Mystery Chassis???

[heightswitch]

Hello all.

I fell for it again and have bought yet another Mk 2 Vixen. I am in a quandary though. The chassis is all constructed out of square tubing with round section outrigger sill runners only. It to my knowledge is not an m series chassis, since this had round section main rails? The car is bodied and stamped a series 2 1970 vixen and is running a series 2 body. Does anyone know of any odd ball replacement chassis that were constructed for the cars? or is it just another peculiarity of the TVR make?

The chassis number is LVX1676/4 with an engine number of D9092/8
I would be gratefull if anyone could shed some light. A previous owner was John William Davies, Morley in leeds. and previous to him was Nigel Thomas Griffiths in High Wycombe.

If anyone knows of some of the history to the car and its odd chassis please drop me a line?

[davidy]

Never heard of this, but experimentation was done (and documented) in Success Against the Odds with square section rails but to my knowledge this was all done on the M series chassis.

I would suggest that this may be a DIY chassis, probably the car suffered significant accident damage or rotten out and someone has constructed a homemade chassis.

Providing its straight it might be ok.

Remember in the late 80's/early 90's chassis prices rose dramatically as there was a 'cash in' on the increasing value of 'classic cars'.

However its unlikely to be a complete air car as a DIY Griffith or Tuscan V8 would have been built.

My 2p, but am defintely intestered in any other findings!

davidy

[heightswitch]

Someone has just sent me a piccy of Nigel Warners chassis on his car which is exactly the same as mine! All of the bracketry etc is identical to my other round tube vixen chassis. I am therefore confident it is a TVR chassis as opposed to a custom fabbed one after a crash for example. The condition of it is good, but the outriggers are pretty pitted so it is a good few years old itself.

I have stuck a couple of pictures up on the yahoo pre 1980 website

Anyone know how to post piccys here and I will do same

Anyone know of the experimentation with square tubing / how many cars built etc.

Neil.

[davidy]

I sit here corrected then! Maybe the line of credit had run out with the round tube supplier so they had to make do with square tubing!!!

To post here just link to your Yahoo posted pictures with [pic] www.website/picture.jpg [/pic]

Hope that helps

davidy

[heightswitch]

I may be wrong here. Russell talbot apparently used to own the car and he thinks its a one off chassis made when chassis to repair crashed cars weren't available. I would like to see if Nigel warner knows more on the mystery.

Neil.

[nwarner]

Neil

I have answered your email that you sent to my home email account.

Nige

[19560]

heightswitch said:

Russell talbot apparently used to own the car.

Going to Le Mans with him next month!

[Terminator]

heightswitch said:

If anyone knows of some of the history to the car and its odd chassis please drop me a line?

Having looked at the photos of the chassis on the Yahoo site, it looks to me like the prototype Tuscan V8 chassis that Mike Bigland made in 1970. I always wondered what they did with it, now we know!

[heightswitch]

I would like to think that it is, but I think it probably isn't. More a home build or chassis company / car repairers job. It is quite faithful to a Vixen S2 chassis though in square as opposed to round.

Do you have any photos / scans of the Bigland chassis I could have a look at?

Neil.
heightswitch at supanet dot com (wrote as such to stop trojans)

[Terminator]

I have a photo that I got from Gerry Sagerman, the US Importer in the 1970s. If I can find my scanner over the weekend, I'll email it to you.

[heightswitch]

Cheers Colin

Neil.