The reader may remember that for a couple of months now, the Grand Master Scheme has been to test fit the bodywork on the chassis, primarily to check that my planned fuel tank will actually fit inside the car (which is preferable). But then there were all kinds of things to do before that - some because it was a convenient time to do them; others because they also needed to be checked against the body shell.
Some progress has been made in this direction, but some new unforeseen questions emerged in the course of things.
Making the Thing to Make the Thing
Sometimes you can't make the thing you want because you have to make the thing to make the thing.
Before lowering the bodywork onto the chassis, I needed a new cradle to hold the bodywork that would not interfere with the chassis. This wound up being something of a Rube Goldberg affair. Suspending the body from the inside edges of the trunk (boot) and engine bay (bonnet) openings seemed like the least troublesome of several options so I began staggering clumsily in the general direction of this goal.
I started with four of these joist hangers - meant for hanging heavy things above one's head. I like them because they have heavy load capacity and attach easily (and adjustably) to construction lumber. They had a bit too much of an up-hook at the far end so I cut those off with the Death Wheel. Also came with some padding, but I wanted more so I wrapped them with pipe insulation. All this meant to avoid having the weight of the body shell resting on any one point, thus cracking, falling, and shattering on the garage floor, there to crumble to dust; instead allowing the bodywork to rest comfortably safe and snug in a cradle made just for it with loving care.
So then I made this wooden frame from which to hang the hangers, itself suspended by steel cable and the cable hoist above. The old cradle (below, on the floor) is what the bodywork was hanging from - and it worked fine - but would have collided in several places if I tried using it to lower the bodywork onto the chassis. The sharp eyed reader will note at this stage that my garage is completely re-arranged from usual - a necessity which made me once again grateful for the wheel casters that allow the car to be rolled easily in any direction.
This is the awkward part - the streamliner hump behind the driver's head is in the way of where the driver side longitudinal board needs to go, so I had to add this not-entirely-elegant detour over the obstruction. This inelegant contraption proved sufficient for the task of getting the bodywork in position.
I did need an extra set of hands to get the bodywork positioned, a duty for which my lovely and long-suffering wife graciously volunteered - only to have a fingertip mashed between the bodywork and the frame. Though painful, the injury proved survivable after an icepack administered by Taylor the Mighty and prayers fervently administered by the other kids.
You see, I am not kidding about 'long-suffering.'
I am not an easy person to be married to.
Injuries aside, it has been encouraging to see the bodywork in position (more or less) on the chassis. I really do feel there are the makings of an nice-looking and fun-to-drive car here.
"More or less" in Position
If the sharp-eyed reader looks closely at the above picture, it will be noticed that the hood (bonnet) sits just a skosche proud of the bodywork at the front - so the front needs to be raised up. This is easy to accomplish by how I set the body mounting hardware.
It's a bit more complicated in the rear. The aluminum panel behind the seats prevents the rear bodywork from going down any lower. One result is the fiberglass body sitting about 3 inches above the aluminum sheet it's supposed to Meet Up and Make One With.
So maybe the panel behind the seats needs to be trimmed, allowing the bodywork to come down and meet the lower aluminum sheet. Alternatively, I can also imagine using a cylindrical dolly to roll-bend the aluminum sheet upward to meet the bodywork. I am sure there are easier and less-easy ways to make this work. So at this point, there ensued a pause to consult the Replicar Cognoscenti for much-needed insight.
Post Consultation
The consenus of the cognoscenti is that the rear bodywork is sitting about where it should be but the front needs to be raised to match. In the picture above, the bodywork is not supposed to come down to meet the aluminum strip - the aluminum strip is supposed be rolled up to meet the bodywork.
So there's more bodywork fitting to be done, but first, back to the fuel tank. After many revisions, it's looking like this:
The chamfered-off corners are a Pops trick - the idea is to have the welded joints run down the middle of those chamfers. This allows an easier weld, and since there's a bend nearby and parallel to the weld line, it will be more resistant to warping from the welding heat.
If I do all this right, I can have both flanges and all the sheet metal cut by Send-cut-Send. They can even put the bends in the sheet metal for me, if I can get the Solidworks file to accurately depict what I want done.
According to Solidworks, this is an 8.9 gallon tank - so probably 8.5 useable capacity in the real world. That is not a huge gas tank but for this car's purposes I think it will be fine. There is room to make it taller - but unless I use a completely different fuel pump, fuel pickup, and fuel level sender, taller doesn't help - it just leaves more fuel in the bottom of the sump that the pump can't get to. Doing my own bespoke fuel system seems like a lot of hassle and not terribly fun, so I believe the better part of valor here is to just accept the 8.5 gallon capacity and move on.
I modeled the side of the tank in cardboard, so I know it will fit under the trunk (boot) lid. However I will go ahead and model the whole tank in cardboard - which will help me select the filler flanges and hoses I will need.
The shiny thing is the fuel filler cap - flip-up Monza style of course - but still not sure where I want to put it. I would have liked to put it in the middle of the car, just forward of the boot lid - but there is not enough space there for it. I suppose I could cut the boot lid shorter and re-do the fiberglass, widening the space between the cockpit and the boot lid to make room for the filler cap - but again that's far too much hassle just to get the fuel cap in the middle of the car.
So one idea is to put the filler cap in the position shown above (or the corresponding spot on the other side). My other idea is to put it on the top of the fender, as seen below. Not sure that I've ever seen this done before and an aerodynamicist would probably have a seizure but I sort of like it. The easiest thing to do would be put a filler cap directly on the tank, and open the boot/trunk to fill the tank. I do like the flip top cap, though, and I'll miss it if I don't use it.
If you have an opinion on the filler cap location please comment below.
Also in preparation for fabricating the tank, I've been collecting materials and watching YouTube videos as I gear up to start learning oxy-fuel aluminum welding. This requires different filler rod, of course, but also special flux and special goggles. One would usually say a special torch, too, but the torch Pops handed down and which I've been using to braze and weld steel, is actually an old aircraft torch for welding aluminum.
Distractor/Motivator Jobs
Of course in the meantime I've been working on other stuff too. In contrast re-inventing the fuel system speculated about above - with a very unfavorable hassle-to-fun ratio - these parts have a much more favorable h/f. The h is large, but the f is big enough to keep the ratio on the good side.
Engine turning is a hassle, working with stainless is a hassle, and the mechanism for the synchronized stopwatches (below) was another level of hassle entirely. The "Smiths" gauges of course are not actually Smiths - they're the stock Miata gauges, re-housed, with new faces meant to look a little more period-correct. On the panels above, I especially like the U-shaped switch guards and the jewel lights. The reader - if still with me after all this - will see that I've only completed one gauge lens/bezel assembly (far right of the three smaller gauges) but making more shouldn't be too terribly difficult now that I've discovered all the pitfalls.
Speaking of discovering the pitfalls - the thing above presented a number of challenges for the hobbyist-machinist. Click on the "play" triangle to see a demonstration. Note the stopwatch on the far right is a 90 second stopwatch, while the other two are 30 seconds. I thought it would be interesting to have the indicators moving at different speeds, and I even got a 10 second stopwatch intending to have fast, medium, and slow needles - but the 10s watch arrived in not-working condition. Regardless, this is the kind of unnecessary feature that makes this definitively a toy car. Therefore, the f is robust enough to make a significant amount of h worthwhile.
Very exciting to see it looking so car-like. Trying to imagine it in the color below, and thinking I will like it.
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