Rebuilt the fan, duct and rad assembly which looks pretty good now. Shuffled the engine and gearbox around so that it'll all fit under the bonnet. I put the bodywork on to test it and all of a sudden everything looks like it's coming together. Ideally I'd still like to move the engine over a bit more but to do that I'd really need to reposition the throttle body. For the moment I'll see how it looks since I can always move it later.
I've also removed some of the material from the grille to open it up to some more airflow, this is something that others have done. The pictures below are more or less before and after and then with the ducting dropped into place.
While I was playing with the bodywork I decided to mark up and fit the (old) rear arches. This will stiffen the rear body and help me to fasten things down once I get to that point. I want to delay fitting the new ones as long as possible because they're in the sort of location that I'm likely to scratch. There is the question though of how long I can productively delay their fitment.
It's really starting to look like a car now with the nosecone on, in a way I like the look of it without the windscreen on but I think once the car is off the trestles it will look somewhat different.
With the engine now in the right sort of place I was able to re-measure the intrusion of the clutch arm and thus cut down the cover I'd made. A bit of new GRP over the top and it's looking pretty reasonable.
I'm afraid that I've been a little lax in updating the pages over the last couple of days, not that I've done that much. By way of a brief summary I've been fettling GRP with the aim of fastening down the body. In doing this I've drilled holes to fit the rear aches, tidied up the nose area, fitted the rear wheels (so I can measure the overhangs) and done a great deal of sanding an measuring.
The result of all this is that I think I'm now about ready to fasten down the bodywork. It's position is somewhat of a compromise in that because of the shrouding around the front shocks it isn't possible to move the body far enough forward to get the 915mm measurement described in the build manual, nor is it possible to get the 400mm one for the boot area. The best I can get is about 7 mm out on the drivers side and 5mm out on the passenger side.
Equipment for measuring offset of wheels in arches
After consulting with others it appears that these measurements aren't all that important after all, what is far more important is the left-right alignment which dictates the overhang over the wheels. Fortunately my overhangs are spot on. I'm not going to worry overly about the other measurements since they really relate to the normal rather than type approved body and are there to ensure that the nosecone, scuttle etc all end up in the correct places relative to one another. On the type approved body it's all fixed for me so there's nothing I can do about it. The only thing that I will need to watch out for is with the weather gear as that may not fit properly now, however since I'm going to have to modify it to fit the RAC rollbar anyway it's something that I can deal with.
Use of copper slip to mark position for nosecone mounting holes
After a month of faffing around the main body tub is now fastened down. Before drilling anything I had to do check all the measurements a few more times before I put some clamps on the front rails and started to drill. As directed by the manual (many other people seem to leave the rear fastenings till last and I can see good reasons for doing that) I started with the back fastenings. To do this you need to lift the tub up to sit against the blocks under the chassis. Dave Hackett did this with a jack but with the car on trestles that doesn't really work, I found that screwdrivers through the spare wheel support worked just as well.
Moving on the manual next directs you to fasten the sides of the engine
bay down with 3 rivets on either side. Being paranoid I went for 5
rivets spaced at 125mm intervals. Around the roll bar the GRP has a
desire to sit above the plate that the roll bar attaches to. I hadn't
planned to add rivets there but looking at other peoples builds they
all have so I added 3 there too.
In all cases where I've been drilling the body for rivets as soon as one hole is done I've used a cleco to hold it from moving. They really are a godsend and I'm using them at every opportunity now.
In preparation of the ramps arriving on sunday lots of tidying up. Finished off fixing the main tub down.
Only really car-related progress was to polish the inside of nose ducting since that will be visible. Theres still a lip that needs tidying up though but for the most part it looks good. With the duct temporarily in place I tested it on the car but unfortunately it hits on the lip on the bodywork. With the lip trimmed back the nose will go on but it's still not quite right. I can address that another day though.
More tidying and a few alterations to the garage to give me more
space and to make better use of what I've got. In particular I've
added another panel on top of my workbenches which will make it
a lot more useful, solid and give me more space on which to put the
grinder. Like the muppet I am I put the vice back where it came from
rather than moving it out to the new edge, thereby making it utterly
useless. Oh well that can be sorted easily enough.
Fixed the indicator pods onto the nosecone and fitted the ducting
in place with rivnuts and stainless allen head bolts. The indicator
pods needed a little fettling to remove the moulding marks to make
the surfaces perfectly flat to mount against the nose. With that
the nosecone is all finished.
Rivetted down the front of the body and fastened the nose in place with more rivnuts. Then more rivnuts to fix the oil seperator and more to fix the scuttle.
Drilled the holes for the spare wheel carrier and built up the number plate assembly including the number plate light. The loom will need to be sorted later since it needs an extension section making up to length and fitting through the tubing.
Fitted the side repeaters and very fetching they look too. I decided against using the westfield/ford ones since they require quite an intricate cutout and from experience on the tiger they are a nightmare to fit properly. I ended up getting some from vehicle wiring products which used a single 27mm diameter hole and had a simple plastic nut that tightened down on the thread. They fitted incredibly easily and I finished them off with new crimp on connectors and heatshrink on the loom.
Can't quite remember exactly what I did
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