Build 4

It was a momentous day for me today, because my car passed the beaming and torsion test. The car has been sitting in the test rig for about a month because when I was first ready to do the test my engineer went on three weeks holiday to the UK and Europe.
Well I have had a couple of rather sleepless nights in anticipation and I had a good workout loading and unloading the besser blocks in and out of the car. Any way the end result is a pass and Earl (the engineer) said that mine was the stiffest clubman he has ever tested in the beaming test.

Bumper Bars
As one of the requirements from Queensland Transport is that these cars should have a full width bumper bar front and back I spent some time in the shed making the front bumper bar and apart from a bracing bracket it is complete I made it detachable after the removal of two cotter pins so that the nose cone could be removed as necessary. The bumper is made from 25 x25mm RHS with the ends made from sections of the boot hinges out of my donor car to give me the required rounded ends . I think that it is one of the ugliest parts I have made for this car all I can say is that for some reason I expect that the bumper bars will mysteriously fall off as soon as the car is licensed which seams to be the case with just about everyone’s car.
Words and Pictures

There is no point in having a boot lid if it can’t be secured and It was my original intention to use the same sort of over centre catches as I had used for the bonnet but I also wanted the lid to be lockable.I had a vague memory that I had removed the door lock from the drivers side door of my engine donor but for the life of me I could not find it until my brother was visiting and we were in the storage shed looking for some thing else.”is this the lock you are looking for Iain?” he said plucking it from the window ledge.
Careful placement has meant that the tongue of the lock hooks under the top frame tube and as the lock comes from my engine donor the ignition key fits as well

Some people think that the majority of the noise produced by an engine comes from the exhaust but in fact the air intake can be a greater culprit. So I had to build an air box. as you can see from the picture it is made of aluminium check plate folded and held together with rivets . the shape is far from entirely regular but after a lot of trial and error I have ended up with a volume of about 7 litres .The fittings to connect the inlet pipe are actually Plumbing components and the intake pipe is actually 50 mm Polly plumbing drain pipe and as you can see there are a couple of angled bends necessary to fit the space these were made by carefully cutting the pipe something the cut surfaces and welding them together with the “blue Glue” which is basically a solvent. The inlet of this pipe is mounted by the top left hand corner of the radiator(as you can see in the next picture) so that the air that goes into the engine is cooler and therefore denser(which has performance benefits)I may be more butch and macho to have this pipe made out of aluminium but Polly pipe is cheap and should do the job well enough.

This picture shows the front bumper that I have made prior to it getting a coat of gloss black paint. Although the regulations say that bumpers are required on ICV’s there is no specification for them at all. this is what I have come up with and if you look closely you may well notice the two bolts that hold the front removable section that allows me to remove the nose cone. for some strange reason I expect that this part will “fall off” rather soon after the car being licenced.

One of the jobs that I have been putting off is modifying my uprights so that the nyloc nuts on the top ball joints will go far enough to engage the locking nylon this requires the underside of the top “ear” of the upright to be thinned down by 3mm I had sought help from a friend to have this done with a milling machine but we came to the conclusion that this would be rather difficult to set up . So after scribing a line around the part to be modified I just ground the part with my angle grinder and by using a new disc in the angle grinder I was able to get a very good result. Now the nyloc nut on the ball joint works as it is intended to.

The final picture is of one of the front hubs after it was cleaned up and painted .You may notice that two of the wheel studs are missing I have had to replace two of them after foolishly forcing the wrong nuts on when I was fitting the car to the jig for the beaming and torsion test.The replacement studs are about 10 mm longer than the originals so I had to remove one more stud from the hub so that the hubs would not be unbalanced .

Front badge and Exhaust Heat Shield

We all want our cars to be distinctive and one of the ways we do that is with the badges and decals we add to them the picture above is of the badge which will be adding to the nose of my car the main part was originally intended to be a boot badge for a Bentley that I found on EBay UK for 5 quid and I have soldered an old Australian penny into the hole half a minute with a dremal removed the words ” one Penny” and the year it was made.once it is chrome plated it should look pretty smicko

All of our cars run their exhausts down one side of the car or the other.On mine it is the drivers side. I have spent alot of time trying to design a heat sheied that looked good without it costing me a fortune.The otherday I was in my favorite scrap metal merchants when I found a stainless Steele shelf with punched 1cm x1cm holes this cost me $24 and it was big enough when cut in half to make the two main sections that cover the muffler after the Catalytic converter. There is enough left over to cover that small part of the header pipe that protruded from the body before it bolts onto the cat. the photo shows the heat shield with the join between the pieces tied with mig wire.When I take it of the car I will weld it from the inside because I don’t have an stainless steel wire for my mig.

I have actually managed to find a bit of time to finish the heat shield and I am rather pleased with the final result which looks business like with out a feeling of excessive bulk at its closest point the heat shield is just 10 mm away from the muffler but that should be enough to keep little, and not so little fingers unscorched. I had a little dilemma about how to anchor the bottom of the heat shield to the car in the end I used three pieces of 2mm x 30 mm stainless strip that came of the shelf that I had bought from the scrappies. These go past the body edge and mate with three 6mm bolts that through the floor. By putting a nut between the floor and the strip and a second one to secure the bracket I can now remove the heat shield without having to reach into the cockpit.

You may have noticed that the heat shield hangs down below the front edge of the rear mudguard I decided to address this by making the de rigueur stone shield a little longer, on the drivers side, to pick up the rear of the heat shield. this was made from some .5 mm stainless that I had lying around this stuff is pretty hard but it cuts OK with one of those lovely thin cutting discs in the angle grinder. I am very happy with the final shape of these.