Catch up post 4

Next job was to panel the end of the passenger side footwell. Having researched a bit I have noticed that the older Fury chassis has a welded steel panel at the end of the footwell - rapidly concluded this would probably be a nicer solution.

Anyway having ordered the chassis pack with the pre-cut aluminium panels started to look at fitting the panel provided. Unfortunately found that the cutouts around the chassis rails etc. were too large (complex position for the panel in terms of intersecting chassis horizontals and verticals) and would provide large gaps through which water could make its way in (in spite of large quanities of sealant).

So decided to make up a template and have a new panel cut. This then got carefully fettled to fit as tightly as possible (managed to reduce the gaps to a millimetre or less). This included a trick of chamfering the edge of the aluminium to allow for the weld pools around joints and provide a tighter fit:

Then the exciting job of drilling, in some cases in tight locations for example at the bottom of the panel and around the side chassis rails. To do this involved employing a variety of different drill attachments. The result was the following:

 

You'll notice the black pop rivets. I've seen on a couple of other build blogs that having a large shinny aluminium panel at the back of the engine bay sticks out like a sore thumb. On this basis I decided to spray the panel to match the chassis colour so it would blend in:

 

All ready to fit. I've decided to hold off the final fitting, sealing and rivetting, until I have all the panels drilled and trimmed.