December 28, 2018.

with the suspension back on I could determine where the front brake hoses would go through to the interior of the car, M16x1.0 nuts are needed to hold the fittings in place. These were sourced from eBay – China. Too cheap and easy to do anything else and they’re nice with it.

Next the final version of the windscreen wiper connecting rod was finished off. several attempts at getting length right failed, so I made it adjustable.

Due to a design screw up the hole in the side panel needed to be enlarged to allow the wiper mechanism to work, I’ll need to make a new cover for this:

Next I’d sourced some more aluminium to have another go at the sheet metal. with the paper templates in place the part was first cu out over size.

Then covered in blue tape to try and not scratch the outside surface.

This was then folded and fitted at the top to make sure the fold line worked, it wasn’t screwed up at this stage, so that’s further than the first attempt.

Before I wanted to go further with the skin I wanted to finish the contents of the box, this’d stabilise the panels for drilling the rivet holes and need to be done to make sure they were in their final positions.

First off was all the side impact foam that could be done before the tubes went in, in the end after much flailing about I used this stuff: https://www.knaufinsulation.com.au/product/multi-use-xps-board basically as it was the only stuff I could source reasonably. There’s plenty better solutions out there, but mostly not in Australia and certainly not in Darwin. hopefully it never be used as anything other than insulation and to stop the boxes being big noisy drums

The tubes (for cables / wiring or hoses) where then glued in place.

A rubber strip was sued around the outside of the tubes in the internal panels and then covered in an ugly mess of sika, Tetris was the played to fill in the rest of the volume with the board.

The end were fibre glassed in place.

Then on with filling in the rest of the space.

Gluing and clamping the final parts…

Here it is done with the next bit to fit the cover, the electric plane proved to be very good at finishing it to size. This was all done with a combination of 50mm and 30mm thick sheet, the 30mm was more useful than I’d expected it to be. Originally I was looking for 100mm or thicker sheets / blocks to do this job. I think that this would have been a mistake. this is approx. 250mm thick (10″) overall so should provide some sort of protection if needed.