After a fairly eventful day racing yesterday (but disappointing as a crash resulted in a DNF - not my fault either!), I got stuck in to the build again. It's a lot easier to put new bits together than fix broken ones! I only had the afternoon to work on the car as I'd been ripping out my mum's kitchen in the morning. A bit knackered after that I was tempted to just go to the pub (a Sunday tradition for me and my friends), but seeing as I was already covered in muck, I got cracking to fit the brake calipers. It as a pretty straightforward affair. Just make sure that you've got the rotors on the right side/end and the same goes for the calipers. As a rule of thumb, the nipples should all face upwards.
The first thing to do is to remove all the rotors (again) so that you can get access to the mounting lugs on the uprights to fit the caliper mounting brackets. At this stage, you should also fit the mounting brackets for the Brembo (if you have the Brembo kit) handbrake calipers. Take care to get these the right way round as the caliper mounting holes for them are different sizes - keep the mounts in their boxes and fit one at a time making sure that you've got the right side. I find it useful to mark discretely on the part the side as soon as it comes out of the packagin to avoid confusion. The larger hole goes at the bottom of the mount. The stopping caliper mounts are lovely quality AP items and look the business. Dry fit them first of all without the Loctite as you may need to shim the calipers a bit if they're not sitting centrally on the rotor. The manual states that a 1mm manufacturing tolerance may necessitate this. Not in my case however, the billet mounts positioned the calipers bang-on dead centre. So just a simple case of removing the calipers and rotors again, loctiteing the threads on all the mounting bolts and refitting. Unfortunately, one of the anti-rattle clips supplied with the calipers was too small for the caliper so I'll have to return it to the factory for replacement, but that's a minor hassle. Other than that, job done.
The handbrake calipers, however, required a little more work to get them to fit. Basically, the pads supplied with the kit are a bit thick, so some judiscious grinding is needed to get them over the rotor. I hate doing this, but it's unavoidable and explains why my hands are so grubby in the pics! I ran in the handbrake cables too. Luckily I had some perfectly sized grommets where the cables pass through the rear bulkhead, so these were fitted and the cables put in place. I won't fix them into position with the P-clips until later in the build where I can get a good idea of what space I've got in the engine bay. When I have parts left that relate to a build section, I usually tape them to the relevant parts to avoid confusion. That's why you'll see bags hanging from the cables in the pics! Guy and Ed from Pistonheads turned up for a gander at the car. It was useful to have a poke around Guy's GTR to compare notes. Usefully, he told me to get maximum travel on both the brake and clutch master cylinders by unwinding the actuating arms from the brake bias bar and clutch connecting clevis. I wasn't happy with my initial pedal positions, so it was a good time to refit the master cylinders to get full travel - which conveniently lined up the pedals!
Once all the calipers were in place and torqued up, I moved onto the brake lines. This really is child's play as the part codes on the braided cables relate directly to the numbering on the diagram in the build manual. I put them all in position around the car to make sure everything reached the right places, then dry fitted ready for rivetting into place. Almost out of time, I quickly ran in the clutch cable too and routed it around the other side of the car to the engine bay. Time to call it a day and get some food and some kip.
Tuesday 3rd September
Due to an early flight back from a business trip, I had a couple of hours to kill down the workshop. Order of the day was to start fitting the cooling kit. The jobs were to define the positions of the radiator box side plates (the triangular bits of ally) and mount the fans to the rad itself. It's a relatively simple procedure but is best tackled in order. First, position the fans on the radiator itself using the pre-drilled lower mounting strip as a guide. The holes tally up with the captive nut slots in the fan housings however, these slots are slightly undersize for the nylocs supplied but they can be tapped in carefully with a hammer and suitable drift. Do this now and tap the nylocs down about 2mm from the fan surface. Centralise the fans and mounting strip on the rad making sure that the fans are the right way round (see pic). Next, remove the lower strip and use it to define the hole positions for the upper mounts by clamping them together and centrepunching the positions through the existing holes. These will all need drilling out to 6mm (including the pre-drilled guide holes in the lower mount strip) and deburring. At this stage, I pre-drilled the rivet holes on the mounting strips to define the rivet on the radiator itself.
