Matt Builds A Tomcat

So, we have just spent a day doing (most of) the bodywork. Dear Lord, but there’s some chopping to do. My friend Nase summed it up quite well: “The rear tail section is the only bit that actually fits without needing modification. And we need to cut it up anyway because of the winch.”

Some of the mess chopping up fiberglass makes

We were expecting to have to do some modifying because of the number of different ways a Tomcat can be set up, but we ended up hacking huge chunks out of pretty much everything. Nothing is too complicated, but time-consuming.

The line marks one of the cuts for this wing

The side walls, in particular, went on and came off again around fifty times. Still, it’s done now. We’ve lightly rivited the panels on, in case we have to take them off to get wiring in later. We’ll bang some more rivets in closer to the end of the build.

Passenger side

Still, it is starting to look the part!

Driver's Side

(Note – I’ve got some better photos of the cooling system somewhere, but I don’t know where they are . I’ll update this post when I find them.)

A cheap ARB-equipped diff came up for sale on a forum I look at, so that was job one this weekend. Unfortunatly my track rod protector (like this one, but bigger) had to come off first, and that required taking (hammering) a bolt from the radius arms out.

The paint is coming off already. Bah.

Still, now I have front and rear lockers, so that can only be a good thing, and I’ve fitted the front propshaft, so the front running gear is all done (apart from the fact that I lost the diff drain plug somewhere)!

To get the water from the rear of the car to the engine, we’ve used some flexipipe and some exhaust tube to run the water through the cab, next to the driver’s seat.

I'll keep my legs well clear, I think

We’ll cover the tubes in heat wrap and paint them red (as required in the regulations). Now all we have to do is run tubing from the rad through the rear floor to join it all up.

In the midst of all this, we bit the bullet and started to cut up the bodywork. The front offside inner wing (top tip: The rear inner wings are the same, whereas the the front wings are different, and will only fit one way around, depending on which side the pedal box is on) needed cutting to avoid fouling on the roll cage and a power-steering mount on the chassis, and then we rivited it on in two places in case it needed to come off again.

No turning back now...

We fitted the outer wing over the inner one, but we didn’t fix it as we still need to make the holes in it for the lights. It didn’t fit terribly well – hopefully some adjustments to the inner wing will help (we will fit the nearside wings together before mounting them on the car). The outer wing needed cutting to avoid the rollcage, and also the top of the suspension mount.

A quick note about the rear winch – I happen to have some thick angle iron that’s exactly the right size, so I’ll cut some channels into it to avoid the rear rollcage and paint it up. Hopefully that will be quite a quick job!

This may take some sawing...