Body Fitting Part 2

A lot of work in this post, securing the body down to last forever more is pretty stressful.

Once the body was in the correct position we jiggled the body about a bit with plumb lines from 12 o'clock in the wheel arches to get left/right alignment correct, then deployed lots of clamps to hold it in place. Then mega-drilling commenced on the floor. Quite awkward drilling right in the footwells. Couldnt get the drill straight through the chassis becuase of the shape of the top of the footwell so we just drilled through the fibreglass to leave a mark on the chassis to drill out later.

We lifted the body off to clear all the swarf away and started applying the Wurth adhesive like it was going out of fashion. One interesting point at the rear end the manual suggests a pretty convoluted way of getting a line of holes drilled into the extreme rear cross member. Our solution was to dremel two slots in the boot floor at either end so we could see where the bar was, then draw a line down its centre and get drilling. All holes were spot on the centre of the round bar.

The body went straight back on and line it up on the drilled holes, not too difficult. I bought an air riveter of ebay and I can honestly say that without it we would have been completely stuffed as these are pretty meaty rivets. Heres Sam doing some lazy mans riveting.

At this point we hadnt put any adhesive around the engine bay and it was a good job as it was getting dark We judged that the inner wings were flexible enough to apply adhesive and rivet at our leisure the next day as we were tired and hungry and didnt want to encourage any mistakes.

Below - first the passenger  side inner wing on the front horn. Job well done, good fit. The fibreglass is bendy enough for this to meet the chassis snugly and was rock solid with a metal spreader plate on the outside, a good dollop of adhesive and neatly tidied with a good fillet of wurth around the edge.

The drivers side was not as good - There wasnt enough flex to make up the gap and have a nice flat face of the fibreglass wing against the chassis rail, giving a vastly reduced area for the adhesive. The solution here was to make a half inch thick spacer plate bonded and riveted to the chassis, these rivets interspaced between the rivets that would eventually go through the exterior spreader, fibreglass, spacer plate and chassis. This required a quick trip into town to get some longer rivets. All faces were copiously covered in wurth adhesive.

Eventually though all was well. The spacer plate was covered by a large fillet of adhesive to neaten it up The insides of the wheel arches currently have the metal spreader plates visible which to be honest look like a bit of a bodge but all this area will be covered in 5mm thick neoprene rubber to stop stones cracking the body. 

For now though its quite satisfying to look at the mass of rivets, although after getting some of the wurth stuff on my hands I know the adhesive is doing most of the work in stopping the body blowing off in the breeze.