Dry fit the mounting strips and fans into position and clamp carefully in place. You can now mark the positions of your pre-drilled rivet holes into the rad by carefully centre punching them. Remove the fans/strips and get a piece of scrap ally panel (the one from the pedal box cut out from the front cockpit section of the double skin kit is ideal) and slide it under the radiator edge to protect the cores. Then, carefully drill through each marked rivet hole, moving the ally panel under each one to protect the cores. Clean up the holes and rivet the mounting brackets into position (it's easier to put the fans in place as you do this). Finally, use the allen-headed capped bolts to secure the fans to the brackets into the captive nylocs that you'd tapped into the fan housings. All that's left to do is to fix into position but it's time for tea!
Finally, some more time to work on the car. Now that the fans were fitted to the radiator, I could fit the side skins to the chassis to force as much air through them as possible. Dry fit the radiator in position first so that you can ensure that the side panels fit snugly against it. They don't follow the chassis rails (they stick out a bit at the rear) so make sure you get everything in place before marking out. Once in position, tape/clamp them in place and carefully remove the rad. I left a cardboard sleeve around mine to protect the core fins which worked a treat. Now that you can access the sides, carefully mark where the side chassis rails run underneath them (this is a bit tricky) and mark out for rivets down the insides. I had to drill out a couple of rivets from the floor skin panel to get them to sit flush but managed to mark the rivet positions so that they were re-used by the side skins! More luck than judgement, but definitely helped by using the rivet jig to get consistent rivet spacing. Sikaflex and rivet the sides in place. Just before you're ready to final fit the rad itself, cut a strip of the expanding foam tape and apply to each of the upper edges of the side skins. Once the rad is then put in place and attached with the rubber bobbins, the expanding foam with fill any gaps where the side skins sit against the radiator sides. A very neat solution. There's still a 10mm gap below the rad though, but I'll get some more tape to do this if need be (not enough supplied in the kit). Time to sort the brake lines out. Footnote: The factory rivet the side skins down the rad box chassis diagonals too. It fans them out, making them wider then the rad at the front, but the foam tape will fill the resulting gap.
Fixing the brake and clutch lines is a simple, if a little time consuming affair. Once you've got all the brake lines in rough position, take care to make sure that they're routed so that they don't foul anything else (some things may not even be fitted yet) and avoid any places that would rub the lines under vibration to cause premature wear. I tried to do this as economically as far as clips/holes go, routing the lines along existing rivet positions where possible. Not much more to say really except to keep it all neat and avoid uneccessary kinks in the cables. It's easier to undo the banjo connectors from the calipers temporarily whilst fixing the lines as it allows the lines to adopt a natural position as they don't like being twisted. Any kinks so caused can mostly be ironed out by adjusting the double-nut on the cable end where it meets the master cylinder or T-piece.
The battery is unbelievably small! It's a dry-cell unit which the factory have recently started to supply (they used to supply the Red-Top race cells). From looking at the packaging, you're more likely to find one of these batteries in a jetski! Still, at least it's waterproof ;) Whilst it's not too hard to fit the battery clamp and side stops when the tray is in place, you may find it a bit easier to do before fixing it down. Personally, doing it with the tray floor in place allowed me to get a nice tight fit, especially with the battery strap. It's a simple job to place the battery in position and put the stops either side, mark, drill and rivet. Pre-drill the top strap for the cap head screws and mark the positions of the holes on the front bulkhead and battery tray floor. The front bulkhead end of the strap is affixed with nylocs but you'll need a Rivnut/Nutsert/Zerc (depending on your nationality/preference) tool to put the captive rivnuts in the battery tray to secure the bottom of the strap. Luckily I already have one (there's a surprise!) but I suggest borrowing/hiring one rather than buying one as there's not a lot of use for it afterwards. You can get a nice tight fit by not fitting the rubber feet when marking the positions for the holes in the battery strap in the front bulkhead (the battery will sit slightly lower). Once you've marked and drilled them, fit the feet to the battery tray, securing with Sikaflex, you'll then find that the upper strap mount will be marginally higher (about 2-3mm). Lightly press down on the battery and you'll find that the tray will flex enough to fit the cap-head screws and nylocs. The end result is firmly fixed in position.
