2006: Finishing the bodyshell

A happy new year to everyone! We'd have started on Rochdale progress sooner, but the Davrian still had issues. The new ported head had a little crack in one of the ports.

Ultrasonic welding was not successful, but radweld did the trick, and the Davrian has now been banished from the workshop.

26th March 2006.

Back to the fun. Robert has been talking aerodynamics again (making lots of woosh and swish noises) and it turns out that that it's important for the windscreen to be bonded in like in modern cars rather than rubber mounted. Unfortunately the necessity for bonded in windscreens hadn't been anticipated by the manufacturers of the new shell so what you see in the photo is a mould for the extended windscreen mounting flange.

1st May 2006. The front end is moving on. The car has grown inner wheelarches and the fiberglass front subframe is nicely integrated into the bodyshell. Still no sign of the ingenious hot and cold air ducting system that's planned to replace the interior heater.

The radiator ducts has also sprung a couple of new parts which will form part of the tie bar mountings. Shockingly Robert is speaking about adding steel reinforcements for the tie bar mountings having made all of the other suspension mountings on the car from plastic.

The Rochdale rebuild continued at it's normal pace throughout the rest of 2006.

The windscreen inner and outer mounting surfaces were extended into the windscreen to accommodate the bonded in screen. For some reason the glass has remained balanced in place since then, which caused a tense moment when I moved the car out of the way to re-paint the garage floor, not noticing the screen had slipped out of place.

The real accomplishment in 2006 has been modifying and fitting the doors. The inner panels have been cut away and replaced by handy pockets.

Seems window winding mechanisms are too much of a luxury for a single minded car such as this. The side windows will still raise and lower, but the process will be carried out manually with the aid of a peg screwed into the perspex.

But what a transformation. The aim in 2006 was to complete the bodyshell, and it is just about there so long as you don't consider the bonnet.

It's even got headlamp bowls, made in much the same manner as the radiator duct in the 2005 pages. I'll dig around for the amusing photographs of people wearing the green elf-like headlamp bowls on their heads.

The unprecedented progress in 2006 was largely due to the absence of the Davrian (I gather it's broken at the moment).