They're coming a bit faster now!

Especially as I've figured out the easiest way to get photos into the Blog! :)

Next job was to fit the clutch and brade pedal assemblies. The pedal box is already welded in place on the chassis, so that's not too bad. First I had to make some nice neat holes for the two master cylinders. The Dremel is a damn useful thing - if you don't already have one, get one!

As you can see, they're nice and round now. As with most of these things, it's important not to take too much off in one go. It's much better to take little bits off and take it easy.

Once the holes were made and the cylinders fitted snugly without snagging anywhere, it was time to fit the clutch pedal assembly. MNR supply a chunky steel rod to use as the pivot bar, which needs to be cut to length for the pedals.

Actually, it needs to be a bit wider than the pedal, as you need a split pin on the outsides to keep it in place. I only just managed to drill the holes through it to allow for this - thankfully! It does fit snugly in there now though.

Once the clutch pedal was in, it was fairly simple to just drill a hole for the clutch cable to come through. I did need to modify the pedal slightly, as it was fouling the pedal box at the bottom. Some re-profiling with the dremel gave a nice, non-sticky movement. You can see it here with the rose-joint joining the cable to the pedal.

With the clutch pedal in and fitted, it was time to do battle with the brake bias bar and the master cylinders.

With the holes drilled, the MCs were fitted to th bulkhead. the MCs are a different make, one wilwood, the other something else. Which is fine, as long as they do the job I'm not concerned, but the wilwood one had a freely-rotating thread for the bias bar fixing, and the other didn't.......

I worked around this by putting the fixing on the non-turny MC first, then threading the bias bar onto it. Then I adjusted the fixing for the other MC and got the MC threading into it. It was a bit fiddly, but we got there in the end! Finally a photo of the almost finished footwell:

The last job was to connect up the ends of the brake pipes to the correct MC and p-clip them in place to the bulkhead. Next time, fitting the ally top panel....

Another 3 weeks!!

Well, we're trying to get through the backlog of posts! My boss looked at the blog the other day and said we had a long way to go - we've done quite a lot more to Ruby, but not the blog! Day off today, so here's a catch up of where we're up to so far...

Next job was to fit the brake and fuel pipes to the car. Queue loads more drilling and rivetting to fit the pre-flared pipes to the car, p-clipped every 6 inches for SVA compliance. It was fairly straight-forward to fit the pipes - I started at the T-piece at either end and worked back to where the master cylinders mount on the front bulkhead. I tried to route the pipes in the most logical way I could, bearing in mind that I didn't have too much of an idea where all the suspension bits would go! As this is our first build, there was some head scratching, but I think we got it pretty well. I did struggle getting the things straight, they'd been coiled up and I couldn't manage to work some of the kinks out of it, but they were pretty well hidden, so I don't mind it too much.

We then mounted the smaller copper pipes which will eventually connect to the flexis at each corner. That was a fairly simple job.

Next up was the fuel pipe. This was a more difficult job, as a) it was much longer, and b) thicker tube, so more difficult to bend to shape. I ended up with a couple of minor kinks in it, but nothing too drastic I think.

I've put some piccies into the post, but you can see all of them here on my Picasa album. If you're working with lots of photos, especially for a blog, a really handy little tool is the Microsoft Image resizer powertoy, which you can get here - it lets you resize multiple images, all by the same amount. V. useful, as we've got quite a high resolution camera, and the images at high-res are too big for the web.

More on the next job, the brake Master Cylinders, after I've done some housework and had some lunch.... :)

It's been two months since we posted(!)

Well, it's been two months since the last post, I've no idea where all the time goes. We picked up Ruby on the first bank holiday weekend in May, (thanks to all the lads who were there and pushed the van up MNR's driveway!), we made it the 250 miles home with not many other hiccups.

With the kit safely tucked into the garage, it was time to fix Claire's tintop, as it had failed its MOT on a wheel bearing. 6 days of working, including the traditionally p!ssing bank holiday weather, got the wheel bearing and the diff changed (that was getting noisy), and so we got started on Ruby.

First job was to sort out all the boxes of stuff we'd received from MNR, and try and figure out what some of the things were, then check out the manual to find out where to start. First up was to put the front bulkhead ali panels in. Lots of putting them on, marking them up, figuring out where to drill the holes, drilling the holes, rivetting the panels. They did take longer than I expected but the final result was ok.


More to come in the next post - it's time for Breakfast! I'll catch up on our progress so far over the next few days....