Roll Bar, Indicators and Gear Lever

A stop start day working on the car and taxiing children (no significant flooding this week) - weather awful again perhaps I'd have been better building a boat!

First task was to drill out the RAC roll bar from underneath the chassis and and then offer up the roll bar and mark out the cut out. Then drilled out the corners and started to cut between the holes with a hacksaw blade - me on one side and Myles on the other - after ~10 mins decided this wasn't going to work so a quick trip to Homebase and bought a Dremmel.

The Dremmel made light work of the cuts and smoothing the edges - a good buy and will no doubt be used many times more before the finish of the build.

Roll Bar in place

The hi-level brake light is made by Hella and supplied (at extra £s) by WF.  I decided to drill 2x 3mm holes to mount the light with self tappers and a further 5mm hole to pass the cable through.  The light has self adhesive pads so you could just stick it on and run the cable down the outside if you are concerned that the 3 holes will compromise the roll bar.  I also drilled an extra hole in the chassis to pass the cable through and used "garden" wire to pull the wire through the cable through the roll bar adding heat shrink to the cable where it passed through the mount as protection.

While I was at the back end of the car I marked, drilled out and fitted the fuel filler cap.  Before I fitted it I played with the cap to make sure it was vertical and marked out the top holes equally spaced around the centre line; once fitted Myles managed to refit the cap at an angle so it's a matter of choice whether you have the screws on or either side of the centre line. Fitting the hose was fiddly and it took a couple of goes to get it in place and clamped up with the jubilee clips. Can't drill out the harness eyebolt mounts as still waiting on the harnesses from WF.

Fitting the front indicators was straight forward but the manual showed some extensions and bolts that hadn't been supplied.  If they do need fitting I'll have to drill out the existing holes so I went ahead anyway.  I then discovered that the spacing between the 3 mounting points of the light unit are not equally spaced after extending one of the holes only to realise that the screws for the lens was then off by 45 deg at one side - refitted and made a cut out in the rubber gasket at the bottom.  Unfortunately I could find the bulbs so the lens are only held on.

I used the Dremmel to cut out the 21mm box spanner for the head light - lots of sparks - but a quick and tidy job.

Note: I actually need a 22mm spanner and other headlamps have needed 23mm so worth measuring before cutting up a good box spanner - If you don't have an old one get a 22mm Lambda socket 

The final job of the day was to fit the gear leaver and tunnel covers.  It took me some working out how to fit the gear lever gaiter. Before I tried to fit it I had assumed that the ring would fit over the gaiter and just be bolted through it but when I fitted the two together the gaiter seemed to clip over the ring.  In the end I rivnutted the panel with M4 rivnuts the used an M4x20mm bolt through the ring and an M5 nut to produce the offset with the bolt then being thread locked.


5 hrs for me and 1 for Myles - total 139 hrs.