As good as my word, I fixed the central tub back together again. The photo here is of one side of the re-attached bodywork. Anthea commented that it actually looks quite good, and it could even be left like this. I don’t actually think that’s the case as when I paint the rest of the bodywork it’s bound to degrade.
Archive for December, 2009
… I will saw this attractive young woman in half. Well, I will in a minute but I need to explain why first.
The thing is, I wanted to check the steering rather more carefully, and perhaps change the routing of the column a soupçon. In order to do that, I needed to check how it fitted under the bodywork. The problem is, I had to do lots of faffing around to get the central portion to fit over the cage; for example to allow the front hoops of the cage to stick through the bodywork, and also to allow the steering column to poke through the front of the central bodywork section. You can see both of these in the photo on the right.
A thing I’ve been concerned about for a while is whether the seat belt mountings are OK for use with the HANS device, which requires that the angle of dangle of the belts between the HANS and the mountings is within 20° of horizontal. So, I installed a seat (that is, the old blanket that I use for such things) and took a video of myself sitting down in the seat in various ways. The photo on the right is an image capture from this video, which I made with the video camera I inherited off my Dad.
In the cold, hard, light of day there’s another possibility for the brakes. I could tap the caliper mounts in the uprights, as shown here, for say, M12x1.5 and I could then fasten the caliper mounting blocks directly into the upright without needing a bolt head on outside in the way of the disc. That way I could use the sort of discs that I’ve got on the back of the Fury and I’d be sure they’d fit under the wheels.
This is essentially how the front brakes on the Fury mount to the uprights (ex mk II Escort in that case) so it must be possible to make it work, especially with the addition of copious amounts of thread lock. Certainly seems a decent idea…
Of course, with it being Christmas and all, it’d be nice to think that I could make some good progress on the car. Admittedly, I do have some work to do, not the least trying to get some shape into what’s going to be in my PhD thesis which I’m supposed to write next year. I wonder what I’ll write about?
In between worrying about that, I did manage to get something done. Starting with the driveshafts I bought some skinnier tubing for sleeving the shafts and, coupled with moving the diff slightly, it does seem as though I might be alright at avoiding the chassis. Of course, the proper driveshafts should be skinnier again than these ones. So, I’ll press on at the moment.
