Boot and other fixes

The weekend weather was quite decent so I managed to get quite a bit done. From Friday's post I had a few things I wanted to look at;

• Tyre pressures. These are now down to 20psi on every corner. It felt really weird having them that 'soft', my last few tintops have been VAG cars and they favour very high pressures. Letting so much air out of them to get them down to 20 just felt wrong!
• I've not done anything with the clutch, mainly because I couldn't get to the nuts! Having said that I did take the car for a drive down the road and it actually felt 'ok', mainly reverse was a struggle but that can be the case anyway (no synchromesh). 
• I also topped up the tank, just to see what the IVA used. I reckon about a litre of fuel in total? 

I also fixed the telltale lights;

They look a lot less 'waterlogged' now which is good. The laminator option didn't work, it couldn't get tight enough around the edge to fit in the slot and still be watertight. however laminating the images with sellotape did work. It might not be long term but at least its better than just exposed paper. I also did the switch labels at the same time, same process.

I've designed a phone holder to sit on the transmission tunnel;

Nothing too clever, it'll just screw to the tunnel top and have the wire sticking up from underneath. That'll feed up to the battery and to an inline power supply of some kind. My phone is a bit 'old' so it just uses a standard USB power, no fast charging or anything like that. 

Now on to the main event, the boot. Given the size of the boot lid and the space available, I have a few options with regards to boot space. The first step was to simply 'fill in' the floor;

This alone showed up a few potential issues. First, the back bar on the bodywork isn't flat. It's not meant to be, the bodywork isn't flat so I had to make things match. But it does mean the aluminium floor also needs to curve. The dots in the picture are just small magnets, but they're also an indicator of where the screws will need to go.

The plan had been to make the floor 'angled', to fill in the triangles either side. But that is actually quite a bit of work, and overall I lose space. Yes it might look really cool, but it's simply not practical.

So in the end I just thought 'keep it simple' and went for side panels where the other bars are;

It means the bottom is filled out further and is not supported in the corner, but given that it was going to be folded aluminium I think it'll be rigid enough. There will be a back panel to hide the fuel tank, that will be a separate piece that is rivetted in place to make the box shape. The only thing I need to consider is the infill. There's a couple of options, the first would be simply to edge the aluminium with the edge trim. That would look quite tidy, it would be safe and do the job. Alternatively would be some profile to go between the boot side and the edge of the opening. That would be a bit more work, especially as I'd want this boot lining to be removable (so I can get to the fuel tank, wiring etc).

In terms of capacity, this design is;

• 480mm high at the back
• 180mm high at the front
• 410mm deep
• 810mm wide

That gives me a boot space of 109 litres. That's almost KLM hand-luggage levels of storage! It will be plenty for a tool roll, a jerry can of fuel and somewhere to put my helmet when I'm not in the car. I might even look at some anchoring points for straps. 

This boot is pretty self contained, once I have the template drawn up and cut it'll be just a few rivnut in the relevant locations. I'm still considering a better rivnut tool, they've proven quite useful and I'll be using them elsewhere but it's still a pain to fit them. Particularly the small M4 ones that I use for most of my fixings. I need to find some 'real' 12.9 bolts and nuts to stop things just turning to mush as I tighten them up.