January 31st 2013 - Boot Box

With a reasonable amount of time available today, I decided to have a go at fitting the boot box.  The roll bar goes through the edge of this, so that had to come off first.  I did think about cutting through the boot box from the front edge to allow easier removal in future, but decided against this as it could look untidy and its not that much effort to remove the roll bar if you take the rear wheels off.

The boot box fitted without the trimming other builders have had to do, so the first job was to put in a couple of 5mm rivet nuts on the rear edge.  These will be needed to hold it in place, so I did them first to hold the box in place while measuring the holes for the roll bar.  It was then a matter of taking the wheels off and drilling a marker hole upwards through the roll bar bolt hole.  This was then enlarged enough to make the mounting point accessible so that the roll bar could be temporarily attached using some longer bolts and its position marked on masking tape.

Roll bar temporarily replaced and position marked

The hold was then cut and filed out carefully as any errors would be very visible.  This created a huge amount of dust.

Hole cut out for roll bar.  Note the amount of dust!

The next task was to make four holes for the seat belts, as the boot box only has cut-outs for the inertia reel belts the kit was ordered with.  Not sure if there's a different boot box for four-point harnesses, but this one will have to do.  Making these holes required lots of measuring, re-measuring and pilot holes to make sure they were in the right place, but at least the chassis mounts have no bottom so a screwdriver could be passed through the pilot hole and mounting to ensure alignment.

The final job (apart from cleaning up all the dust) was to fit the trim panel that fits over top of the rear bulkhead carpet and the front edge of the boot box.  I fitted this (with Velcro) with the (incorrectly placed) cut outs downward as it virtually covers the holes for the inertia reel mountings.

The finished job with dust removed!  Not the biggest of boots, but better than none.