapped around to meet the sills.  This was a real battle that I did not see coming…  The wings were flared so heavily, that when the bonnet was here, it just kind of had the rear of the wings way out.  You could pull the back adges in to standard E-Type width, and so I figured everything would be OK.  Well, what I failed to realize was that we needed to pull the rear section in to meet the sill all along the sill.  Getting that back edge in was easy, but getting the part right behind the wheel in all the way to the sill was TOUGH!  Luckily, the pattern for the new wing was perfect, and as we forced that rear section in, it flared that wing out to be a perfect match to the rear and the LH side.

Then the flanges started bending and tearing…  Nightmare.  I made them here from the same .050 soft aluminum as the rest of the pieces, and it just was not thick enough for this abuse.  Luckily, Brian had a piece of about .070, harder aluminum sheet laying around, and we used his shear and brake to make some new flanges and fit them into place.

Of course, this takes time, and soon it was 6:00 PM, and everyone except Brian and I were long gone.  At this point, based on less than 8 hours sleep over 2 days (and working like CRAZY when I was awake – or driving several hundred miles), I really have no explanation for why I didn’t drop dead right then and there in his shop.  I guess it boils down to just the shear will of wanting to get this done and do a good job for them, but it may also have been this:

I spent from 6:00 PM to 12:30 AM with Brian, working feverishly to fit the bonnet, and the whole time I kept quizzing Brian about racing, his business, his first E-Type, etc., and the stories were FASCINATING!  25 years of racing E-Types had yielded stories that involved just about every name in vintage – or recent – racing that you could imagine!

And so I just worked away at a feverish pace, and we finally got the bonnet fitted well enough to go racing, and I pulled out at 12:30 AM pretty proud of myself for getting it done.

Then (insanely…) I drove from Lenox, MA to the St. Lawrence river through the night…

Here are some photos coming down the home stretch.  I’ll try to put a few captions on but I will keep them short.  Stay tuned – I’m headed back up there on Friday morning to see this car at Lime Rock at full speed!