Matt Builds A Tomcat

As you can see in a lot of the photos, the wheels stick out a good six inches from the edge of the body. This is an MOT fail, so it was time to buy some flexible wheel arches.

The flexi wheel arches

I got mine straight from Tomcat Motorsport, but wherever you go, be ready for a smack in the wallet – these chunks of rubber cost around £220!
The wider ones actually come in two parts (one part is more solid rubber and you bolt some less solid rubber to it, as a six-inch lump of ‘floppy’ rubber wouldn’t be strong enough) which you put together yourself.

The front arch.

Then we riveted them to the car.

The rear arch

Meanwhile, my put-upon brother continued sorting out the electrics…

Nearly there!

While the smallest mechanic tested out the newly-fitted passenger seat.

I'm not sure he's got the hang of that spanner...

The cooling system is finished! We’ve finally connected the pipes that run through the cab to the radiator. All the appropriate pictures can be seen by clicking here (I’ll add some more next week).

The water pipes underneath the car. The radiator is directly above them.

The brake lines are finished too, and the brakes are bled and working. Here are all the brake pipe photos.

Here you can see the (nearly) finished rear axle. Note brake pipes.

Also, we’ve got the driver’s seat in! This was a bit of a game as we decided not to use the supplied Tomcat seats, so the mounting points were in the wrong place. So we made up a bracket for the seat runners and bolted it in. We attached the shoulder harnesses directly to the rollcage behind the seat, and the side straps to the rear bolting point for the seat. We’ll find somewhere to attach the last belt next weekend.

Driver's seat with belts fitted

Then we lifted the front up on the ramp, for no real reason.

Whee!

So, yesterday, we fitted the rear propshaft:

The blue piping is for the rear air locker.

Attached the rear winch:

The rear winch, a Britpart DB9500i

And put the lights in the rear panels. We’ll be attaching them once they’re wired up.

We'll probably end up using something stronger than tape.

Bye!

We’ve set a self-imposed deadline of July 19th to have the car on the road, so we can take it to Billing. Then we took a look at our schedules and realised that we only have six build days left! We’ll work it out somehow.

The rear winch mounts are on, which can probably be best described by some photos:

The angle iron that will eventually hold the rear winch in place

Fitting the winch

Welding the plates in place

Undercoat

And finished

The rest of the day was spent on bodywork (again). We’ve finished up the side panels, and riveted practically everything on.

Riveting stuff (and look - the rad is finally fitted!)

The only bodywork left to fix on is the front wings, rear light panels and bonnet (in so much as that is fixed). We also need to add some metal finishing strips to the rear of the car to cover up some creative bodywork adjustment.

All the external bodywork is on! Note the seat on the right of the picture

We also started to hack the dashboard to bits to make it fit around the wiper motor, with further hacking required to make the original instrument panel fit into it.

And that’s it! We’re not going to do anything else until the 14th June. Still on our “To do” list for the MOT:

• Dashboard
• Electrics
• Battery and air pump box
• Front winch
• Front bumper
• Rad pipes
• Exhaust
• Steering guard
• Diff guard(s)
• Wing mirrors
• Fit windscreen
• Wiper blades
• Windscreen washers
• Front lights
• Rear lights
• Rear brake lines
• Fit bonnet
• Fit front wings
• Rear propshaft
• Fuel lines
• Air intake and snorkel
• Fit Seats and harnesses
• Check fluids
• Start engine!

Six days..?