Finished Painting!

Painting now complete! Drove it home with the absolute minimum of parts on. Now have a mountain of small jobs to do!

Paint Progress

Painting is coming on nicely, not long now!

Ready for Painting

Took the car to AK Bodycraft in Isleham near Ely this morning and proceeded to undo all the work we have done. Most difficult thing to remove was probably the exhaust. I put a couple of self tapping grub screws in where the collector slips onto the headers and the head of one of them sheared off which required drilling out. Not looking forwards to putting them back on again.

They kept the dash as I want one of the dash mounting lugs moving slightly and the open edges of the dash glassing and tidying up. They also kept the windscreen to help with moving the holes for the windscreen legs so the gaps don't have to be full of sealant.

Rear Light Brackets

First attempt at bracketry for fog/reverse lights and reflectors. Minimum height requirement 250mm, reflectors max 400mm from side of car.

All appears to be going well, thanks to Max and our new found welding skills we managed to avoid a complete bodge on the bracket manufacture:

Update 21/04/2013. Brackets fitted and wired up.

Turbo Progress

Or should that be naturally aspirated progress?

Thanks to the superhuman building ability of Max, loads of stuff was done this weekend. Before that though, I fitted the side vents a couple of weeks ago but I don't think I've put a picture up until now so here's the driver's side one, taken before I fitted the side repeaters:

Right then. Max has lent us his engine crane which should just about do the job so thats stowed safely away in the garage awaiting its moment to shine. Most of saturday was spent getting the doors on. The procedure appears to be 1) cut nice big holes in the door to allow adjustment of the hinges, 2) put door on and wedge bits of cardboard until you get a nice even gap 3) nip up all nuts and then do final adjustment with a big hammer.

This process was mainly as follows: "up a bit, back a bit, down a bit, RIGHT NOBODY BREATHE!".

We were hoping to get the door locks on but it occurred to us that the door trim needs to be on as there is a cutout for the lock in it, so we had to abandon door lock fitment and just settled at some nice looking doors (i.e. much better than in the picture above). It amazed me how good the final fit looks at a glance. Obviously Max and I know where it could be better, because we did it, but the casual observer would think it was pretty good. Then you go and look at any production car and you can DRIVE A CHUFFIN' BUS through most door gaps on any car, even supposedly well-built German cars.

Next was a bit of electrical work which was tedious but ultimately absolutely critical and very rewarding when it worked without making fire. The fog light was a separate switch but its now on the big rotary headlight switch and we are now using the full functions of the left column switch. With the Lucas rotary switch I had no headlight flash unless you clicked through position 1 and 2 (sidelights + dip beam), which is less than satisfactory. Now though, we have saved the need for a separate fog switch on the dash. The rotary switch is now wired pos 1 = sidelights, pos 2 = headlights (which then goes to the left column stick for dip/full/flash) pos 3 = fog light (connected with a diode to pos 2 so the headlights don't go out when the fog light comes on).

This satisfies the IVA requirement that the fog light only comes on when the headlights are on, and goes out when the headlights are turned off, seeing that you have to click the rotary switch through the headlight on position to get to the fog lights. The fog dash light can then be positioned next to the fog position on the rotary switch. We can cover up the holes for the fog switch and original fog light position with a bit of tape and Max informs me this will be invisible as he found loads of extra holes in the old dash on his Gemini that didn't show through.

This was all good work but didn't really lend itself to photos as its just a bunch of wires. One of the outcomes of all this electrical work is that the loom behind the column will eventually be far tidier once I put it together and all the wires going to the dash will be contained on three 11-way connectors instead of a multitude of 6 and 8 way connectors. We did check the fog light actually works, and the reverse light while we were at it.

Next it was our old favourite, the fuel tank. I hadn't actually checked it for leaks since having it re-welded to the right size so we took it off and had a close look at the welds. I did this with the welder who modified it and he filled in a couple of pinholes but I had never tested the tank with fluid. We poured in a few hundred ml of white spirit and sloshed it round a bit and couldn't see anything so that's about as good as we can do. I'll rinse the tank out with petrol later.

