REVERSE BOX

I am not the best driller in the world, and I really didnt want to screw up the holes for mounting the reverse box. I can imagine any oddly sized holes would allow it to move very slightly and maybe cause horrible vibration.. ? who knows. I'd rather get it right first time so I made a few templates of the hole pattern with card+masking tape and decided it wasnt very accurate. So, using a thick offcut of aluminium i've managed to get the 10 mm holes bang on (2nd time lucky as you can see!). This will be used as a guide to drill the holes into the mounting plate. Which I havent got round to, yet.. going to wait until ive got some socket head 12.9 bolts first.
In the meantime, the box was filled with 250ml of redline shockproof gear oil. (a fantastic red colour!) :-)

BODYWORK #4 - FRONT HOLES

My parents came down to visit one weekend, and my dad being a car nut lept straight into action. shame it wasnt anything more fun than drilling and filing though..

NOTE: make sure your bodywork is pulled forward as far as its going to go before cutting any holes! I found out that one of my sides seemed a bit shorter than the other. I had to grab the bodywork through one of the holes and pull very hard before it 'clunked' forward a 1/2 of an inch. Of course, this meant my very neat and tidy holes needed expanding a bit more.. gah!

all in all, it was very tedious. expand hole, push body against chassis.. work out whats touching, expand a bit more.. etc etc..
Then once the body could push against the side without hitting anything, we discovered that you couldnt get the bolts in some of the brackets due to the angle the body intersects them. So more filing was needed to accommodate certain bolts.

Drilling the lower holes was a bit of a mental puzzle. the holes had to be wide enough to get the widest part of the wishbone through, but also had to be narrowed a lot to cater for the wishbone tapering to a point, and therefore getting narrower the further away from the bracket. and to make it even more interesting, the rearwards lower hole needs to be bigger, as the wishbone passes through the body futher away from its pivot, and so travels in a bigger arc if you get my meaning...

Once one side was done, I taped card to the outside of the bodywork, and drew around the indside of the holes onto the card. that meant i could line up the holes with the brackets, stick the card to the body, and cut through the guides. I was expecting this to be a bit dubious, but there was lots of measuting and checking, and double checking, and it seemed to work out alright.

THROTTLE PEDAL

I placed the throttle pedal mount where I thought the pedal should 'dangle' relative to the other 2 pedals. I hope i've got it right.. I wont know until its driveable unfortunately!
Drawing around the base of the mount, I could draw a rectangle slightly smaller in width, and long enough that the bolt collar of the pedal could fit through. I also drilled a hole next to it to get the pedal bar through, plus extended it a few mm to allow for rotation of the pedal without it fouling the aluminium panel. The its just a case of feeding the pedal up from below, slotting the mount in underneath, and sticking a bolt through. :-)

CURRENT STATE

Heres just some pics of how it looks at the moment.

TRANSMISSION TUNNEL COVER

Firstly I started by cutting a U shape out of the front corner so the loom could come through. Then once I could push it all the way forward I put the handbrake in its upmost position and rested the tunnel on it. Using a marker pen i drew roughly around the end of the handbrake - this will determine where the first hole needs cut to start feeding the handbrake through and lowering the back of the tunnel.

Using a holecutter I made a starting hole. Slightly smaller than I was expecting it to be as it gives more room for error and lets you carefully remove bits to get it to fit. You can see that the hole was in almost the perfect place! (lucky!)
I then masking taped the outside of the handbrake as it would see a lot of tunnel removals and holes being too small, i didnt want to scratch it more than it already was. Keep trimming away at the hole and testing it. Once the 'fat end' of the handbrake was through, I could see how wide the thin metal part was. Using masking tape i made 2 strips as a reference for the slot that would be needed to get the tunnel completely down. Again, it was a case of expanding the slot a small amount, testing, and repeating until the tunnel cover could be fitted comfortably.

I will probably need to expand the slot later depending on the type of gaiter but I'd rather have the hole as small as possible for the time being.

SCUTTLE HOLES

I started by putting the scuttle in what I HOPE is its final place before being fitted properly. I had the nose and bonnet on to check the panel gaps were okay and that nothing was out of place. with masking tape I marked a line for where the rear panel of the scuttle is across the top bulkhead panel, and then removed it.
Then I put the steering column in, and marked where the column crosses the 'scuttle line', and also how high up the colum is from that point. Removing the column and putting the scuttle back on, i could accurately mark where the colum passes through it.

