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!