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A labour of love

Boot floor corner and boot cover support fitting

Boot floor corner and boot cover support fitting

With a nice long lockdown-mandated Easter weekend at home I’ve made a bit more progress on the metalwork, finally getting that boot floor corner panel into position and welded in. Easy enough to get it plug welded onto the edge of the chassis rail, slightly more difficult to get the run of welds underneath which attach it to the rear valance.

Very frustratingly I discovered that when I made up a patch for the inner wheelarch some weeks back I had not got the curve quite right (despite multiple test fittings!), and it would not come close to meeting up with this panel. I had no choice but to cut it out and re-fabricate it, hence the gap on the right of the photo above. I absolutely hate having to re-do any job, so I took the rest of the day off and caught up on some gardening to cool down!

Whilst I got over that mistake I moved onto the more straightforward job of fitting the boot cover support panel (these are the upright panels specific to the GT into which the wooden spare wheel cover clips). I deliberated about whether to fit this before or after I fitted the rear wing, but on balance I think the access for welding is better all round by fitting this first. As you might have seen in a previous post when I cut the old one out, the angle bracket which holds this in place had completely disintegrated (as has the one on the other side), so I just made up a new pair from sheet steel.

And then it’s a simple matter of plug welding the bracket first to the top of the chassis rail, and then onto the support panel to hold it in place. You can see below I’ve calmed down by this point and also got the new wheelarch patch welded in – it was actually much easier doing it this way with the floor corner already in place!

The support panel fitting is finished off by a couple of short seam welds on its bottom edge inside the boot, and then a couple of plug welds and a little bit more seam welding at the front where it meets the top curve of the chassis rail (you can just make this out in the picture at the top of this post). And that’s another couple of important jobs done on the seemingly endless path towards getting the new rear wing fitted, which will hopefully be covered in the next update…

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