Hmmm

The problem with working on the exhaust tunnel is that you need to be able to get to both sides of it and the underside is a pain to work on. It would make sense to have a facility to be able to turn the car on its side but that’s not an option. So on Friday night I spent a couple of hours messing about with the trolley jack and the engine crane and raised the chassis another 8 inches on the chassis rig that I made up. This makes it possible to get under the car to work on things.

I’ve now done some work to tidy up the tunnel and bit from the Satchshift mount forwards to the bulkhead is now all finished. So it was time to work back towards the fuel cell. One of the problems of having previously removed the plate for the original seat mountings over the tunnel is that you loose a lot of strength. So with the handbrake fitted there is a fair bit of play left to right and when it’s pulled. The plan is to reinforce the mounting point with a reinforcement panel.

So took off all the paint to start work and found some bad news…

I’m regretting having paid to have welding work done on this car a couple of years ago. Having skimmed the paint off the quality of the work revealed is not to a level I now consider acceptable so I have had to do a lot of additional repair work. All this was hidden behind filler and primer and the big hole in the right of the picture had been really crudely patched from the under side. Rather than make a lot of progress I spent 5 hours today starting to make good the repairs.