Wheels on... Wheels off... Wheels on... Yawn!

Spent a few hours taking the wheels off, winding up spring pans, putting wheels back on, measuring, taking wheels off, adjusting spring pans etc.. etc..

One thing I noticed was that the handbrake cable rested against the spring pan of one of the rear shocks..... I split some grommets, fixed them over the cable and secured each of them with a cable tie round the circumference to "nip" them onto the cable. This will keep the cable away from the spring and the grommets are too big to allow the cable to fall into the spring. Should be OK for SVA:

After a couple of hours of setting spring lengths, driving it a bit to settle the springs and re-checking I ended up with the front indicators at the correct height (350mm) from the floor.Oh well..... after all the waiting I suppose it's time for the money shots:

It is sitting quite high at the moment but will be lowered after SVA, also there are no spinners on either. I did fit one to see what it looked like but forgot to take a photo.

I had quite a few interruptions today from interested neighbours... funny how the sun brings them out!.... where were they through all those long winter nights freezing in the garage??

Now for the bad news...... the tyres foul the inner wings on full lock..... so that means fitting lock stops to the rack.

More on that tommorrow.... I've just wasted an hour or so with Plan A, but Plan B looks like a goer.

More Carpets and Some Leather

Time for the last big piece of carpet - the rear bulkhead. This was carefully lined up and taped into place before sticking down in a number of sections:Whilst waiting for the for the Evo-Stick to dry ready for bonding, I busied myself with investigating how to fit the seat runners. These need two areas of the seat bottom cutting out to accommodate the seat runner mechanisms:Once cut out everything fits a treat (you will need to shorten the operating wire):Just need to do the other seat now. Next up was to trial fit the leather trim panels:

The bulkhead panel is a tight fit and holds down the tunnel panel. However it needed a bit of modification to achieve this. As received the bulkhead panel fitted tight against the carpet and needed a few mm taken off the bottom to accommodate the tunnel panel underneath. This can be easily done by unsticking the leather and carefully removing a few mm off the bottom edge with the Dremel:The bulkhead panel needs two "secret" fixings to fix it to the bulkhead. To do this mark out the carpet with tape in line with the centre of one of the quilts on the panel and on the tape mark the centres of the two fixings before drilling a small hole at each location:Next offer the panel back into place and mark through from the boot:Next take your Dremel (with the depth stop adjustment fitted!) and cut out two keyhole slots to take an M5 button head bolt:To make the bolts easy to get into the bulkhead itself you can open up the holes in the bulkhead to, Say, M8 and use a repair washer on the back. I can't carry on with fixing these two panels as I need some stainless plate to make a couple of brackets and some stainless self tappers and cup washers. We'll come back to these panels in a few days.

Having come to a bit of halt with the leather panels I thought I would trial fit the handbrake:

Wired it up and the operation seems to be OK - need to fit the last piece of floor carpet and gaiter to finish.

Where does the weekend go? just left this afternoon for a tidy up. Once you get the carpet and leather in you can't help but get bits everwhere from drilling etc. So I tend to clean up every other day to keep on top of the mess!

Done Something!!

Not much! - but I have done something!

Fitted the blanking plug to the nearside head, as the temperature sender will be going in the manifold, and also fitted the NPT to JIC adaptors for the heater pipes:

I have also got the handbrake working - there is a little bit of re-engineering required to get the cable clevis to fit properly. Tested it and it does seem to be pretty effective with no adjustment being required to the handbrake mechanism itself.

Hopefully next week there will be a bit more progress?

Handbrake

Bought a Jag XJS fly-off handbrake off EvilBay for 20 Quid. Turned up today and looks like it has hardly been used - the chrome on the lever is unmarked!! Took 5 minutes to put the bits together and get it working. I thought that refurbing the handbrake would be one of those nice little time filling jobs - unfortunately with this one it isn't going to take me long at all!