Rear Bodywork
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
After the fun and games with the bonnet and nosecone I was expecting the rear bodywork to be really difficult. Actually it sat on the chassis in almost exactly the right place and only needed taping to the chassis slightly pulled to the offside to centre it before bonding it in place. I stood back and looked at it from a few different angles at this point to make sure that it looked OK by eye as well as the tape measure. The gaps were nice and even around the rear wheels, apart from in front of the nearside wheel, which seems to be a common feature of Striker bodywork. In a relaxed moment on the phone whilst talking about the sale of the Striker to Raw, Jeremy Phillips admitted that he had never been happy about the symmetry of the rear bodywork and that I would soon find out why when I took the tape measure to it and cut off the rear arches. He also talked me into fixing the front of the arches on inside the arch rather than the outside to tidy things up a bit as well.
When I ordered the kit I had already sourced the 8.5” wide rear wheels and was determined to use these. This meant that it would be necessary to space out the rear wheel arches by something IRO 2”. I decided that it would be easier to do this with the bodywork bonded onto the chassis. I was also intending to French in the rear lights and possibly the number plate to achieve a cleaner look at the back of the car rather than the usual kit-car array of trailer lights screwed on and sticking out all over the place.
Before embarking on the one way process of bonding it put a couple of bits of angle on the chassis to fix the curved inner section of the wheel arches too with rivnuts in. I also drilled out all but two of the rivets holding the rear grp bonding strip in place so that I can easily remove the rear bodywork section when finished for spraying.
The bonding process itself was very straightforward indeed. I armed myself with some 100mm woven glass tape (far easier than cutting strips) and epoxy resin from a local chandlers and set about bonding the rear bodywork section under the wheel arches and at the rear with two layers. In order to maintain a neat finish inside the boot I bonded the rear of the bodywork to the underside of the grp strip at the back of the boot. This was quite difficult due to the restricted access between the fuel tank and the rear bodywork and gravity being against me. I ended up with my hands and forearms scratched to bits and stinging from the epoxy, but it was worth all the suffering. I did however go out and buy some more disposable gloves and put some long sleeves on for the sides. Later in the day I noticed that my hair was stuck in a big lump on the back of my head from lying in the epoxy from under the rear of the car. Nice.
With the rear bodywork bonded on it was possible to take some accurate measurements of the wheel arches and this confirmed that they needed to come out by 50mm on both sides to cover the wheels from the plan view to satisfy the SVA.
The next bit was a bit daunting. I marked out a line ½” out from where the wheel arches started to curve into the body shape as advised as at this point the curvature of the arches is less pronounced and should be easier to join back up again. I then started cutting along the line with the B&D Wizard…After about 1/3 of an arch the Wizard got very hot and burst into flames. Great. The remainder of the cutting off was achieved with a very sharp hand-saw, which was actually a lot quicker and easier than the (still smoking) Wizard. I stood back and marvelled at the lack of wheel arch and hoped that it all went back on again.
The method recommended by Jeremy was to space the arches out with lots of strips of aluminium and to recreate the new outer surface of the join with strips of Rally Design rally car mudflap material. I followed this advice and soon had the arches re-attached by this bridge of aluminium and mudguard, riveted through from above and it looked pretty good. The next step was to recreate the new surface of the arch with a thin layer of filler. I will be getting my bodywork sprayed by Martin Bell’s Kit Car Workshop and Martin had expressed caution over using bodyfiller because it might not agree with the etch primer. So I applied a couple of layers of gelcoat to the underside of the mudflap material followed by 2 layers of 100mm woven glass and epoxy. I also glassed a lip onto the inside of the front of the arches so that I could rivet the front of the arches to the side panel out of sight. Again this was not particularly easy working upside-down with resin dripping all over the place. When the rear bodywork is finished and off the car ready for spraying then I will laminate some more woven glass across the join to minimise the risk of stones causing cracks or punching through. With two layers of glass that are far from soaked in resin it doesn’t seem as thick as I would like it.
When it had all gone off I removed the moulds with a fair amount of trepidation. I was enormously relieved at this point as I had been dreading this job for ages and to my delight the arches were very well aligned and looked like they only needed a little filling and rubbing down to finish. This was actually very time consuming indeed, mainly due to me using rivets to fix the aluminium strips in place, which when drilled out made a bit of a mess. With hindsight, self-tappers would have been better. Also there were one or two small air bubbles in the gelcoat and a couple of bigger bubbles between the top layer of glass and the gelcoat so I ground these out and re did them. Lots of rubbing down, sticking in more gelcoat etc but I was very pleased with the end result. With paint on I will be very surprised and disappointed if you can see the join - more pics to follow...