Framing is everything

First of all, I have to say I am really pleased with the level of engagement on the forums now. That’s largely because Gillles has started contributing amazing work. I’m in awe of what he’s doing and he’s showing how the coupe should be done. But anyway, I still have a roadster conversion to drag over the finish line. I’ve been struggling with doors and hinges, but that has led me to the realization that in the absence of a coupe body to hold it all together, I need to provide strong, positive location for the front side of the door opening.

The kit comes with flimsy kick panels and I already replaced them with much more robust versions of my own.

There’s also some infrastructure to positively locate the dash support. Those were a huge improvement over the kit, but I still couldn’t line up the doors,or fit hinges. A big part of that was the cowling (in the photo above) really had no positive location, so there wasn’t any way to ensure the cowl would fit the body/floor, and that it would tie in with the hood. So I ended up building new larger kick panels.

They look about the same, but they’re larger. Slightly too large at this point. The cowl just didn’t want to sit on the body/firewall. I would just wriggle around because there was nothing robust enough to hold it in place. So I built some structure and glued it in place inside the cowl. That effectively locks the cowl into place.

Now, almost miraculously, the cowl quite happily sits right where it’s supposed to without being taped down as recommended in the kit instructions. It took a ton of trial fitting, sanding, cursing etc. but now it’s fine and I have a rigid base for the doors. For my next trick, I plan to glue some styrene strip into the edges of the door opening so the front of the door skin has something to rest on. After that I will build some hinges for the doors. By the way, none of this is glued in yet. It’s all just dry fitted.

I think I mentioned last time that the roadster tail section had cracked from all the handling while I have been sanding and test fitting. I was almost at the point of putting it back in the box, but I realized I could fix it. And so I did. Here’s the before…

The dart that I had inserted (erroneously) to level the floor had broken away. This badly compromised the integrity of the tail section. I decided I could fix it by ganging 2 new dart sections into place. Along with a ton of styrene glue, I drilled through from the top and inserted a pin to hold it together.

Now it’s back to being solid enough to paddle a canoe.

Cheers,

Chris