That done, I set about getting the battery cable into position, temporarily connecting it to the +ve terminal so that I could work out the run length. This allowed me to fix the front-to-rear brake line into place too as it runs along the same chassis rails (NOTE: This is for a Right hand drive car only. For a Left hand drive car, the Front/Rear brake line and clutch pipe run down the left hand side of the car and the battery cable down the right). The idea is to double-clip these lines with the 1/2" and 3/16" clips using the same rivet. You will however need some longer rivets as the standard ones just pull out of the chassis rails. I used some larger ones with 4.5mmx13mm shanks which were ideal. The kit for the battery cable and brake lines only contain a few p-clips allowing for a wider interval between them. I like my lines nice and tight though so I sourced some more from a local motor factor (or rather, a mate picked them up for me - cheers Mart!). As with all the line clipping, I fixed duct tape to mark the centrepoint of the chassis rails where the lines were routed, marked out the 100mm intervals and drilled/waxoyled the holes. This is what takes the time but it's well worth it. I think that you'll agree that it looks great when done. It's just as well I've recorded my efforts here as once the bodywork is on - no-one will ever see the fruits of my labour!! A good days work. Not that it's made a great deal of difference to the appearance of the car, but I could sleep soundly in the knowledge of a good job done.
Back down the workshop and more fixing to be done. Now that the brake/clutch/battery lines were in position, I could fit the coolant pipes which run from the radiator to the engine bay.
Once I'd worked out which pipe was which (the left hand pipe is slightly longer), I set about preparing the ally mounting brackets which hold them in place. These aren't pre-drilled and I soon worked out why! I almost jumped straight in and drilled them with a 3/3 pattern (3 lower rivets a the bottom of the bracket to mount to chassis, 3 upper rivets: 2 to hold the pipe firmly and 1 'spare' to secure loom clips etc.). However, whilst they're pre-bent fairly well, they don't exactly conform to the dimensions of the pipe and so the front/rear faces of the bracket don't necessarily line up (see photo). Therefore, the best method is to temporarily clamp them to the pipe itself and make sure that your rivet holes pass through both ends of the bracket.
If the bracket is a 'P' shape, it's the lower end of vertical bit that I'm talking about. To give you an idea, it's about 10mm up from the bottom. Remove the clip from the pipe, re-clamp it and drill for rivets. Once you've got all the clamps drilled and setup, you can set about defining their mounting positions after you've put the solicon hose connectors on temporarily. The left hand hose uses a 40 degree elbow at the front and a 90 degree at the rear (not needed to be fitted at this stage) and the right hand pipe uses a 100mm silicon connector that you'll need to cut from the length of hose supplied in the kit. Make sure that you cut the end square. I find the easiest way of doing this without a special hose-cutter (even I haven't got one of these ;) is to either put a piece of tape around the hose and use it as a guide (see photo) or temporarily fit a jubilee clip to the hose and cut around it's edge. Once you've got the silicon hoses on, put the mounts onto the pipes and fix to the chassis rails. Any slack in the upper part of the mount can be taken out by putting a couple of rivets in the top part of the bracket shank (see photo).
The same procedure was taken for the left hand pipe. This also provides the route for the expansion hose on the radiator which is cable-tied to the pipe. I fitted rubber strips between the top of the mounting brackets and the hose to prevent any chafing damage and bonded it in place with Sikaflex. The last job was to Sikaflex 'bungs' between the pipes and the chassis rails to prevent vibration noise and subsequent damage. The end result, well, I think it speaks for itself - well worth the effort.
