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.