Build Officially Started!

[vmax1974]

I like these shiney bits too I believe my brake and fuel lines will be coming from sweden when the time comes

[Tatey]

Quick update before I go on holiday for 10 days.

My mate came round to help me the other day and we managed to get quite a lot done, the new gearbox mount is in now and it is safe to say the new mount is 100% better than the old one, the gearbox moves a couple of mm, compared to the mass amounts of movement in the old one.

I've put another bulkhead bracket underneath the handbrake bracket for my brake lines, I decided on this as I felt it was a neater solution.

Welds were ground down to allow for bodywork/aluminium panels to be fitted.

I finally got round to buying some more steel and I have nearly finished mounting my passenger seat. I just need to profile some spaces so that the runners sit flat against the seats then weld in the mounts. Once this is done then I just need to weld in a few tube ends and then flip the chassis, and fully weld the brackets that have been put on recently.

The chassis can then be primed and painted satin black ready for the floor to be fitted.

I also popped round to NTS yesterday and managed to pick up all of the bodywork for my car for £205 (Nose cone, scuttle, front cycle wings, rear arches, bonnet and a carbon aeroscreen), they are all seconds and require a small amount of work but should look good. As they are all different colours I will be wrapping them in vinyl and have ordered this in tomato red (£65 for 6x1.5m of cast automotive vinyl inc VAT and delivery, which is enough vinyl to do the entire car) as well as some wing stays from ebay (I'm starting to get sick of fabrication and at £43 they were a bargain in my eyes), and finally I've ordered some body filler to fill in a few chips/cracks on the bodywork. The carbon aeroscreen has a few problems like a large air bubble in the top left hand corner and the carbon weave hasnt gotten into the front edge of the mold so there is a large amount of resin there, so I will be cutting the air bubble out and profiling the side to match, and then surround it all in edge trim and then give it all a polish and hopefully it should look quite good.

Another mate of mine has had experience with carbon fibre/fibre glass so he is going to give me a hand with the bodywork and I will post lots of pictures of the wrapping process in case anyone is interested in doing it.

Finally I've ordered of custom Roadster grills from this thread which I think will make the car look really nice:

http://www.haynes.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=8105

Any questions just give me a shout.

[tkpm]

Tatey where did you order your vinyl wrap from?

Terry

[Tatey]

It's been ordered from here:

http://www.mdpsupplies.co.uk/vehiclewrapping.asp

Someone on Locost Builders recommend it as he wrapped his motorbike in it and said it was fine to use so should be perfect for the roadster. I was originally going to go for 3M stuff but at around £200 vs £65 it didn't seem worth it.

[tkpm]

Thanks

Terry

[voucht]

Hi Simon,
Could you post a picture of the bracket you welded under CP14 for the bulkhead fitting of the rear central brake line please? I'm very curious about it :-)
Thanks.
Sylvain

[Tatey]

Sylvain, I will take a couple of pictures of the bracket later on today and post them up.

A quick update on my build, I've been away for the past 2 weeks travelling around Europe covering 2,500 miles, so not that much progress has been made.

However I managed to mount the passenger seat yesterday which was a lot easier than the driver seat since I knew what I was doing, I have welded the end caps to the open chassis tube on the front roll bar mounts. This now just leads me into stripping everything from the chassis, priming it and painting it.

I have got my tomato red vinyl that I will be using to cover the car, it has a very slight pinkish tinge to it, but I guess I'll see how it looks and I can always change it at a later date, being £60 and all it won't be too much of an issue. The body filler also arrived so when I am waiting for the chassis to dry I will be working on the bodywork.

My loom also arrived from Premier looms and it looks very good, I can see now it would have taken a lot of work to get a loom of the quality they have provided.

So at the minute there isn't much I need to buy to make a lot of progress on the car, I've got the next 3 weeks free and then the army is paying me to get my C+E licence (£2500s worth...) so that should be good, then I head off to the Olympics for 4 weeks with the army to provide security, then the weekend after getting back I then go to work for Triumph Motorcycle for 5 weeks then the weekend after I get back I go back to uni, so the next 3 weeks are the only real time I'll have to work on my car so I am seeing that I may ever day count! I've also got a couple of friends who are keen to give me a hand, so that should speed things up somewhat.