So, what next. Well, I managed to get hold of some more rubber grommets for the handbrake cable holes in the rear bulkhead and now that the coolant pipes were in position, there was no reason not to fit it. Almost missed in the double skin-kit are a pair of rear bulkhead sides. It wasn't immediately apparent as to how these were fitted - inside or outside of the panel? After a quick look at the CD photos, it became clear that the side panels fit 'between' the rear bulkheads and are there so that you have a flange onto which you can rivet the engine bay side panel. Simply drill them for rivets and fix to the chassis rails on either side of the bulkhead 'sandwich' with the return facing the engine bay. Now you've got something to drill into at the sides of the engine bay panel.
And so the final job for this session. Fitting the steering wheel. I'd clamped up the rack and column temporarily before, but stripped it again for final fit. I wasn't happy with the rotation of the column in the front bulkhead hole as the UJ follows a slightly eccentric rotation and the column shaft was a bit close to the upper chassis rail. It's an easy thing to change by slackening off the rack clamps and rotating the rack. Next, I removed the upper steering colum link and polished the sections where it passes through the bearings with sevel grades of Wet'n'Dry using some light oil as a lubricant. The difference was amazing with a mirror finish replacing the gold anodised finish that it comes with. On to the quick release mechanism. I taped the boss to the upper column link and marked the positions of the holes. Be careful when you're doing this and make sure you get every hole in the upper link dead centre of the mounting hole in the boss. These were drilled out with a 5mm drill and then tapped with an M6x1 tap as the countersunk screws are captive. The MOMO wheel itself was supplied without mounting screws so I opted to use the ones with the quick release mount. Someone (dunno if it was the factory or the quick release manufacturer) had already drilled and tapped holes to suit the MOMO wheel, but, with smaller holes to suit smaller screws. Being the impatient sod that I am, rather than source the smaller screws I re-drilled and tapped for the M6x1 screws and put it all together. The only problem with this is that the screw heads are a bit too large to allow the centre boss to be put in. So I'll either have to find some more or shave a bit off these! Anyway, once it was all back together I was very happy with it. There's no play in the boss and the rack movement is so much smoother. All that remains on the steering front is to check the bump-steer, but I'll have to wait until the flat-floor is free of TVR before I can do that.
I ended the day tidying up any loose cabling which was really just the bits in the engine bay. So another weekend gone by in a fit of activity. Am a bit undecided as to what to tackle next - loom or air-con. We shall see!
After a phone call to the factory earlier in the day, I realised that I'd better get my butt into gear if I the car was going to be ready for the body fitment next Thursday! So, once I'd got home from work I shot off down to the workshop to get cracking. There are three jobs that need to be finished before the body can go on, fit the aircon, the loom and the luggage containers. The aircon needs to be done first as the pipes are routed down the chassis sides and the luggage pods are trimmed to allow the pipes to pass through them.
The aircon kit comes in a fairly hefty box with the mounting panels, blower, condensor, dryer, pump, pipes and fittings inside. First job was to get the blower mounting tray and lower vent/control panel into place. By this time you'll all be old-hands at anything that involves fitting ally to the chassis ;) Once you've ascertained the correct position for the blower tray, clamp it to the chassis and mark, from above, the positions of the chassis rails that run underneath. Remove from the chassis (duh!) and mark, drill and deburr holes for the rivets which will hold it in place. The photos on the build CD only show about 6 rivets holding it in place, but I went for a few more with 60mm spacing between them, down the two diagonal chassis members. Once again, take care to ensure that the holes line up with the centrepoint of the chassis dash rails or the rivets won't seat properly and will 'pull' the panel down making it indent. Once happy with the positions, re-clamp the panel to the chassis and drill the chassis rails. I got them spot on - phew! Before you can fit the panel, you need to drill 3 x 6mm mounting holes for the cap-head allen-screws and nylocs (which were supplied with the radiator kit) for the lower aircon vents and control panel. Place the control panel upside down on the blower tray/chassis rail so that the 3 pre-drilled holes at the 'rear' of it align with the centre of the main dash rail. You can now mark the positions of the 3 pre-drilled holes at the 'front' directly onto the blower tray. Remove both and drill/deburr the blower tray. At this stage, you can fit the tray into place using the good old waxoyl/sikaflex (not too much mind ;) and rivet procedure. To fix the rear of the control panel to the dash chassis rail, you will need to (as far as I could see) insert some rivnuts (zercs/nuserts) to take the cap-head screws. These weren't supplied, but I had some in my rivnut kit. Temporarily hold the control panel in place with the 3 front mount screws and mark the positions of the rear holes underneath the main dash rail. This is a bit tricky to do unless you lay upside down in the cockpit which I don't recommend as you'll cover yourself in hot swarf when you drill them out! Before you ask, no, I didn't try this myself ;) Use rivnuts in the front holes too which ill allow you to remove the panel in case of service requirement later on. Don't use bolts/nylocs otherwise you won't be able to access them when the dash is in place. Once the rivnuts were fitted, I set to work on fitting out the panel itself with the vents and airflow/temperature controls.
