Day 33 – 23/4/11 I’m building a car... at last

Finally I have finished painting. Now I’m left with nothing to do but start putting the car together.  I sorted the garage out a bit and gave my mate Dan a call to ask for his assistance.  The first jobs are to mount the front end metalwork to the tub and mount the roll bar before the fuel tank goes on.

I went back to the facebook photos of the demo car currently being built and saw that an area of the bulkhead and drive tunnel was covered by heat reflective tape.  Dan and I fitted the tape.  The tape supplied wasn’t enough to cover the area shown in the demo photos being just over a metre short.  Fortunately I had a spare roll I had been advised to use on the roll bar feet. Taping done, we presented the front frame to the bulkhead and the nut plates to the back side of the bulkhead.  Problem no.1 one of the nut plates will not fit flush to the bulkhead.  The fibreglass resin was fouling so it was impossible to align the pre-drilled holes to the nut plate.

Drivers side mis-shape

passenger side - and what the drivers side should look like

The fouling resin is going to be very difficult to get at, if at all.  I could barely get my phone in to take a picture of the problem which is obscurted by the internal webbing.  Alternatively I could cut the nut plate back as much as possible. I suspect I will have to do both and cut part of the webbing to get access to the fouling piece.

Problem no.2 is a bit more fundamental.  There are 18 fixings holding the front frame on. Nine bolts on each side, five at the top, three in the middle and one underneath, which is also one of the gearbox sub-frame mounting points. When we aligned the top five the bottom fixing point wouldn’t fit under the bulkhead.  And if we put the bottom fixing under the bulkhead the top fixings were out by about 6mm.  Dan and I struggled for about an hour before he had to head off (he’s new to being a dad and time is no longer his own).  I gave it some thought and came to the conclusion the underside fixings are the most important as they relate to the drive chain and engine mounting.  Left to my own devices, which involved sitting the front of the metalwork on the workmate and laid on my back, after much straining and cursing, I managed to put the underside bolts in place temporarily.  Once tightened I could see that all the other pre-drilled holes were about 3-6mm too high.  The alignment side to side was fine but they were still too high.  I think I need a word with Ben to see if I can slot the holes a little.

In the meantime I moved on to the roll cage. After my last discussion with Ben I took his advice and got hold of some glass fibre based bonding compound.  Ben Recommended U-Pol SMC but I was only able to get hold of the Isopon Equivalent P.40 which, I was told, is an equivalent product.

With a damp sponge I cleaned the interior in order to mark the fixing points for the roll bar.  I squared up the roll bar as best I could but with the interior of the car being glass fibre and resin and I struggled to find datum point on each side to measure from and ensure the bar was square on to the car.  I thought I had it about right, within a millimetre or two, based on the roof fixing points on the windscreen frame the top of the bar and marked it up ready to use the bonding compound to create pads for the roll bar to sit on.

 It was after lunch I went back to it and noticed from the side that it wasn’t as square on as I had thought.  I suspected it had shifted but the feet were still square in the marked areas.  I found a straight edge (some square bar about 6ft long) and put it on the tops of the door edges figuring the door frames must be equal and square because the doors have to fit with a relatively close tolerance.  I was out by more than I would have liked.  Now the simple answer is to bring the roll bar forward to the straight edge but that would put roll bar’s rear feet off the back of the car.  I went back to the Facebook Photos of IBIS White and it does look like the roll bar is set back from the door line (where I lay the metal edge) if only by 25-30mm.  But photos can be deceptive - another problem to speak with Ben about.

So I spent the rest of the day putting other bits and pieces together cleaning nut and bolt threads and applying copper grease.  I took a closer look at the steering rack and the bushes.  A bit of cleaning revealed that one of the bushes was perished. So that’s another set to order.