Month: September 2016

Seventh day and managed to find a spare couple of hours to fit the roll cage. Which didn’t quite fit so had to widen some holes so the threads would line up. Also bolted in the passenger seat as I don’t think I’ll need to move it again.

Big day tomorrow for the build. Finally the engine will be going in along with the gearbox and the last of the heavy parts!

Sixth day and managed to spend a couple of hours on the car fixing some of the issues I was stuck on Sunday. The elusive handbrake parts were in the bag labelled ‘axle’ and putting that in was a quick job. The seats didn’t fit previously because I used the wrong set of seat belt mounting points on the inboard side. Totally missed the other holes because the interior of the car was not well lit. With a torch in the car it was easy to spot them. Won’t bolt the seat in yet as it would block me getting to the mounting points for the rear suspension which i’ve yet to start. At least with the seat in it is starting to look more like a car.

Also got around to drilling holes in the driver side floor pan so I could fit the 2 lower harness straps. The instructions don’t match up with the parts so made it up based on what made sense to me. Hopefully it’s correct.

Fifth afternoon of the build and I had a simple aim get everything on the interior of the car done and possible fit a seat or two and maybe even the rollcage.

First job was to fit the knee trim panels and rivet the side panels. Three rivets in and my riveter broke! Painfully slow trip to screwfix to pick up a replacement and I was good to go. Sometime later and several cuts later the panels were in.

Decided to keep it simple and fit the fixed passenger seat first as I still needed to sort out the 6 point harness on the driver side. Since it was a fix seat how hard can it be I thought? Turns out not simple. The harness mounting get in the way and prevent the seat going back far enough to match up the holes in the floor pan. Either i’m an idiot or the holes are in the wrong place. At this point decided to have a tidy up and give up for the weekend.

Fourth day (afternoon) of the build. First things first was a trip to Halfords to get some much needed supplies for a few of the upcoming jobs. I’m actually a bit ahead of where I thought I would be so now it was a case of skipping ahead in the build manual and finding stuff I could do that didn’t depend on the engine being in the car. Spent ages trying to find the handbrake kit. Pretty sure it’s not there so will come back to that one.

Managed to tick off the front anti roll bar, engine mounts, boot cover, 4 point harness. Then hit a problem with the 6 point harness. ‘drill a 11mm hole in floor’. I don’t have a 11mm drill bit. Added that to tomorrow’s shopping list and onto another job. That is the thing with kit cars every job has a dependency on another and if you can’t do one thing you have to abandon a whole lot of related stuff.