The Alpine Project : The Organ Donor

At peace in shady slumber

Page Four – The Organ Donor

Alphie meets Dr. Frankenstein:

The Alpine Project takes a new tack.

In my original Alpine plan (that had yet to meet reality), I, like a knight-errant sworn to his chivalric code, would gallantly perform shade-tree miracles to bring Alphie back to the glamour and romance circa 1965, wearing all her original sheet metal and accoutrements. A glorious, noble and difficult task worthy of a dedicated champion, a True Restoration! Yeah, so much for that.

Defiling a grave

From our first meeting, I could tell that Alphie had had some unskillful “work” done to her front end, but I had no idea how deep the wounds went until I carved inches and pounds of Bondo from her snoz. Ignominy, anxiety, hand wringing and head scratching befell as the burden of my moral pledge began to weigh on me.

In February while we closing the Alphie deal, Clint offhandedly mentioned, “I have another Alpine at my sister’s house in Kentucky,” offering it as a freebie in the deal. I didn’t seriously consider dragging home two rusty cadavers, but each chunk of Bondo chiseled from her flanks added another month or year to the build, not to mention mucho buckage to the budget. So…

I emailed Clint saying, “about that Alpine in Kentucky,” more because of the rumpled snoz than her dangling rust. He sent me some pictures, and I immediately kicked chivalry to curb, abandoned my moral quest and launched Operation Alpine Rescue to wrest the Organ Donor (the nickname she earned the day of her resurrection) from her premature grave. All because the metalwork required to fix Alphie’s mashed nose rattled my mighty resolve. Weakness and shame! Moral conviction cowers to convenience and laziness as soon as reality landed its first blow!

Alphie must suffer the same fate as Frankenstein’s monster, an amalgamated abomination, at least in the eyes of the purists!

Operation Alpine Rescue becomes Operation Grave Robbery

Rudely yanked from her hole

Organ donors are usually - they tell me – dead. Apparently, it hurts less that way. Not to speak ill of the dead and I understand that the Donor is Clint’s high school car, but she has spent the last 20+ years squatting in a pasture under a tree, so her prognosis was doubtful from the get-go. Since her tires exhaled, she has been lying with her belly against the ground, which, for rust prone cars like Sunbeam Alpines, is no bueno.

She looked peaceful, quietly disintegrating in the shade of her tree. But callously we invaded her repose. We sawed down her protective saplings. We drug farming equipment from her path. We dug and tugged. We huffed and puffed and finally, with the aid of a substantial 4X4 pickup, yanked the Donor out of her hole like a bad tooth. It was a rude reintroduction to the world, and I felt a little embarrassed as if we had heedlessly thrown open the door of an occupied outhouse.

Disinterred!

On soft slanted ground, the Donor precariously teetered on two floor jacks where I swapped her wheels and flat tires for the set I looted from Alphie. I pounded unyielding spinners, rocked gummed up splines from hubs, removed the right front brake caliper and banged the left rear brake drum with a small sledgehammer, ultimately getting three of the four wheels to roll. The left rear wheel still stubbornly refuses to turn, but the Donor moved.

The Donor even with new shoes resists getting on the trailer

We lined up the trailer, and, with the help of a come along and my curiously rigged, jumper cable powered ATV winch in the bed of the truck, we wrestled the reluctant Donor onto the UHaul trailer rented especially for the job. All that took more than three sweaty hours in the 90+-degree sun. Thanks to Clint, his son Rubin and my brother-in-law Mark. I did some of the work too – no judging!

All that rust is the frame of the car - the blue is the seat dangling where there is nothing.

Again, my first plan for The Donor was to restore her instead of Alphie because I liked her color combo better - Then I crawled under her to secure her derriere to the trailer. Perhaps you have heard of Rusticles? The Titanic has them – you know, rust that hangs down like icicles?

Once under the car, any thought of restoring the Donor evaporated like hope on a golf course. I could see the broken main X shaped cross member hanging in rusty splendor from the crumbling remains of the floorboards. In the old car hobby, that’s terminal, a fatality, a dead stop, the incontrovertible harbinger of death, even beyond the reaches of rat-rod zombiedom. I solemnly pronounced her death and rejiggered my plans, again.

Or the (Latest) Modern Prometheus:

Alphie is a 1965 Alpine Series IV-A while the Organ Donor is a 1964 Alpine Series IV – essentially, the same model. Both have 1592 cc four poppers and four speed trannies. Alphie left the plant wearing a fully synchronized gearbox while the Donor’ sported a non-synchronized gear grinder. Everything else, model wise, is the same. In the dark of night using lightning and galvanization, Alphie will rise again as a cobbled together 1964 Alpine Series IV A. She will be year older but will keep the benefits of her youth.

I will resurrect her as a Midnight Blue beauty of a 1964 Sunbeam Alpine Series IV with all the goodies of a 1965 series IV-A – The Best of Both!

Mixing DNA and a New Direction

The Drivetrain:

From the two car-casses J, I will

v - Excise the Donor’s entire front clip including the bonnet and inner wing wells

v - Harvest the Donor’s engine block so the block number will match the body tag

v - Amputate the Donor’s non-synchromesh tranny

v - Transplant Alphie’s fully synchromesh tranny and

v - Graft on the Donor’s overdrive unit and driveshaft - yeah, the Donor has overdrive, how cool is that!

v - Oh almost forgot, Swap the body tags– boom, number matching car!

The Color Palette: Alphie is a stealth black car – Embassy black paint, black seats, black rubber floor mats, black dash, black door panels, black tires, just black, black, black-on-black!

The Organ Donor is Midnight Blue with an Azure (sky) Blue seats and door panels with dark blue piping on the seats. It has tattered scraps of red carpeting in it now, but the Azure Blue original will go back in it. Me like those colors much gooder!

Shoes: The Donor has 13-inch wire wheels, the shoes all Sunbeam Alpines trotted out of the factory wearing. Someone upped Alphie’s shoes to size 14-inch, probably stolen from some other unsuspecting LBC (Little British Car, remember?) an MG, Triumph, Austin, Rover - who knows…

Other Stuff: Whatever components are in better condition from either cadaver will one day return to the road!

Postmortem

The Organ Donor sits glumly under a tree in my front yard. I have cleaned the leaf litter, twigs, rotted carpet and vinyl as well as pulled the seats out and removed a lot of old “stuff” from the trunk and interior. Alas, the Donor must die so that Alphie may live.

Oh, and I collected many chiggers along the way! Yay!

Next post: The Dissection

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