(note that in the 3rd pic you wouldnt be able to put the column in yet as theres no hole at the front!)
Now the tricky part was to do a similar thing for the front of the scuttle. It was nowhere near as simple as the back, i took a lot of measurements and ended up marking the angle at which the column passes through the scuttle, and the height at which the column is from my floating 'mid point'.. theres some room for error here as the final hole for the column shroud will be much bigger, but I was trying to be as accurate as possible. Another 'check' i used was to feed a rod through the circular chassis mounted column bush thing, and through the centre of the hole i'd just cut at the back, and then marked where the rod touched the inside of the front panel. it turns out it was within 3mm of the mark that i'd made after various measurements so that was fairly comforting. :)

With a hole cutter I drilled a hole big enough to get the circular part of the column in, and extended it downwards with a jigsaw so i could rotate the column in from below and bolt it to the holes i'd previously drilled. It turns out that my guess was just about bang on. (lucky #2 !)

removing the column once again, I guessed where the shroud intersects the scuttle and tried to get an idea of the profile shape at that point. one of those profile guages with the strip of moving pins would have been extremely handy for this but I didnt have one so I guessed and drew it on the tape. Then I cut it out a fair few mm inside of that as I wasnt too convinced i'd got it right, so lots of filing and testing came after that. I did get it slightly wrong (the corners were too sharp) but the trim takes a slightly gentler curve and hides it!
The lower half of the cover is longer than the top and needs cut to fit underneath otherwise it hits the column mounting plates. I carved mine at the pencil line shown.

FRONT SUSPENSION AND BRAKES

Just loosely assembling stuff here to make sure things go together properly. Good thing, as I discovered my 240mm front discs were too small, I need 260mm ones!

REVERSE BOX #2

I wasn't looking forward to this as getting it wrong would have been disastrous.. ;-)

I started by putting some masking tape down and positioning the box exactly where I wanted it, where it was roughly in the middle of the sliding part of the propshaft's travel, and also the largest part of the prop UJ was clear of the tunnel hoop. because the box platform is high up and the hoop narrows towards to the top, it gets very close to contacting the hoop which would be very nasty..
Once I was satisfied about the position i drew around the base and removed the box. On the underside there are 4 mounting holes which are 10mm wide. its very easy to measure the spacing of them and draw it out, and as a double-check i layed the previously made metal template on to check everything was okay.

After holepunching the centres, I started to drill them out. However because of the upper tunnel bars, I couldn't get a drill vertical in the space so it would have meant drilling slightly angled holes. as a precaution I drilled them out to 9mm and hand filed them straight, to 10mm. (tedious!)

Once the proper mounting holes were done, I drilled through the floorpan to create pilot holes. Going underneath the car I used the pilot holes to expand them big enough to to get a bolt in from underneath. Once that was done, the box was replaced, and bolts were screwed into the underside of the box, with loctite applied and frilly washers to stop them coming loose. The holes in the floorpan will be expanded to 20mm and 4 rubber grommet caps fitted to seal it again and still allow access should it be needed.

GEAR MECHANISM

didnt get many pictures of this, sorry. The gear lever was positioned between the mounting brackets, and positioned as low as possible without it contacting the propshaft. I marked the place on the gearstick that was to be the m12 pivot point and drilled it out. an m5 hole was drilled as low and as far away from the main pivot holes as possible, hopefully to minimise stick travel when in use. The lever was fitted by using an m12 bolt through the brackets and lever, and centralised by 2 aluminium spacers -i sawed a lovely billet aluminium spacer (came on the r1 engine) in two. washers would do the job as well but not look as cool. :)
The gear cable was fed through the bracket above the reverse box and the rosejoin was attached to the bottom m5 hole in the lever. T'other end will be attached to the engine later, once i get around to fitting it. ;-)

FUEL PUMP

One of the final jobs left that would be best done before the car is taken off stands and sitting on its own weight. The pump is the standard one that comes with the r1 engine. I got a large clip from the harrogate kit car show. I removed the rubber mounting thing thats normally attached to the pump as it was a bit floppy, and I cut the U shaped pipe from the fuel filter to the pump inlet into a ¬ shape so its pointing towards the fuel tank outlet. It is fitted by 2 m8 bolts coming through the chassis rail from below. I need to use 2 flexible fuel pipes to connect the tank to the filter, and the pump to the solid fuel line.

REAR INTERIOR PANEL

I wanted to be able to get to the bolts that were behind the panel in case I needed to take the wishbones off for some reason in the future. This mean some form of subtle removable bungs would be needed. So I placed the rear panel in the car (I had already notched it to fit previously). Then removed the 4 bolts from the rear wishbones that were immediately behind the panel. Using a scribe I pushed it though the wishbone bush tube and marked the back of the interior panel. Removing the panel again I used the 4 marks to make pilot holes to check wheter they were in the right place. after fitting again, checking, and removing I expanded the holes to 25mm, just large enough to get a 19mm socket in. Satisfied that this would do the job, I capped them with 25mm rubber grommets.

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