This was a good opportunity to paint the tank straps which is my job for the evenings next week. I had an extra bit of triangulation welded on to make them a bit meatier but in the process they had to grind off the plating to weld it, so I'll slap some Hammerite on.

With an hour left to kill we got one last job done, fitting the fuel filler. Fairly straight forward, we used the gasket as a template and got busy with the Dremel as I have no hole saws.

As the tank is on the floor because the mounting straps are dangling from the ceiling while the paint dries, the filler isn't actually connected, but its one less part in a bag cluttering up the garage. Obviously the gasket was later fitted and not just forgotten about.

Boot Shiny Bits 3

I was starting to get a bit fed up with the block of wood as a boot stay so I dug around in the bin of spare parts and found the boot stays. A few rivets, a bit of Wurth adhesive and half an hour later and the boot now stays open of its own accord!

Boot Shiny Bits 2

Small update to the last post after taking a couple more photos to show the boot lock and power to the number plate light.

Boot Shiny Bits

Long post. A full day in the garage today and some good progress made with the boot hinges, lock and number plate light.

First of all, following the instructions in the build manual, drill holes for boot hinges.

Deviating from the build manual slightly, the dremel was then applied to the holes as I had drilled them all in the wrong place.

There we go, that's better. It took a number of fittings and re-fittings to work out that the hinges are actually handed left and right to match the curve of the body.

Boot stay sorted. Boot lip seal in (very annoying) Boot lock in, lots of dremel action. Its not quite in the centre so it will take some "adjustment" later. The loop on the boot floor had to be stood off about 6mm which is convenient as when I come to fit the carpet it can fit neatly underneath the loop. The white cable in the picture above was looped inside the boot skin when it was manufactured, to feed the number plate light. I was going to use it to draw through some other wire but it appears to be glued securely in so I pushed some heatshrink on to the end and put grommets where it goes through the skin to prevent it rubbing.

This was a bit annoying. The boot has been stood leaning against the garage wall for about a year, and over that time its bent out of shape, you can see the gap below where it doesn't follow the contour of the body.

I made the fit of the lock catch purposely very tight so you have to really push the boot down hard so it would apply stress to the boot lid and pull it back into shape. Being fibreglass, although the resin has now hardened since it was new, its still pretty flexible. The garage has been very, very hot recently meaning the resin may soften a little so I'll leave it for a few weeks and see if it permanently regains the correct shape. If that doesn't work I may have to encourage it with a heat gun.

You can see in the picture above the force from the tight fit when closed has improved it a bit so we'll see how it goes.

Bonnet Fitting

The bonnet is now attached -

Not too difficult, the hinge bolts onto the inner wing so we did lots of measuring. I stood the bonnet off the lip with a bit of blutak just to get it lined up nicely then bolted the hinge brackets through.The front of the bonnet did catch very slightly on the lip so a bit of light sanding there and job done.

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.

Body Fitting Part 1

We drafted in friends Max and Chris to help finish the slightly messy assembly of the rear end, driveshafts and CV joints which took most of the day at a steady methodical pace but passed without massive incident, apart from having to adjust the rear caliper carriers as the wheels were catching. We ended up griding away the slave wheels in frustration which solved the problem.

When it came to it, 3 people was enough to fit the body. One at the front and one each on the rear wheel arches. Bit of effort required for the two at the back to get it chest high but it dropped straight on. Pushed the footwells up against the plates in the chassis to ensure fore/aft alignment was correct then stepped back to admire our handiwork. The difficult bit will be tomorrow when we start drilling and riveting but for now we basked in the glory.

Body!

Yesterday (29th March) the body arrived. It will be left outside for a fortnight until I can round up a few people to help fit it, but this will probably do it good if its warm and sunny as the resin is still curing. Sadly no sign of a steering rack yet but this isnt Dax's fault - well not their fault that it is taking so long to come from the supplier, but still naughty of Dax not to even bother telling me they didn't have any. I will get the rack, extended steering column and rivet kit for the body some time next week.