Mushing onward

Having satisfied myself that my engine title issues will resolve themselves down the road (in Rolla), I have gotten back to work on the car fastening down the cockpit tub this week.

This should have been a pretty easy task, but it turned out to be a little tougher. I had to drill 4 holes in the tub that lined up with the pre-drilled holes in the frame to hold the tub in place. Easy enough. But while I was down there, I was also supposed to drill 10 more holes for the seat and seatbelt mounting spots. Twelve were easy enough, though I really don't like laying on my back doing this work. But 2 of the holes were not accessible any more because they were obstructed by the driveshaft safety loop that I installed a few weeks ago.

My first solution seemed simple enough--just cut off the end of the safety loop that was not needed and was the source of the obstruction. So I locked the cutoff wheel to my angle grinder and plugged it in, prepared to just lop off the excess. When I tried to figure out how to hold the tool at an angle that would let me cut through the steel, I had such a hard time maneuvering while on my back under the car, it seemed extremely dangerous to go that route. In an inspired attack of safety consciousness, I instead decided to try to take a bunch of measurements and drill the holes from above. I used a 1/8" bit and managed to blindly hit both 3/8" holes in the steel after drilling through the fiberglass. Then I widened out the holes by hand with a larger bit and hand file.

Next up was drilling more holes and riviting around the footboxes. Simple enough, except that my frame includes a modification that Hurricane implemented after some other builders figured out a way to get more footroom for the driver, and the instructions for fastening the tub around the footbox don't quite work as they did before. So I posted some questions online and am waiting to get satisfactory guidance on how to proceed before I do any more riviting there. Pictures will come when I finish up. Should be pretty quickly.