Hiccup on the seats

 I'm really happy with the seat wadding;

It's made a really smooth squishy surface just ready for the leatherette. It glued on to the sides quite well, I did staple it underneath but the plan is to remove the staples and trim the excess just before the leatherette goes on.

I did take this opportunity to take a quick measurement;

That's 750mm to the base of the seat to the top of the headrest. The regulations are;

• 85mm from each side of the centre line. That's an easy one, it's about 220mm total. It is slightly offset but I think it's still fine. 
• Measured at an angle of up to 25 degrees. My recline angle is 15 degrees so I'm measuring ok.
• Top of the head restraint must be at least 700mm above the R point. 

The issue is that the R point is 53mm from the seat base. That means I'm 3mm short. 

At first thought I could argue that the wadding going over the top edge of the head restraint could fill in the extra 3mm, but am I really going to measure a pass/fail on how thick some padding is going to be? Especially it it would mean redoing the seats.

So the easiest fix is simply to raise the seat back. I'm going to raise it maybe an inch or so, it's not going to cause an issue apart from where the leather pulls tight behind the seat. That's just a decorative thing. The priority is to make it strong enough to be considered a safety device. I doubt the extra inch will make that much difference from a 'seat aesthetics' point of view, as long as they're both done the same. 

I'm going to 3D print a measuring block, then take some better measurement to sort out an extension.

(The following Tuesday)

The measuring block is now printed, and it's showing something interesting.  In the IVA manual, the seat base is also angled;

But my base isn't, it's horizontal. So as I move 136mm forward, the ninety degree angle at the top actually makes the seat back 'longer'. In fact, with my 'measureometer' (patent pending) it actually measures just over 730mm;

So again, in theory I don't actually need to do anything. I'm at least 30mm clear to the metalwork, and I still have a layer of wadding to go on top. Havin said that I'm still going to increase it by an inch, it's not much effort and it gives me a safety margin. 

It does make the headrest back cover more difficult to deal with though, as it'll mean I'm trying to staple into metal. I'll have to bring the leatherette down a bit further but I'll end up with creases. The easiest way to fix that is to have a short board covered with leatherette that will bond to the back of the headrest. But that will mismatch with the rest of the back, so I'll have to do something to lift it up.

This is the back of the headrest;

The wood sits inset based on the metal, which works well for what I had planned because the metal clamp would raise the leather up and I'd be left with a nice transition from back to side. Actually, that will work, the extra board for the headrest would simply sit on top. 

One step at a time I think... I'll lift the headrest 30mm and start there.

Start on the seats

 First, a problem...

Yes, despite me having far more space than a regular Haynes roadster, the air filter doesn't fit. I noticed it after fitting the meter and the filter, then seeing the bonnet not sitting right. The filter is jammed between the frame and the body. Given that I'm not going to cut the body or the frame, the filter is the one that has to give. That'll be an interesting side project, not quite sure what to do yet. 

Anyway, back to the seats. The foam glued on really well after my dashboard exploits;

And thankfully just having that thin foam on has made the seats far more comfortable. I did manage to get the wadding from the Hole in the Wall, although storm Darragh did make that particular journey quite eventful. Before that goes on I needed to round off the corners;

The left side is the cut right angle from the initial trim, the right was after I'd smoothed it over a bit. It was pretty easy to do to be honest, the powerfile with a really coarse grit belt was enough to shape it. Then my Japanese saw rasp took off the untidy bits. So now I have two seats with nicely rounded edges;

I'm really happy with the outcome, everything has gone right so far.

There is a slight change of plan on the wadding though. I had originally planned to have the surface as one piece, and the edge trim as another. But that seemed to be asking for trouble, particularly how the rounded corners were done. Instead I've cut it so the surface wraps round and staples to the back. I'll still glue it in the centre so it doesn't slide about under the leatherette, but being able to pull it taught round the edge will hopefully give me a really smooth corner without too much effort. 

Once that's done I can apply the leatherette. 

