Bolly Blog: McArlus Cars

Not a lot has happened on the driveshaft front yet, although I now know where the mistake is and why it happened. I will do a further detail on that soon, when I have made a few more enquiries.

In the meantime I have been slowly ticking off a few more jobs.

I have always disliked how all of the dirt, bits of rubber and small stones flick off the tyres and sit in the sill panels, to stick there and stain when they go hard. I’ve made a couple of aluminium inner guards for the front wheels. Unfortunately, as they have to fit inside a complicated shape that is effectively closed on all sides, they are rather tricky to make. A cardboard template, then some 3mm MDF and finally the shape is OK.

Then I made a 25mm MDFbuck, with a nice round edge on it so that I could bend a small return all the way around, for the rivets to fix into, and for added strength. In addition the LH sill is where the radiator is located, so in order to maximize the airflow to it, I’ve cut the centre out of the inner guard and riveted a piece of expanded aluminium sheet in there.

I’ve made some rather nice, I think, mirror supports that copy those on the original Mclaren. The stands are made of an aerofoil type section that I couldn’t find, so I made my own out of a piece of 25mm round tube with a triangle shaped piece welded along its length. A bit of grinding and filling and a coat of aluminium colored paint and no one will ever know!

The webbing tow hook on the front will make loading and vehicle recovery (hopefully never needed) easier. Once I’d worked out the length of the webbing and the correct size loops, it is like a figure 8, I did a couple of stitches to hold it together, and then had my local Mister Minute sew it together in the same pattern as the webbing I have on the trailer winch.

Brake light brackets are folded aluminum and are nice and sturdy, with plenty of angles, so the lights don’t shake. The lights are trailer type stop / tail lights. Since I don’t need taillights, I loop the taillight holder to the brake light so that I can have two brake light globes and a nice bright brake light. I also fit the lenses by drilling them right through and fitting small bolts all of the way through the bracket, rather than the cheap and nasty self tappers that are supplied. I have lost a couple of lenses in the past.

The choke mount is another of those fiddly little brackets to be made. In the past I have simply drilled a heavy hex head screw into the roll bar. It is less than satisfactory, needing two hands to operate and forever coming loose. This time a piece of aluminium block has been shaped to the roll bar curve, but cutting it off a larger block with a holesaw, and a small groove machined in to take the standard Honda choke cable bracket. A couple of dome head stainless cap screw tapped into the rollbar and it is all secure and looks quite neat.

Finally I’ve hinged the doors. I think I bought the piano hinge about 12 months ago! I got a nice wide hinge that doesn’t come pre-drilled, so I could put all of the fasteners exactly where I wanted them. It allowed me to offset them so that the heads don’t clash on each leaf of the hinge when it is closed, so that I could use a decent screwed in fixing, rather than just pop rivets, that would probably work loose. The hinge secures to the door simply with nuts and dome head screws, while it is secured to the chassis into rivnuts. A couple of pieces of cheap webbing make perfectly adequate door stops.

The doors have fitted on really well. The RHS still fits exactly how it was cut out of the body and although the LHS is not quite as good, and I can’t work out why, the only problem is with a slightly wide door gap, that I will be able to tidy up when I eventually even up all of the door gaps.

It looked so good that I couldn’t resist sitting a couple of wheels on to see how it looked!

Oh Baby!

What do you think?

Regards

Simon