This weekends antics - Body work

So this weekends task has been to make the body work a fully permenant attachment, i now hope that the body work doesnt have to go on and off as many times as it has done this weekend.

the main thing with the body work is patience, and making sure every thing lines up, and don't be afraid to cut slots into things like the nose and scuttle to ensure you get the best fit, this will give you the room for adjusment needed, and as you use repair washers to hold the body work making the hole bigger isn't going to cause problems.

the longest time spent was ensuring the bonnet and nose cone lined up pefectly where the pins go from the bonnet into the nose cone, a bit of trimming was needed here and there, and more around where the nose fits into the bonnet. once happy with how the nose and bonnet lined up the holes were drilled off into the nose cone and bolted into place, now with the use of the slots made with the dremmel some fine tuning was then needed to get the front shut lines correct.

once happy with the top the bottom was then secured along the chassis with 20 large headed rivets, now every thing starts to feel very secure and soild.

next stage was to then get the rear secured up onto its mounting blocks, now at this stage the car has been placed back on axle stands to allow room underneath to do the riveting and be able to take the wheels off to align up the rear arches. now the rear needs to come up a fair old amount but this is easily done, with the aid of an assistant and a trolly jack it tends to sit where it wants, and then you need to check measurement between the center of the rear hub to the arch front and rear, now the manual states that these should be within 10-20mm but with a bit of pulling and pushing i managed to get them to within 2-3mm. happy with that the rear was the drilled off and and riveted up with 6 large head rivets. there was a small amount of distorsion in the body underneath but this was not a problem.

now things are starting to take shape and it was time to start hacking some holes into the body work, first up was the exhaust system.
to do this 2 holes were needed, one large one at the front where the exhaust exits the body work and a smaller hole at the back where the mount goes through into a M10 boss on the chassis, now whilst the body work was off i made a masking tape template around the exhaust section, when the body work was placed over and the masking template was used to find the center so a hole can be hole sawed in.
The rear hole was first pilot drilled from the inside out, and then opened up to allow the bush to pass through the body, every thing else was then bolted up with out to much hassle. the exhaust needed to twisting to get it to sit right.