How to tow a car without wheels!

 

 

 

If you've been following this restoration, you may remember that it began at my parents house in Limerick, as I did not have the space to do it while living in Lucan in Dublin. Now that it was only 6 weeks to Eurofest, I was worried that I would not have enough time to be going up and down to Limerick to rebuild the car. So, the only option was to bring all the parts such as the coolant/ac/brake lines, engine/transmission, fuel tank, and the fiberglass body with stainless steel bodypanels attached, up to our house in Wicklow.

 

My Dad brought up most of the parts himself in his car, and the engine/transmission in a trailer. Thanks Dad for all the help!

 

Then, on Friday April 7th, we rented a flatbed trailer from the Baltinglass Tool Hire shop to transport the shell of the car. We got talking to the guy in the shop, and when he heard it was a DeLorean body that we were transporting, he told us that he used to work in the factory that stamped all the stainless steel bodypanels for DeLoreans! They were made in a company called Lapple in Carlow town, about 20 minutes away from Baltinglass.

 

That's the funny thing about Ireland - you're never too far away from someone who was involved in the creation of these cool cars!

 

Anyway, we got to Limerick at about 10pm that night, and started to load the body onto the trailer. Its harder than you think to load a car without wheels onto a flatbed trailer!

 

As you can see from the pictures below, we raised the body to a sufficient height of concrete blocks to allow us to push the trailer underneath it. We then lowered the body back down, and used hydraulic jacks to help remove the planks of wood from between the fiberglass body and the trailer.

 

 

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We left the following morning at around 7am to avoid the traffic, and removed the car body from the trailer in Baltinglass, basically reversing the procedure of the previous night, as you can see in the last few pictures above...