It is bolted to the hull at both sides;
then all the electrical plugs and heater hoses connected ..
All looking neat enough now!
As Amfey rises up frpm the Fiesta, the Fiesta is turning into a race car alongside!
First Easy job of the week was to refurbish the rear callipers. I'm using pre-not especially loved rear callipers from a Mk 1 focus estate. They are in good working order but very muck and rust encrusted.
They just needed a damn good wire brush and a couple of coats of hammerite.
Spent most of the rest of the week sorting out the heater hoses and dashboard fix. On the Fiesta the heater hoses attach to the heater matrix tails through the bulkhead. On Amfey they wont go through the bulkhead but do a 90 degree turn and come out in the footwell and then lead back to the engine room.
Using bits of hose from the Fiesta it wasn't possible to get a tight enough downward turn to the hose without having kinks.
The solutions available were to either cut more holes in the bulkhead or to adjust the heater matrix tails.
You can see the tails protruding from the front of the dashboard in the photo above. I cut about 2" off the tails and used premade 90 gegree elbow to lead the pipes down. I didnt take any photos so you'll just have to believe me! The elbows connect to more 19mm id hose back into the cockpit and these will connect to the preinstalled aluminium pipe that runs to the engine room.
This week has been amazing. Four jobs in progress. As ever nothing ever gets finished as everything is dependant on something else.
The first job was to finish getting the dashboard ready for installation. This was just a matter of drilling some (3) 10mm holes on the leading edge
Before the dashboard goes in I've screwed the plates over the forward bulkhead.
This should marginally slow the ingress of water when it starts to sink.
The next job thats been waiting awhile is to make a new hole for the fuel tank bund drain.I seem to have actually made the hole in the correct place and the right size. Thats not typical!
From under the bonnet...
and in the wheel arch
Like everything else it will all need masticing in later.
The next two big jobs are to get the dashboard and engine into the hull. To get the engine over the transom it will have to be about 1.5m off the ground. My engine crane wont go anything like as high as that so what we need is a gantry and a hoist.
The gantry comes in a box....
... and eventually all fits together.
I've got a chain hoist and thought I'd give it a bit of a test with the dashboard. This has a rather convenient tube running across its width so putting a strop through that and ...
... and before you know it the assemby is practically in the right place! Its beginning to look like a car now!
Got all the paperwork off to register it as a car now to test it as a boat!! Here are a couple of videos and some photos of it in action....
