Exhaust & Starting to prep the body

Exhaust Side Pipes- During the week I had a trial fit of the exhausts. Fitting the headers took a little bit of fettling as the holes don't line up perfectly with the holes in the heads. Initially I put some manifold studs in but the holes are too close to the pipes to allow the nuts to turn, so had to put some Allen headed bolts in (I only had black and will need to swap these for some shiny ones). I checked all the clearances around the ancillaries, HT leads etc and all was good. Then I fitted the side pipes, using a jack to support the weight and a rubber mallet to "encourage" the pipes onto the headers. It's a tight fit and takes a while to get it right.I set it up with 85 mm gap between the side pipe and the chassis and with the pipe parallel and level to the chassis I offered up the mounting brackets. You have to bend these brackets to suit the location of the bobbins and this is no mean feat as the brackets are 5 mm steel and are not big so there's not much leverage, I ended up using hydraulic press to get the adjustment. Here's the resulting near-side fitting:

Exhaust Trial Fit

With the brackets G-clamped in place and marked up, the side pipes came off again. I'll need to get the brackets welded onto the chassis and I'm another step closer to fitting the body. Oh, and I also made up some templates from card that I hope to use when cutting the body to accept the pipes.

Some Body Preparation - The sun was shining on Sunday so I took the covers off the body, removed the earwigs that were squatting in there. It's great to be able to work outside, daylight means I don't need my glasses but on the down side wearing only a T-shirt while working on fibre-glass means picking loads of irritating splinters. I tidied up the hole I'd made for the fuel tank pipe and expanded it out a bit. I also cut the hole for the gear lever and trial fitted the heater. As mentioned before, I've had to modify the heater to take the air from inside the car rather than the engine bay. The trial fit went well but the bolts I had were too long, I'll re-fit as soon as I get some decent bolts and post some pictures.

Gear lever & Heater Access

Fuel Tank Access