February 16th 2013 - Passenger side interior finishing

A mixture of things today, with the aim of finishing the passenger side interior.  First up was the propshaft to diff bolts:  These have been temporarily fitted for ages but now needed to have threadlock applied and be tightened to the correct torque.  Other builders have cursed this task due to the apparent need to crawl around under the car.  I didn't need to do this, however - I just:

1. Jacked up one rear wheel
2. Removed the two rearmost cover panels
3. Slackened the handbrake cable
4. Unfastened the handbrake lever
5. Attached a long extension bar to the torque wrench and an adapter to allow the use of a 3/8 drive socket
6. Turned the rear wheel to move the first bolt to the top
7. Lowered the wheel back down

This allowed easy access and just needed the car to be jacked up again for each of the four bolts to be accessed and torqued.  On each one I used an old red touch up paint to put a line across the bolt and flange as a reminder that it's been torqued and to allow any loosening to be spotted.

Next task was to finish off in the footwell:

1. Drilling out the gearbox filler access hole (see earlier entries) to 25mm to allow a grommet to be fitted.
2.  Making a hole for the washer pipe to pass through to the washer bottle - a 9.5mm hole with an open rubber grommet.

Passenger footwell - gearbox filler grommet on the right

 The carpet under the seat went in next, after blanking the holes for the standard seats with some 9mm grommets.  To get the holes for the seat mountings in the right place I jacked the car up, weighted the carpet down, then used the conveniently-handy red touch up paint to mark through from the underside.

under-seat carpet with seat mounting holes visible

Before putting the seat back in, the seatbelt mounting needed fitting and torquing.  Whilst doing this I temporarily fitted the tunnel carpet so I could make a cut-out for the seatbelt to allow the carpet to be fitted/removed without taking the seat out:

seat belt mounting passes through tunnel carpet - note vertical cut to allow easy fitting

The seat then went in, along with the footwell carpet:

Footwell carpet in but not yet secured

Dark now (I didn't get to start until mid-afternoon) but surprisingly warm for mid February, so I decided to fit the expansion bottle for the cooling system so that the scuttle can be fixed permanently next time.  This was simply a matter of mounting the bottle to its bracket using two 5mm bolts, then fixing the bracket to the scuttle, again using a 5mm bolt and nyloc nut.  Its location was determined by the cooling system metal pipework and the need for the expansion bottle top not to foul the bonnet.  The pipe angles on the metal pipe still seem as wrong as they do at the other end (see earlier entry), but hopefully Westfield will have a solution that doesn't involve trying to bend the (steel) pipe!

Expansion bottle in place.  Definitely dark now!