Sunday, November 20, 2011

Fabricating Bits

Picking up where I left last week, fabrication was the game today. I needed to redo the strap that holds the battery to the car, since I relocated the battery, and two supports for the coil packs. It was a task that took time, specially since I measured and dry-fitted things many times. But in the end it came out almost perfectly.

The idea with the battery strap is to rivet it on the chassis rail underneath and bolt it on the steel plate in front. Taking the bolts out allows removing the battery but with them on it's there to stay.
The coil pack supports could look nicer than they do, but since I don't have ally cutters, I would have had to use the dremmel and a cutting disk to make detailed shapes. So I lazily resorted to doing these supports that although don't look that nice, do their job.
Since taking the pictures, I've visited the storage room enough to now have all the fabricated pieces painted black. Next week I just have to bolt/rivet them on the chassis (with the need to drill the chassis for the battery strap fixing holes).

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Moving Parts and Making Holes

Had some time today and started by following the suggestion made by David on the comments of my previous post. He said that the rectified couldn't stay on the bulkhead otherwise it would overheat and fail. If that happens in the UK, imagine with the 35ยบ+ temperatures we have in Portugal during the summer...

So I had to unstrap and move the electronic control unit, then made some holes on the engine cradle and bolted the rectifier there. Some cable tidy up and it was done. This move means I can also move the battery to the front of the passenger footwell, next to the engine. It's a lot better in terms of weight balance. Although it means my previous battery strap is garbage. Took measures for a new strap. The picture shows things in their new places.
Then I tried to bolt the coil packs to the provided mounts. I don't have any metal plates to hold them, as it seems others have. My idea was to use long bolts with several nuts to bolt the packs on the mounts. Turns out I failed to measure the distance between bolts and it turns out this fails. So I ended up taking measures to later on fabricate some ally supports. Nice I bought that sheet of aluminium...

Last task was to drill holes for the coil pack supports to be made, to rivet the horn and to rivet (or should I bolt?) one of the earth terminations on the loom that I can't make reach any of the bolts around there.