This is straightforward enough. Remove the directional vent face of 2 blower vents to leave the mounting portion. These can be pressed home (remember to get them in the right side!) with a bit of persuasion and then held in place with 4 countersunk self-tapping screws. The small plastic control panel has 4 plastic locating tabs on the rear. These can be simply snipped off or, as I did, you can drill 4 mounting holes in the ally panel to hold it in place. Remove the sleeve nuts from the 2 potentiometers and insert with the temperature pot (the one with the soft wire coil) at the bottom. Secure with the sleeve nuts and add a bit of loctite (in my experience, these always work themselves loose over time). That done, you can push-fit the knobs on. If these were more visible I'd replace them with more elegant ally items, but seeing as they're under the dash, I'll leave them be. The control/lower vent panel can now be fitted with cap-heads/spring washers for the captive rivnuts.
The lower vents are connected to the blower unit with the flexible ducting hose. I found that a compressed length of 40mm was perfect to make the short right angle onto the vent mounting flange. Wrap the temperature sending wire around one of the hoses and secure them all with a cable tie at either end to stop them slipping off. Which just leaves the plumbing except I ran out of time so you'll have to wait for Saturday's installment to see how I got on ;)
Right, so now that the blower was in position, I just needed to plumb it in and do some final fitting. To secure the blower properly and stop rattling, I added some foam tape (had a bit left from the radiator skins) to the bottom of the housing so that it sits on something soft, then drilled out a couple of holes in the rear of the tray for 2 cable ties which hold the blower securely, pulling down on the rear. Finally, the black wire strap was rivetted to the tray. I was a bit confused by this. Although it looks like an earth strap, aluminium is a poor conductor yet this is what was shown on the build CD? Oh well, onto the piping! The instructions (or should that be distractions?) that come with the A/C are a little unspecific regarding the pipe runs from the blower to the engine bay. After a lot of head scratching and some useful confirmation from the Ultima forum (available here!), I figured it out. Rather than explain it in words, I've designed a diagram which shows the plumbing schematically.
First you need to attach the A/C blower thermostat to the lower RH rear pipe on the blower (the RH of the blower is for cooling, the LH for heating). Use some PTFE tape to get a good seal on the threaded outlet. Wrap the sender wire around the takeoff pipe and clip in place with the steel clip provided. Once it is secured to the pipe, lag it with the tar-like stuff supplied (you may need to stretch it out a bit to get it to go all the way round). Once done, you can attach the 18mm OD pipe to the 'stat takeoff and the 22mm pipe to the top connector. The long 22mm OD pipe with no end connectors attaches to the copper outlets on the LH rear side of the blower to form the heating circuit. Leave the pipe uncut in the engine bay for the time being so that the pipe runs in a big 'U'. You'll later connect the engine bay ends to the waterpump/thermostat housing on the engine, so leave it loosely in place until the engine is fitted. Don't fit the heater shut off which sits in the LH luggage pod at this stage until you've pre-fitted the luggage pod to define the best position for it. The pipes which run front to rear are held in place with ally 'P' clips which are rivetted (skin-pinned for the time being until the luggage pods are in place) to the underside of the top chassis outriggers at either end of the luggage pod apetures.