A halt in the proceedings

 Since the last post I seem to have done very little. To be fair, it's been absolutely freezing in the garage, and the clocks going back make it even more challenging. 

But I thought I would at least update the blog to see what needs to be done. Well, I know what needs to be done, the blasted wiring! I need to get on with it but it really is painful. I could probably get it done in an hour or so, then just need to tidy it up, job done. 

Away from the wiring, I'm also looking at the seats. I put the foam on the seats to see what will happen, and I'm a bit wary it won't be as smooth and curved as it is in my head. The foam is firm and very 'right angled'. Looking on youtube I think I need to add a layer of dacron, a lighter foam that can round off the corners. If I trim the sharp corners then add dacron I think I can get it looking reasonably curved. 

The seat base is 50cm long, 41 wide. Add 5cm all round gives me 60 x 51.

The back is 41 wide as well, 77cm tall. Same addition is 87 x 51.

I also need to add a strip all round, a couple of inches thick. All four sides of base and back is 418cm. Working it all out I can get away with a 2.5 yards based on a 54" width (1.5 yards). I could 'probably' get away with a 1 metre wide, but I don't think haberdashers have embraced the metric system yet. 

Of course, haberdashers aren't as common as they used to be. Where I used to work there was one on the high street, and there's one in Walsall which isn't far. But there is a market tomorrow (Wednesday) and there might be one on there. The weather won't be good but it'll be worth the journey, especially if I can do some Xmas shopping at the same time!

I then have to;

• Trim the exhaust
• Complete and attach the arch fenders
• Finish the fuel tank plumbing (possibly buy some correctly marked hose)
• Bolt together and tighten up the suspension
• Seatbelts
• Edge trim everywhere
• Paint (I'm tempted to leave this until after IVA)
• New tyres

Dash 99% finished

 So after last weeks debacle, things worked better. For reference, this is what the brushed on glue looked like;

It makes me cringe just looking at it, but at least it peeled off very cleanly. Fast forward to this weekend with spray adhesive;

This was far more successful, and the finished product is exactly what I was after. I was so happy to see this come together, it's a huge part of the overall look of the car. 

I also did the gear shift surround bolts, which can be seen in the pic above. Problem is that the leather was just a bit thicker than expected so it's left a gap. It also means the surround is higher than 2.5mm so it no longer meets the radius requirements. A bit of 3D printing for a profiled surround and I have this;

It's not quite as clean as metal on metal, but it still tidies it up a bit and gets everything level and IVA friendly. I'm tempted to glue the leather to the underside of the frame as I'm not sure it would stay in place over time, but I'm also tempted to make another gaiter.

And that comes to yet another digression. With the dash in place I can see the black steering wheel and shroud look a little out of place. A wooden wheel would be perfect, but they're not cheap (well, some are, but they're made of chinesium and I've seen some scary youtube videos on those!). The current wheel is Momo so it's definitely good quality, and it needs a centre boss made up anyway. So I'm thinking a bit more leather work might be good. If nothing else the centre boss should be the same colour. The shroud is also the dull black plastic from Mazda, and I think I can do a bit better with just a layer of leather. That in particular will really tie it into the dash and seats. I'd end up with leather soft furnishings, aluminium interior, and black fixings. Nice, clean, simple. Well, not simple, the amount of work to make it look 'simple' is actually quite complex!

Right, back to wiring. I keep putting it off, but it's got to be done. Rather than looking at it from a 'dash' point of view, I'm going to do it one circuit at a time. Today's mission, wire in the indicators and hazards. So that's front and rear lights, tell tales, column switch and hazard toggle switch. All connected to the light relay. That's something my brain can deal with, I just hope I can find enough green/white and green/black wiring. 

Trouble with glue

 I really am not on a good streak at the moment, so this is a bit of a rant. Partly over the poor quality of products nowadays, partly over my own incompetence.

