The Floor (Episode III)

With the bank holiday over, I could get my hands on somewhere that sells rivet nuts (lets call them rivnuts like all the cool kids), which are needed to fix the front floor.

I'd decided to switch from M3 to M4 nuts as I kept breaking my M3 tool as it was too small. So with this in mind I visited Rivet Holding Limited at lunch time to stock up.

Putting the floor in place as the sun set

I was glad I did, as upon arrival there was a nice Caterham style kit car outside with a Hayabusa logo on the back, so these were people I could relate to. The helpful guy who worked there sorted me out with a selection of nuts, bolts and washers all for a fraction of what I'd have paid online, so I well recommend them. He also had some suggestions for what to use later in the build so no doubt I'll be back (that wasn't an Arnold Schwarzenegger impression).

Tada! Note the bricks at the
front are not part of the kit.

After work, I had drilled out the smaller holes to take the larger M4 rivnuts and fitted them without a problem, the M4s really are much easier to work with than the flimbsy M3s.

And now the front floor is in place, it's time to flip the car, so I may need a hand, some unsuspecting person tomorrow is going to be lured into the task on the promise of a Creme Egg.

Front Suspension

For some reason, when envisaging building the car, it was always the suspension that seemed the fun part. No idea why, I know nothing about suspension systems, what they comprise of or how they work. Don't get me wrong, I know the buzz words, "wishbones", "shock absorbers", "coils", and I'm well aware of what a ball joint is as one broke on my 1275GT mini back in the day leaving me on 3 wheels in the middle of Kings Norton Green roundabout. Luckily this is next to a police station who's occupants dragged my car out of the way to free up the traffic, but I digress.

The suspension bits. Four wishbones, a bag of
bushes, a green box full of crush tubes, and in
the top right, a drag link. 

Following the instructions for a car similar to my car (they're still working on instructions for my actual car), it all looked quite easy.
Put some bushes in the wishbones, some tubes in the bushes, attach a ball joint and a drag link. So what's a drag link then? A quick Google Images search and I knew what to look for when rummaging through my boxes. Found them, right.

So the bushes in the wishbones. The instructions would have be squeezing them in by a vice, but alas, my vice is too small, so I borrowed a bigger one, which was also too small. One quick trip to the shops later and I have a multi-angle vice that's also yellow so that I don't lose it.

It appears that fitting the bushes into the wishbones is THE most frustrating task ever. Trying to get them to fit in evenly is near impossible, and I didn't want to damage them by forcing them. After 30 mins, I had one in out of sixteen and things were very close to be thrown around the garage. Time for a break.

After another twenty mins, I had another one in, not using the vice, but by squeezing with my hands, although this was more by luck as no others would go in that way. Time for a break.

As this is very frustrating and seemingly impossible, I figured other people would have a solution on their build logs. Apparently not, as no one else seemed to mention it at all. Hmm, what about if I scrap the vice method and make a tool? Ok, stop laughing, at this point you probably know enough about me to know that I've never made anything in my life, but I have a plan. I just needed a 12mm drill and I'd be fi... oh wait, biggest I have is 6.5mm, so lets bodge two holes together. 

Bush Fitter 3000 (c) 2013, all rights reserved, pat pending.

There we have it, a bush fitting tool, I'm going to call it a Bush Fitter 3000 [tm]. Ok, so it just looks like a nut and bolt with a square metal plate with two one hole drilled through it, but you wait and see.

Right, the Bush Fitter 3000 [tm] is an improvement, but it's still about as easy as doing a rubics cube while riding a unicycle and juggling (I did actually Google this to see if anyone has achieved it see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRAwkwFMbSI although I still don't think it's easy!).

Taking a picture whilst holding
the wishbone and the
vice proved difficult.

While using the Bush Fitter 3000 [tm], I noticed how deformed the bush gets before snapping into the wishbone, so I went back to the vice method and just gave it some grief and it actually worked. This quickly turned into a technique (as my vice kept falling apart if I didn't do it in a particular way), and before you know it, all sixteen bushes were in place.

If anyone reads this and is hella frustrated about how to fit the bushes, give me a shout and I'll go through my technique. Having a vertical vice helped a lot! However I am willing to sell on the rights to the Bush Fitter 3000 [tm] if necessary.

All bushes in place.

There you go, bushes fitted. Now to put the crush tubes into the bushes. Again the vice is needed for this, but unfortunately even my new yellow vice is too small to fit it all in which is a bit of a problem. I tried without a vice, and it looks like this could be a challenge. Time to go and have a think about where to find a big vice.

