Continuing on with my progress from last week I ended up finishing the frame for the scuttle. I used 16ga steel and an electric nibbler to cut it. The plasma cutter is super cool, but it seemed like a nibbler would be more useful eventually for cutting out non-circular holes in the aluminum, so I decided to pick one up on amazon and it turns out to be really efficient at cutting 16ga steel too! Best of all there’s no heat distortion, which I sometimes found happened with the thinner steel with the plasma cutter. I ended up semi-boxing the frame so its fairly rigid, and it will bolt to the frame of the car under the dash. I’m still waiting on the aluminum that I ordered to arrive to totally finish it off, but I need to order rivets and clecos still anyway.
With the scuttle worked out I decided to take on the radiator, but first I needed to mount the nosecone. I got my first experience with dremeling fiberglass. Definitely use a facemask! It produces lots of nasty dust that I’m sure is bad for you to inhale. After about 5 minutes of making a mess I also started using the shop vac to suck up the dust immediately as I sand/dremel away bits of the fiberglass nosecone, that worked superbly well. I wound up finishing mounting the nosecone as well (though I haven’t started on the radiator yet, that’s next) and playing around with what the hood + scuttle would look like thanks to some construction paper. The scuttle isn’t quite perfect or symmetric; the problem lies with the “caterham-csr-style” tube that I bent and welded to the frame.. it slopes down a bit too far towards the sides of the car and it does so more on the passenger than on the driver side by about a 1/4″. I’m trying to decide whether I want to take a stab at fixing this somehow (adding filler material, redoing the tubing, etc..) or just continue on with the thought that I can always fix it later if it really bothers me that much. For now I think I’m going with the latter decision in the name of continued progress.
Next on my list are the radiator, mounting the headlights, finishing the tubing (4 more tubes left) on the csr dash, building the roll bar, and perhaps getting started with some aluminum work for the firewall and scuttle skin.
Scuttle and nosecone updates
Continuing on with my progress from last week I ended up finishing the frame for the scuttle. I used 16ga steel and an electric nibbler to cut it. The plasma cutter is super cool, but it seemed like a nibbler would be more useful eventually for cutting out non-circular holes in the aluminum, so I decided to pick one up on amazon and it turns out to be really efficient at cutting 16ga steel too! Best of all there’s no heat distortion, which I sometimes found happened with the thinner steel with the plasma cutter. I ended up semi-boxing the frame so its fairly rigid, and it will bolt to the frame of the car under the dash. I’m still waiting on the aluminum that I ordered to arrive to totally finish it off, but I need to order rivets and clecos still anyway.
With the scuttle worked out I decided to take on the radiator, but first I needed to mount the nosecone. I got my first experience with dremeling fiberglass. Definitely use a facemask! It produces lots of nasty dust that I’m sure is bad for you to inhale. After about 5 minutes of making a mess I also started using the shop vac to suck up the dust immediately as I sand/dremel away bits of the fiberglass nosecone, that worked superbly well. I wound up finishing mounting the nosecone as well (though I haven’t started on the radiator yet, that’s next) and playing around with what the hood + scuttle would look like thanks to some construction paper. The scuttle isn’t quite perfect or symmetric; the problem lies with the “caterham-csr-style” tube that I bent and welded to the frame.. it slopes down a bit too far towards the sides of the car and it does so more on the passenger than on the driver side by about a 1/4″. I’m trying to decide whether I want to take a stab at fixing this somehow (adding filler material, redoing the tubing, etc..) or just continue on with the thought that I can always fix it later if it really bothers me that much. For now I think I’m going with the latter decision in the name of continued progress.
Next on my list are the radiator, mounting the headlights, finishing the tubing (4 more tubes left) on the csr dash, building the roll bar, and perhaps getting started with some aluminum work for the firewall and scuttle skin.