Hit a bit of a snag at this stage. I needed to get the luggage pods fitted. However, on the build CD they are shown rivetted through the fume seals at the rear. However, the fume seals are supplied with the body kit - which I don't have! Additionally, to get the luggage pods to sit far enough back to allow them to be secured in this fashion, it means that the top slots which are cut in the luggage pods to clear the top frame in the chassis outrigger are in the wrong position (too far to the rear). Hmmm... I decided to leave this for a while and moved onto the gear linkage which had to be fitted beforehand anyway as the RH luggage pod blocks access to the gear lever rose joints.
Like several stages in the build, whilst the component parts are of high quality, they still need a bit of 'blueprinting' to get everything working properly. The gear linkage is a prime examply of this (like the steering column). Ultima finish a lot of parts in a gold anodised finish. This looks fantastic, but, means that components with fine tolerance no longer fit together properly. The gear linkage suffers in two areas 1) where the linkage rods pass through the Rose joints and 2) where the UJ's fit to the ends of the linkage rods. The key to the linkage rod fitment this is to not only to get things to fit together, but to do so with minimum resistance between rubbing surfaces. The machining on the insides of the rose joints is pretty good, so you'll need to rub down and polish the linkage rod ends where they pass through them. I used 320, 400, 600 wet and dry followed by T-cut to get an absolutely smooth finish. The difference that it made to the slickness of the linkage is amazing, really smooth. The next problem was that I couldn't get the cockpit linkage rod in! You may remember that I'd worked out the hold size for the linkage rod from another rose joint and had pre-drilled the holes in the rear bulkheads. Whilst my measurements were spot on, they failed to take into account the fact that you need to be able to slide the linkage rod INTO the rear bulkhead in order to get it to fit into the front lower UJ and the rod is thick in the middle section than the ends! So the hole in the bukhead was drilled out with the stepped drills to allow the thicker part of the linkage rod to pass through it. The component parts of the linkage are held together will rollpins. Once you've pre-fitted all the rods/UJ's to make sure they go together, mark each joint with a number and a side. So each UJ will have 2 numbers and a mark denoting it's orientation. The reason for this is that to ensure that the rollpin holes all line up properly otherwise you'll never get the rollpins in! You can of course laboriously mark dead centres on the rods and UJ's so that any UJ will go with any rod, but there's no point and you can still get it wrong! It's far easier to put the UJ on the rod and drill both together. That way you can be sure that it's bang on (see photo). Make sure you don't push the rod too far into the UJ otherwise you'll restrict its rotational movement. Check that the UJ can rotate 90 degrees before drilling (see photo). At this stage I realised that I had all the parts EXCEPT for the damn gear lever itself! So, I couldn't final fit the entire linkage. I could fit from the engine bay bulkhead back though. The roll pins are a bit reluctant to fit at first. I tapped them gently into the UJ, then placed them on the rod making sure that the orientation marks were aligned and partly pressed home with a G-clamp and finished off with a hammer (take care not to damage the rose joints or the UJ's themselves). Not a great way of doing it but I couldn't think of another way. It's a loborious process but well worth spending time over. The last thing you want with such a protracted linkage is any stiffness in it's operation. Time to call it a day.
Well, not exactly. Next job was to fit the loom. To make this process about 500 times easier, I took the loom home and spent almost 3 hours identifying and labelling all the connections. This is a VERY good thing to do because, it will not only make you familiar with the loom layout, but will make identifying things whilst wiring the dash whilst being upside down in the cockpit a LOT easier :). I managed to find everything except for the Voltmeter guage connection? A further inspection revealed a likely connector but I'll check with the factory on Thursday.
