February 24, 2011

A long time since I’ve updated the blog. End the end of last year I was able to get quite a lot of laser cutting done, a mixture of steel and aluminium parts for various parts of the car.

Here’s the parts currently waiting to be fitted to the car…

Some of the parts cut were for the fuel tank, which took a few steps to finish, after being cut I then had them folded and then took them to a another guy who welded it all together for me.

Here’s the finished tank sitting in its final location in the car…

The openings in the top are from left to right in the picture, first the fuel inlet, this uses a Fuel Safe filler valve, this has a one way valve as part of it, which is good in case of an accident…

 

Then in the middle is the opening for the VDO fuel gauge sender and on the right is the opening for the fuel pump.  Internal to the tank are stiffeners – baffle plates that line up with the two vertical tubes you can see which will have to straps bolted through to hold the tank in place.  The tank itself will supported in rubber strip.

The frame at this part of the tank is sheeted in steel essentially as it was the most straight forward to complete the process, I determined to plug the weld the sheet to the frame, it soon became apparent that the sheet would need to be clamp to the frame and tacked in place to hold the parts close enough together to plug weld properly.

This side show the opening for the fuel filler cap…

At the rear where the sheet meets the roll tube there is clearly some work to do to attach it cleanly.  The root of the issue here is that the top left diagonal in the picture I centred on the roll tube rather than keeping it in line with the other tubes.  The causes another issue later on…

Other parts from the laser cutting enabled the exhaust system to be basically finished, the mufflers are from a late model Holden Commodore V8, which are apparently very good, but frankly the main design considerations are that it is neat tidy and passes registration.

The support brackets, this is all bolted to the engine and transmission so there no need flor flex or rubber joints in the system as it’ll all move together with the engine.

Back to the sheet metal, I want to structurally rivet and bolt the 10″ wide aluminium boxes to the sides of the car but I don’t want to drill holes in parts of the frame that I can see from the stress analysis are the most highly stressed parts of the car.  So I’ve decide to attach additional rails to the side of the car and then those can be riveted to.

Here’s the left hand side of the car…

Here again where I did not follow the CAD model with the top rear diagonal caused issues again so that the new rail can fit neatly against the top rail of the car as shown below…

The next job done has been to fit the windscreen wiper and motor mount…

I think I’ve managed to work it so the car only needs one wiper blade.

Also done is the mounting the tabs for the inboard ends of the brake lines, which are Corvette Z06 Goodridge parts.

And that’s it for the moment hopefully more updates soon.