Once I’d got hold of the correct Goodridge brake lines for the rear, the front & rear calipers could be attached - of course, looking back on these photos now I see that I did everything on the rear as though they’d never need to come off again, yet they will - you can’t bleed the brakes with the calipers attached as the bleed nipple is no longer at the “top” with the hubs mounted on their side like this.. Ah well, that’s a problem for a later day.
Fronts:
Rears:
The body was up and down more times than a <insert euphemism here> at this point, trimming, testing, trimming, checking, trimming and so on, using plum lines from the arches to make sure everything was ‘even’ side to side and aligned with the center of the hubs as best as is possible.
One interesting point to note - the build manual has you push the footwells up against the little vertical plates at the end of the chassis part of the footwell - the idea being that the pedal box will ultimately bolt through both the fibreglass footwell
and the metal, but two things became apparent:
If we did that, the body was off-square by about a quarter inch at the front end, so the wheels would never be even
When the pedal box was offered up and placed, per the build manual, “as high up as possible”, the lower mounting holes would miss the metal plates in the chassis anyway!
Because of that we decided to make the body square on the chassis (or “more square”, perhaps I should say!) and then pack the footwell out with an additional strip of 3mm steel between the fibreglass and the steel chassis, allowing us to both fill the gap and raise the plate enough that the pedal box will bolt to steel at the bottom.
Eventually the body was attached using Würth adhesive and pop rivets per the build manual - thank heaven we had four people and two compressor driven pop-riveters at this point! There are no pictures because we were all too busy trying to finish riveting before the adhesive set..
You can just see what I described about the footwells in this image, before the packing plates were added:
The main tub with so many rivets. So. Many. Rivets:
And the boot, which needs in-fill plates to be added over the chassis rails left & right, and the cut-out section to be filled with the piece laying in the boot; that provides clearance for the De Dion beam and also contains a steel reinforcing strip as it is the front mounting point for the fuel tank straps:
Here’s the pedal box being offered up:
Shown here at its lowest possible point rather than where it will end up (as high as possible). I really,
really wanted a bottom hung pedal box rather than the Dax one, but in the end I just couldn’t make one fit without sawing off a few inches of leg. Due to the design of the footwell the master cylinders can’t exit the footwell forward (because of the chassis box section), and having ‘rear facing’ cylinders means moving your feet upward into the steering column.. So, Dax pedal box it was. For now, I can always change it later, right?
I must have added the steering column somewhere around here, although I don’t have any pictures of the inside (the Corsa B ePas column), but here’s the intermediate shaft plus the bearing I installed (rather than the Dax bushing):
And one last picture for this update - we went to a show (I forget which one!) and bought a load of exterior lighting stuff as well as some lathe tooling and bits & bobs: