Thursday, July 28, 2016

Interior and Fibre-glass

Determined to post more in a more timely fashion after the event, trying to recall and post from a few weeks ago is not easy!  I apologise if my previous few entries were a little sparse, I'd only written them in a hurry and if I'm honest I wasn't there half the time, as I was away working. Fortunately the events described in this post happened only yesterday, so they were fresh in the memory!

Missing packet of Rear Wing fixings
Firstly Derek had sent the missing packet of fixings for the rear mudguards, including the necessary roll of the rubber 'P' Seal (see above), so we spent some time investigating how these all go together (as you'll see below), certainly cleared up a few unanswered questions we had regarding the rear mud guards and the stone guards.

Contact adhesive; recommend masking off and then using spray contact adhesive. Note the cross-member.
The first parts to be fitted today were the carpets on the sides of the transmission tunnel. We initially used a mixture of applied contact adhesive around the edges (see above) and the spray-type on both surfaces, however it became apparent that using just the spray can was much quicker and less messy.  However it can be messy if you aren't careful and we really recommend that you do a dry run first and work out how you are going to fit the carpet, paying particular attention to the notch for the cross-member (again see above) and the holes for the harness/seat belt mounting points. Contact adhesive is entirely that; it sticks on contact! It's also worth masking the edges to keep things cleaner, however any over-spray was easily wiped up with a rag dipped in a very small amount of Xylene thinners.

Side carpet & passenger harness lap belt fitted. Note; red buckle is fitted inboard and therefore harnesses are handed.
Next we fitted the lap belt part of the 4-point harness, however we had a problem; there are two possible threaded holes on either side of the transmission tunnel, fore and aft. The Assembly Guide shows that the inboard side uses the forward hole, in keeping with the indentation on the side of the transmission tunnel which is, I guess, for seat belts. However the aft hole of the one that we used is similarly threaded and also directly opposite the outboard mounting point, so why wouldn't you use this? However if this is wrong it's an easy fix to move the mounting point backwards if required. Also it is important to note that the harnesses are handed, the quick release (red buckle) is always fitted to the inboard side of the car and the red release catch points to the floor.

Assembly Guide says to mount the inboard lap harness to the front hole, so what's the rearmost hole for?

We worked out where we are going to fit the poppers/dot fasteners on the rubber mats to stop any migration towards the pedal box, so that they don't interfere with the free movement of the pedals. However from the test fit it looks like we'll have to trim the rubber at the sides, as they're a little too wide at present.

Also worked out the interaction of the boot cover and how it fits with the hood sticks and the shoulder harness (had no idea the hood-sticks went under the boot cover, oops), they'll be fitted another time. It's going to be fun trying to measure and fit the poppers/dot fasteners...

Fitting leather seats; bases come off, easier job than we thought. It's worth extra greasing of the runners though.
A job we thought that was going to be difficult but turned out to be a lot easier was the fitment of the seats (above), the base comes off so it's a cinch fitting them. However, before fitting the seats it's worth working in some more grease into the runners, ours weren't really running that freely to begin with. Although some grease had already been applied on ours they were still rather stiff, so we worked some more in by running them back and forth a few times. Also when were adding the washers and nyloc nuts underneath the floor we used a small bead of black silicone sealant around the bolt holes, which then got squeezed as they were tightened. This was to help stop any water ingress from through the floor.

Seats and Harnesses fitted, just have to fit the tunnel top, leave that to later on.
In fitting the cycle wings the assembly guide suggests drilling through the wing-stays and fitting using the bolts supplied. However, from looking at numerous other Sevens, most people seem to stick their cycle wings on (including even factory built Sevens?), plus it looks a lot nicer!

Initial bead of Sikaflex applied to cycle wing
Firstly we fitted the IVA rubber strip around the outside of the cycle wings, there's a long and short side, the short side was used as the long side would have interfered with where the repeater light sits on the wing, plus it aesthetically it looks better. Next, Dad attached some masking tape to the wing & stay and adjusted the wings so that we had 80mm from the centreline of the front wing-stay to the edge of the front of the cycle wing. He then marked a line so that we would have a datum to come back to once we applied the adhesive. The adhesive we used was Sikaflex 255 (black windscreen adhesive), recommended by the Caterham group on Facebook. Firstly we added a bead on top of the wing-stay (see above) and carefully placed the cycle wing on top, paying particular regard to the markings made previously. We let that dry for an hour or two whilst working on the rear mudguards and then added fillets of more adhesive on each side of each wing-stay.

Wing stuck on prior to adding of more adhesive.
Before we ran out of time we started work on the rear mudguards, we started by test fitting them to the side of the car and then adding the 'P' seal so we could mark out where to stamp out the holes for the bolts. We also had to do a little enlarging and fettling of the hole for the radius arm by using a file (use appropriate protection here, GRP fibres can be nasty stuff!). From research of other blogs, some people cut a slot in the wing however we thought it would be good to preserve a little more strength and rigidity by enlarging the hole, however it is rather time consuming.

That's it for now, off to the cinema for date night with the wife!