The Floor (Episode II)

Compulsory artistic shot 

With the holes drilled the next job was to rivet. I had borrowed a rivet gun from someone which is the manual squeeze type. Each rivet takes 4 squeezes with the last one taking some girth.

I decided to do it in several sessions with 13-15 per session so that I'd be done in 10 sessions. This was to give my hand a break every now and then as it can start to hurt using this type of riveter. Reading someone else's build log, they were using an adapter for an electric drill which does the work for you, but these were £80, so I figured I'd do it the hard way.

I found that I had two types of rivets, both were exactly the same size, but one was slightly tougher than the other (known as "bastard rivets" or brivs for short). You never knew if you were going to get a briv or not, and believe me they really hurt to fit.

About 2/3s of the way in, I found that I could tell the brivs from the normal ones so quickly moved them about so that I never had to do two brivs in a row. 

The ten sessions were spread over two days and finally the main part of the floor was on. It looks quite neat at the moment, although I'm sure it will get scratched up pretty quickly once the car is on the road.

I'd decided to mount the front part of the floor separately to allow easy access to the pedals and whatever else goes in the front bit (probably loose change). This meant moving on from pop rivets to rivnuts. 

After some Googling to find out WTF rivnuts were and how they worked I ordered a bunch of M3 rivnuts and bolts to fit. I also opted for buying a rivnut gun rather than make my own which all the other YouTube people seemed to do.

Broken rivnut tool.

A couple of days later and I was ready to give it a go. 5 seconds later I was ready to down tools again. You see, when fitting rivnuts, you need a delicate hand, and not the same hand you used to fit pop rivets. If you do use the same force as you do with pop rivets then you quickly break the rivnut tool.

Back to eBay to order a new M3 mandrill for the tool.

Ok, take 2. Now with some more knowledge and a new tool I was able to fit 5 or 6 rivnuts before I threaded the new tool. Grrr. It turns out that M3 rivnuts have a really wieny thread, I should have gone for M4s instead.

The front part of the floor with the carbon wrap inside and
rubber strips around the edge.

Unfortunately it's now the bank holiday and nowhere is open to sell me M4 rivnuts. So the floor is going to have to wait for a bit which is frustrating as I desperately want to turn the car the right way up to crack on with the suspension. Once I have the tool it should be a fairly easy task...

I used some of the time to fit some rubber strips around the edge of the front floor to seal it a little better, this seemed to go ok which is odd, something went right first time! Hurrah!

The Floor (Episode I)

It's been slow progress lately, people keep having 40th birthdays which I have to help celebrate and then there are those distracting text messages saying "Fancy a beer?", plus the next thing to do I wasn't really looking forward to, the floor.

So today, I've spent most of the afternoon drilling. Easy now ladies, I mean making holes... 

I was going to use this tool for cutting but as it's
impossible to use I decided to go back to using a jigsaw.

The car is upside down now, hopefully for the last time, so that I can get the floor in place. This involved using a wonky jigsaw to cut it to size which was so much fun I decided to do it twice.

Carbon fibre goodness.

After that I covered the inside with some carbon fibre vinyl to make it look a bit better and it would save trying to put something down when it was in place which would be a little difficult. 

The vinyl was easier than I thought, it's designed for the outside of cars, so it goes on quite easily and you can get the bubbles out without too much hastle.

The floor cut out and wrapped.

With the floor to size and looking good it was time to clamp it down and drill some holes. I ignored part of the instructions here that would have me putting in some temporary pop rivets, I didn't want to have to drill them out, so I just used some clamps instead. Surprisingly this worked (so far).

The floor clamped in place with every other rivet in place
(I ran out), and all the holes drilled. Yes, those
are socks between the chassis and the wood, don't
question me.

Now it was time to drill some holes, through the floor and into the chassis for the pop rivets. Some of the holes were blind which meant I had to do some measuring. Now with my DIY skills in mind, I measured twice. Hmm, that didn't add up, measure again. Nope still doesn't look right... It turns out that that some of the cross members on the chassis are at non-right angles on one side but they are right angles at the other, not a problem really but it makes measuring a little difficult, so I winged it.

150 holes and 3 drill bits later and I was done. At the moment everything seems to fit, although I'm a little way off being able to fit the pop rivets (a task that is definitely going to destroy my arms).

Up next (once I have more rivets), episode II of The Floor.