I recently got some time to myself, so I reconditioned 2 steel wheels to fit the front axle. They were very grubby and rusty, but luckily I have access to an industrial grit blaster which does an amazing job of cleaning them up. see the pics below for the results:

Here are the wheels with the tyres removed (incidentally my local tyre fitters charged me a bank-breaking £3 for removing and disposing of the old tyres!) as you can see they are very mucky and rusty around the rims. However under the tyres was immaculate, so I masked off the centres as they simply did not need doing.


This is the rear of both wheels after I blasted one of them, you can see the difference it makes, the metal surface is now clean and perfectly keyed for paint application.


And here they are after I had finished the blasting process. If you do this yourself, make sure you blow off all the grit with compressed air, paint them withing 2 hours of blasting as they will rust VERY quickly if you don't. And DO NOT touch the blasted surface with your bare hands as you will leave fingerprints in it that WILL show through the paint.

Immediately after blasting I placed the wheels in a spray booth and applied 2 coats of primer.

Followed by 2 coats of gloss black. And don't they look superb!

Oh well so it's yet again been a month since I last posted.

I wish i could report a whole new wave of progress - but i can't. The truth is I haven't done much at all on the car. There are a few good reasons for this though :-

1. My wife has recently become pregnant with our first child, so I have lots to do to prepare for that!
2. I have been put onto permanent nightshift. ( although this may have it's benefits ;) )
3. I have finally decided to do something about my ever increasing waistline and now spend an hour a day working out - the same hour I used to spend in the garage.

Anyway, the couple of things I have done are these: I fabricated the mounts and fitted the BMW 3 series steering rack, although it isn't actually connected to the wheels yet as I need to design and fabricate some appropriate rack extensions. Also i need to connect the steering shaft to the rack by means of a long extension piece.

The other job i have started is fitting a new steering wheel. The BMW one is unsuitable as it is way too big and has an airbag fitted. (the law says where one is fitted, it has to work, and that's never going to happen). I picked up a nice 3 spoke wheel from an autojumble last Sunday And today i started stripping the BMW steering wheel down in the hope I could re-use the mounting boss in the centre. This may not be possible and I may have to buy one - but as always, persue the Locost option first!

Ok, so today didn't go so well. I thought I'd better post up they odd day when I'm not so productive, you know those frustrating days when it all just goes wrong - just to have some balance to this build record, honestly!

Today I attempted to mount the steering rack - and failed. After taking lots of measurements, and doing several sets of workings out on scrap paper with marker pens I finally had the dimensions for mounting brackets, that would hold the rack in the right place relative to the steering arms on the front hubs.

Having cut a couple on the saw, I proceeded to drill the mountng holes in the drill press, but they had vanished into thin air! I knew I hadn't moved from that spot, and they were gone! So I proceeded to make another set, at which point the first set magically re-appeared. Grrrrrr.

Having finally got all the brackets made, I had very little time left before work but decided to weld the first section in place, just so i could say I achieved something. I fired up the welder and made a very neat and tidy weld. I stood back to admire my handiwork, and realised it was the wrong piece of bracket! Dammit!

At this point I just gave up, I'll cut it off tomorrow and have another go.

The only other thing I have done since is dismantle the acclereator pedal and mask it up ready for grit blasting and painting. it will be painted black to match the other 2 pedals.

I was a little bored at the end of my garage session today and found a bottle of engine cleaner and had a little go at the drivers side head cover. I think it came up ok for 5 minutes work.

Compare that with the other head, with no cleaning:

Ok here's how I made my accelerator pedal. Blogger for some reason put all the pics backwards on the page so go to the bottom of this post and work your way up.

Here's the completed pedal, with the link bar attached via the clevis, pin and clip.


This is the link bar - made from a length of M10 threaded bar, welded to a flat plate with a 10mm hole to pick up the cable, screwed into a suitable clevis from the donor. The threaded bar gives me an extra degree of adjustment in the throttle cable. A locknut will be added on final fitment.

Here's the pedal all welded up.

I made a pedal pad from 1.5mm plate, and welded a smaller piece of 3mm plate to the back of it to add strength.

The first step was to weld an 8" length of 3mm flat bar to a crank that was part of the brake force transfer rod in the donor BMW

Ok picture time again!

Here you can see the installation of the master cylinders, the brake one mounted on a large flat steel plate and the clutch on a smaller bracket, welded to the other.


Here you can see more clearly, the brake master cylinder mounting.



And a better picture from above.

Ok here's the pics and updatey stuff!

I have done a little more work today. I have about 75% completed the back half of the pedal box and mounted the master cylinders. So the pedals are now functional.

Next job on the list is to fabricate the accelerator pedal. I've taken some pics and will post them up soon.

Gotta go now as the wife is huffing and puffing as she want's the laptop back.