Rear Panel

Its been nearly 4 weeks since my last blog, been a bit busy and only spent a few hours on the car. With the help of my son, Alex, we fixed trim around the holes for the front suspension on the side panel, and secured with the "black sticky stuff". We also attached the runners to the seats, and located the holes in the floor ready for fixing and fitted the seat belt harness. finally cleaned the garage and sorted all the tools.

Today was fitting the rear panel, with the help of Simon. Raf from GBS had given instructions on bending and fitting and sounded very straight forward ? All the tabs where bent back and bending proceeded, all well and good, offered it up to the car and looked good again, Then came issue number 1... Getting the cables through for the fog/reversing/number plate lights. This was a pain and a half but we finally got them through the holes ! ... then issue number 2...

Bolting the light units to the back panel... some what difficult to reach past the fuel tank with spanners in hand ? ... so off with the back panel to fit the light units first.

First panel fitting.

Second panel fitting with lights fitted.

Next sequence of fitting was to attach the rear panel to the roll-over bars support with the top trim.

While I was drilling the top trim panel and fixing with temporary rivets, Simon noticed a slight mistake we made while re-fitting the sump ? ... The Solenoid cable had become trapped between the engine and sump ! and we only just noticed ?... Rollocks ! and other nasty words ? No photos of this mammoth cock-up but it did take up and hour or so to fix.


God I hate drilling Stainless Steel, broke 4 drill bits this afternoon, only got 2 left ! Drilling this panel was taking some time, so Simon started on the front steering and suspension.

Next "pain in the butt" was the fuel filler cap. This involved once again drilling stainless steel, and then trying to get 6 extremely small nuts and bolts through the filler cap to fix it to the rear panel. I have large stubby fingers which have lost their feeling in the ends, so this job did not suit me, also seem to be running out of steam at this point ?

Next job on the rear panel was to get the rear light electrics through a small hole, sounds easy but the cable had a large connecting block attached, so had to be taken apart... not the job for stubby fingers with no feeling in the ends !

Meanwhile Simon was cracking on with the front suspension and wishbone assembly.

Been at it for 8 hours, and we have both it the "brick wall" and run out of steam. Time to stop for today.

Time for rear panel fitting and part fitting of front suspension and steering ... 16 hours

Total build time ... 133 hours