It's been about glue this weekend. I need to fit the fuel filler bayonet to the filler neck, and since I can't TIG weld then glue is the only option. To be fair it kind of did work, although I question the longevity. I used epoxy to bond the two parts together, and yes it stuck but it was unfortunately off centre. So the cap wouldn't go on. I expected a struggle when taking it apart, but the fact that it just needed a bit of encouragement with a stanley knife makes me wonder how long it would last.

Once it was apart and cleaned up, I tried some JB weld. Turned out I'd not done enough, because it wouldn't even hold together under it's own weight. After a second clean up, I made a decent lump and applied it. I also clamped it in place and left it, I am hoping that patience is a virtue here and it'll be fine tomorrow. Or next week, depending on when I want to look at it again.

The other gluing job was the dashboard leather on to the blank. I bought the contact adhesive yesterday, thinking that my challenge would be getting it flat and whether it stuck to the leather. Turns out my problem was neither of those, it's the fact that it didn't stick to the blank! I noticed it when I was painting it on, it was going gloopy and dragging. I actually got to the point where there was a visible lump right above where the steering wheel would be, so that would have been horrible.

I prepared myself for a frustrating time getting rid of the glue, turned out that I need not have worried. It just peeled off. Now, I'm not an expert on glues, but when something peels off that easily, something has gone wrong. The leather looked ok though, it had wrinkled up a bit but had accepted the glue no problem.

So at the moment I've washed the glue off the leather and left it stretched flat to dry, and I'm wondering what to do with the blank. I don't want to strip the paint off completely but I think it's going to need more than a bit of sandpaper. I'm thinking perhaps a wire brush to actually score the surface which should hopefully keep things fairly smooth once it's done. 

And of course, I thought it was going to work fine first time, so I temporarily put all the wiring stuff underneath the board that I'd laid out... so no more wiring today. I don't mind to be honest, after such a bad start to the day I'm not in the mood for more garage work. I might go in there to tidy up in a bit, I need to get some stuff sorted/binned. In fact, yes I might do that as it's fairly relaxing, reasonably trouble free, and I could do with a win today. 

Weekend progress

 Again, more of an 'aide memoire' than any actual decent blog post. I've done most of the wiring loom, I just have four white/red power wires to join up together, and the same for four black ground wires. That gets rid of the spaghetti. Now the next part is to wire in the lights and dashboard.

There's a few blockers to that though. First off is that I seemed to have trimmed an entire lighting section out of the loom!! There should be a connector on the column multi switches that powers the lights, but now I've got to the end of this particular task I have no more connectors. I'll need to go back and see what I removed. It might be that I took each individual wire out in turn, then ended up with an empty connector that I stuffed in the 'spares' box. Once I find the connector I can wire it back in, 

I also need to print out the fuse and relay positioning, again I seem to have quite a few empty holes and I want to make sure I've not unwired something important. I also need to check the relays are still in the right place, for example I know the indicator flasher is wired in but it's missing two of the wires. I need to energise the flasher with some power and then see what comes out. The flasher is listed as;

• Black Ground.
• No connection
• Orange hazard light switch to Black Ground.
• Green Black to left hand lights (front/side/back and tell tale)
• Green Red to direction switch on column
• Green Yellow to direction switch on column
• Green White to right hand lights (front/side/back and tell tale)
• Black Red to fuse block

Looking at the existing wiring in the block, I can see;

NC          GR/RE      OR      BL

BL/RE    GR/YE      NC      NC

If the one below the black is the actual 'no connection' then the other two must be left and right. 

For the lights and dashboard it's all new, so it'll just be lengths of wire of the appropriate colour.

Ah yes, colours... I seem to have some wires that were attached to the loom, and attached to the engine, but neither end is actually attached anymore! I need to find;

• White/Blue. Apparently this is labelled as battery negative. 
• Green/Orange. This is most likely going to be the horn I think?
• White/Black. Off to the alternator for the battery?

None of them go to the ECU so I can rule that out straightaway. I'll have to double check the colours to see if they're actually what I have.

