First job was the fuel lines, this went pretty smoothly. The pipe bending tool was fantastic here, and we soon got the pipes ready to be fixed. Then it was a simple case of drilling some holes through the chassis and rivetting 'P' clips to hold the pipes in place. It seems a little strange that the pipes end up UNDER the floor panels at the back, i hope this won't cause any clearance issues! I soon started to appreciate the fact the aluminium panels had been fitted by Westfield, my hands were hurting from just a handful of rivets!
During a spare second we decided to turn the engine over, so a quick connection to the starter motor saw it spin up and sound great. Thats a relief!
We then set to work on the brakes, so got the master cylinder installed. The pre-fitted studs didn't exist, so we substituted a few random bolts (i hope we won't miss those later!). Once bolted into place, we started to run the brake lines. This was fairly straight forward, but there were several points we couldn't get the drill and riveter anywhere near, so couldn't properly fix them. We used a few cable ties instead, not sure if we'll have to do something better later. Bending this pipe is much easier than fuel line, and some careful bending by hand seems to work here. Some of the pipe routes are a bit crazy, but it all makes sense in the end.
We decided to fit all the pedals and the clutch master cylinder next... James got on with that while I started to fit the main wiring loom.
Unfortunately James quickly hit a problem - my pipework for the brakes master cylinder sticks out WAY too far and gets in the way. Ooops, should have anticipated that really. We're getting pretty knackered now... we were up at 6am and have driven 400 miles... so we're going to give up and fix that tomorrow evening after work.
Conclusion for the day - we need some tupperware for the screw packs, and we need to go screw, bolt and nut shopping for a few bits we can't find for the brake cylinder and fuse mountings. Overall, an amazingly successful day, off to bed, chuffed to bits.
Todays Build: 2 people, 5 hours. Total build time so far: 5 hours, 10 man-hours.
