Monday 14th April, 2008.

Since the last post I’ve engaged an Engineer to review the car, he’s been and inspected the progress to date and so far so good.

To me this is a major milestone as I really pushed to get all the welding done on the main frame before he came over.

Since then there’s been spotty progress as I’ve needed a bit of a break from the project, being sent to Manila for a week on business and having to sort a few things on my motorcycle provided that, so now it’s back to the project…

One of the things you don’t realize about a scratch built project until you are there is the repetative nature of the job, i.e. for the frame, cut fit and tack weld in a tube repeat 200 times to finish, fully weld tubes repeat 200 times to finish…

Below is another example of this, this is the start of the 16 suspension attachment brackets, they’re cut from 75 x 50 x 2.5mm RHS, the holes you can see are in the base of the bracket as they mount against the frame tube. That’s 48 holes measured, marked, center punched and drilled, just counting the ones I needed to do and not the 18 I put in the wrong side of the part.

Eventulally the parts will look like this (mostly)…

There’s actually 5 different variations used but they’re not that much different from each other. As you can see most of the metal will be cut off the part before its finished.

At this stage there’s little more to do than clean the sharp edges off of the things. The plan is to leave them as is until the suspension mounting location jig has been completed. Once this is done I can then use moving the location of the pivot holes in the brackets to remove construction inaccuracies that I’m sure have crept in so far.

Next in the list of things to do is the pedal box and steering column mounting brackets. Again to be fabbed out of cut down 75 x 50 x 2.5mm RHS.