For other wires, I've got Blue Yellow to come from the fluid level sensor and the parking brake switch, when either of them close that puts a ground on the far end of the brake light tell tale to light the bulb. Black Blue for the coolant temp sensor, that'll go direct to the gauge with the other end being grounded.

I also have Yellow Red to come from the oil pressure sensor, again to the oil pressure gauge. 

I feel like it's all starting to come together now. I do have a lot of fused power feeds to go round the car, and there are so many ground points to put in. The grounds are fairly straightforward though, crimped ring connectors screwed to key points on the chassis. 

I'm going to try and get more done during the week, even if it's one or two wire colours a day I'd soon get them all done. Then it's a test, then bind up the wires and secure them ready for IVA. I have a route for the dashboard wires but I will need to make it IVA friendly, there's a sharp 180 degree bend that goes round an aluminium edge, that's just ripe for IVA to fail. 3D printing to the rescue there! Behind the dash it's easier though, the current connectors are in quite close proximity and would be stable enough to hold the wires on their own but it won't take much to add a couple of cable tie brackets to make it extra secure. I'll have to remember to position some next time I get the glue out, which will be when I come to put the fuel filler together. But that will have to wait until I get some more PETG for the 3D printer, I've actually run out of a roll! Only the second roll I've managed to finish too, I must have been doing a huge amount of printing recently. 

Fuel filler

 One more post about the fuel filler, just for my own memory to be honest. The fuel filler neck arrived;

And thankfully it was a usable size, this photo compares it to my moulded one. It's maybe a little larger which is fine. The main frustration is that the Ebay listing said it was new, this was far from new. I don't think it's been used, but the chrome is so tarnished that it looks like it's sat in someone's toolbox for years. It's annoying, but not worth trying to get a refund, after all it's still usable.

The only thing was the angled edges that the cap locks on to, they were simply to severe for the cap to lock. This was expected, I knew I'd be out of luck to get them to work perfectly. Fortunately a few minutes with the dremel got me a shallower angle that the fuel cap could lock to. So that's that.

Now comes the fitting. My idea had been to weld a steel collar on to the tube that would sit inside the bodywork. This neck would then protrude above the body, with maybe a decorative trim to finish it off. Problem is this neck is actually wider than the two inch tube, so I'm not going to be able to weld a collar on and get it to fit through the body. I could make the body hole wider for the neck, but then I'd need to trim it. And again, because the neck is wider than the tube, the trim wouldn't work either. 

I think it's an opportunity for some more 3D printing... Basically I want a bracket to sit under the body. The internal diameter will be for the tube. Then I want an upper lip to fill the hole in the body where the neck needs to fit through. Then the overall part should be wide enough to fix the tube to the body.

Or... I can do the same, but have the tube come in from above. That way I can make the hole only big enough for the tube rather than the neck. I could still use a 3D printed collar to bond everything in place. That would mean I wouldn't need an outer trim, I could just make sure the bodywork hole is tight against the tube. The neck itself would then sit just above the body.

Oh, but that introduces a new problem. When I lock the fuel cap, it needs me to press down on the cap. If I do that too often, I might end up pushing the tube through the collar. However that could be mitigated by my gluing approach, if I use two halves of a collar then I can more easily apply epoxy inside the collar. I could then use a jubilee band during gluing to really press it on there. 

I could also reinforce it by using another 3D printed collar underneath the neck lip. It doesn't need to be much, just enough so the neck sits proud and so the cap has about 1mm clearance to the bodywork. I don't want it to sit on the body because that would scratch the body over time, as well as make it difficult to lock as things wear.

Right, that's my notes sorted, I can come back to that another time. My task for this weekend is to get the loom sorted, or at least get the spaghetti sorted. Even if I don't get all the way to the dash, at least I could get the engine ready to run. Two solid days should be enough, as long as I don't make excuses to avoid it. Like writing a blog post on how to fix a fuel cap...