Matt Builds A Tomcat

(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...

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 7:12am and is filed under Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.