Rose joint caps complete

 After a lot of welding, cutting, grinding and more welding, I finally have my rose joint caps. Two layers of 5mm steel with a welded 12mm nut on the back, giving 22mm of fully threaded end;

A quick check against M12 bolts shows everything looking good;

And here they are in place on the tubes, with the rose joint screwed in and the hoop mounting brackets ready to go (more 5mm steel);

I'm happy with the work, it all went to plan and while it probably won't pass MSUK inspection I can see enough metal at every stage to ensure that it will help if the worst happens. The next stage is to cut the bars to length and weld the fixing plates in place.

Talking of welding, I went back over the cross bar on the roll hoop and fully welded it;

Unfortunately, while I was happy with the weld itself (reasonably tidy and with good penetration), it did pull the hoop in and stopped the fixings from matching the holes. I had expected it when welding the hoop itself, so I guess it was just a delay to the inevitable. I needed to slot around 3mm into each of the eight holes to cover the shrinkage, so now the fixings have washers underneath them. It's still as strong as before, the washers are 'belt and braces' so to speak.

Now comes a little frustrating bit. I wanted to look at how the tank was going to be strapped in, compared to the support bar mounting plates. I managed to get it wrong;

The fuel tank sits on top of the plates on both sides. This means that once the tank is strapped down, those plates will not be as easy to work with. Particularly when I'm inside the boot of the car trying to wrangle the support tubes into position, I don't want to have to fight the fuel tank as well!!

Of course, it's a fairly easy fix here, I just need to trim the plates a bit. I do have the trailing edge that is already shorter, and rotating the plate showed that it would work. It's just one extra job.

I've also remembered to fully weld the bodywork mounting on the drivers side, so that's now ready to go. I think for next weekend I'm going to get hold of some Sikaflex and get the bodywork in place. So before then I need the support bars finished. 

I also want to get the straps sorted for the tank. For some reason I thought the fuel tank straps were going to be soft, turns out the book asks for 2mm steel. Of course, I don't have 2mm steel, and definitely not in the length required. B&Q have it, and while it seems to be a bit expensive it appears to be the 'normal price' for steel now. I knew I should have got this finished a while back, all these little bits are going to end up costing more than most of the chassis. The tank also needs insulating from the rest of the chassis, so I need to find a rubber strip of some kind. 

The next post will be having a look at the next jobs, or more importantly the next purchases. There's not much left now, it'll be on to engine and body work. It's looking to be a nice summer (fingers crossed) so that will make things easier to bring things out of the garage to work on. Of course, we have thunderstorms predicted for today, so just indoor stuff for now.