Ride Setup Complete

Well, another hiatus - this time caused due to me breaking my wrist in a slip on ice which curtailed my ambi-usefulness somewhat. Very frustrating as I was just getting stuck into the final stages of the build (and the first decent weather for driving a topless car has arrived - wah!)

But I'm back on it now - and the first thing to do was to finish the wheel alignment that had been started. It'll certainly require professional attention once road-legal, but I'm pretty confident that it is all set up safe enough for driving. Pretty confident...

Following that, tightening the suspension bolts was a pretty simple job - but still I went over them all a few times to make certain I hadn't missed any. Plus it was satisfying to employ the torque wrench a bit more coz it's a nice bit of kit. Tightening needed to be done at this stage rather than any earlier to allow all the parts such as the shocks to settle into place, and to do it any later would have made it a little difficult to reach many of the bolts about to be hidden from sight by carpets, the last parts of the bodywork and wotnot.

Once that was completed I set about finally bolting the rear wheel arches on; they've been held on with a handful of temporary bolts for what seems like for ever now.

And then I moved on to the front wheel arches. I think these are now the single area that I'm most unhappy with cosmetically due to the large washers and bolts holding them in place - I'm wondering whether a better job would have been achieved if I had used the good old plastic padding to fix them to the brackets rather than following the instructions. Perhaps when there is spare cash knocking about one day (har har) I'll get a replacement pair and try that out.

For a wee bit of fun I started the car up tried to get it into gear, only to find I could not. This was a bit of a calamity until we found out that I had been stomping on the pedal far too hard and the clutch had been coming off and going on again, preventing it going into gear. Once I was a little more gentle it worked like a dream and I've driven the car the half metre or so forwards and backwards that the garage allows. A few times :) I think I'll work up some sort of stop for the clutch pedal to prevent it being pressed too far.

Next I'm fitting the boot box and moving on to finishing the interior.