Plugging Away

So after hand making them last time with aviation shears, as I have the floor pan in both this and Maxi to do I bought a load of blanking discs. I looked at getting them laser cut (astronomically expensive) so went for stamp cut ones in 25mm, 32mm and 40mm sizes.

So worked out what I needed for the floor pan and engine bay in this one and started to prep them. Each one needed a bit of tidying up as they all had a half a mill lip from being cut out on the press. Once that was done, hit them with some primer.

On the passenger side of the engine bay, the section near the gear box mount needed some work. So I chopped out this bit of the battery tray…

…and welded it back in the other way around (flipped around to the other side and moved the hole closer to the inner wheel arch).

The reason for this is partly aesthetic as in the standard design the section that joins the tray is edge on to the hole and so this looks better but it also means I can stitch weld the tray and the chassis reinforcement together.

I spend about four hours CAD templating and then trying to form the steel into the right shape to weld in as one piece. The template was right, but I couldn’t get it to form the right shape, so in the end decided to cut my losses and chop it into two

Now have those bits welded in and am getting ready to finish that side off…