After a good night's sleep from exhausting my brain with all those loom connections, it was time to fit it to the chassis. I now had a good idea of where things went and the addition of the labels which explained exactly what the wire spurs were for made things much simpler. So it's just a question of p-clipping and cable tying everything in place as neatly as possible. Which brings me on to earth points. Now, GRP cars have an electrical disadvatage in that they can't use the bodywork as a convenient earth point. Consequently, it is VITAL that you have good chassis earth unless you wan't electrical gremlins later on. The chassis is of course, powder coated, so in order to get a good contact between the chassis and earth strap you must remove it down to good bare metal. I the best way to do this was to firstly run a drill through the strap mounting hole, then scrape off the powder coat around it with a sharp knife blade and finish with some wet & dry. Do this for all the chassis earths. Then it's just a question of finding the best routing around the car and securing in place. I secured along the LH side with cable ties to the battery live cable but used p-clips for the rear part of the loom in the engine bay as I didn't want to constrict the clutch pipe. Not a lot more to say about this at this stage.
5 hours and lots of p-clips later, the entire loom was in place. The last job before the body can be fitted was to fit the luggage pods. I spoke to the factory about the fume seals, but it appears that it's not necessary to sandwich the two together. So, I went with a centralised position for them. Once you work out the method of fitting these they are easy - before that, you'll curse like hell! Basically, as supplied, the pods can't be put into the apetures as they have to go in at an angle in order to pass over the water pipes. Simply put, as well as the notches for the aircon pipes, you need to cut a 'V' out from the outermost top sides to allow you to temporarily fold the outermost top sides over a little, so that they can slip into place. It's a tricky one to explain, so I've done a little diagram to make life easier! To give you an idea, it took about 2 hours to do the first one and 30 minutes for the second!
So, I'd pretty much exhausted all the jobs that needed doing before the body could be fitted. In fact, I had! A momentous moment now as I finally got to unwrap the mega wheels and put them on, as I finally had a rolling chassis which could be trailered up to Ultima for the body fitment. It looks FANTASTIC!
There you go. I'm off on holiday once I've taken the car up to the factory so next time you see it, it will look like a proper car instead of a big go-kart. Blimey - it'll be finished before you know it!
After a quick measure up, I found that the chassis wouldn't fit on my trailer, so fellow Ultima owner and all round good egg(head) stepped in a lent me one (cheers Slappy!) which my brother kindly collected (ta Stu). I took a couple of shots when I delivered it to the factory. I wanted to avoid getting everything covered in cack from the road (especially the unprotected loom terminals), so used one of my car covers to make the worlds largest crisp packet!. I got some funny looks on the motorway that's for sure. After an uneventful journey (save for adding more bungie cords to keep the car cover from flapping about) I arrived safely in Hinckley. Had a good long (possibly too long - time is money afterall ;) chat with Ted & Co. and we identified a couple of minor snagging areas that needed sorting before the body could go on. The loom routing from the dash to the battery needed changing as I had it on a chassis rail which the body sits on (ie. the outer one) and the side skins on the radiator box weren't rivetted to the side chassis rails. This occurred because I'd dry-fitted to the exact width of the rad which is slightly narrower. The idea is to rivet to the side rails and let the expanding foam fill the gap. As I mentioned earlier, this wasn't that clear from the build manual/CD but there you go! Also, as I didn't have the fume seals when I fitted the side pods, I'd left them skin-pinned in position so that they could be fitted. I explained the problem with the slots to Ted who thought that the design had already been changed? Anyway, it was no great problem to fix and the factory would fit the seals and pods before pre-fitting the body. It was all pre-drilled and ready to go so there was very little labour involved (I hope!). Anyway, they seemed pretty pleased with my workmanship so I left them to get on with the task of pre-fitting the body (which wasn't there otherwise I'd have taken a pic or three).
Happy day! Whilst on holiday in the states, Richard sent me a couple of the pre-fitted body. There was still a bit of work to do to it but it's finally looking like a GTR! :) Can't wait until next week when I go to collect it along with the majority of the parts to finish the car.
