Whether you’re building a car at home or are paying someone to do it for you,that last 10 per cent is the hardest to achieve.
When you’re doing it for a customer and they come in and see the car is together, running, driving and moving, stopping and turning, they naturally expect it’s finished.
We’re at that point with Guido’s project VK. We’re driving it and putting some kays on it – even though we’re still waiting for the correct wheels to turn up. We’ve had it aligned and are bedding in the brakes, listening for squeaks and rattles and looking for leaks – all those things.
We’ve had none of those problems with the VK. None! It’s absolutely beautiful, but the speedo won’t work. We need to investigate further as it’s eaten the drive – on the cable, not the output shaft. We have no answer until we get the new one and start investigating why it happened. So we’re really down to the last three per cent.
Speaking of builds, it’s sometimes difficult to get across how we have to sink lots of time into what seems a minor task.
Today’s example was on a Camaro we’re building, where we are mounting a handbrake.
The kit came with instruction to use self-tapping screws for the mount, but we won’t do that. There’s not quite enough metal in the chassis pans to drill and tap, so I’m putting in rivnuts (aka captive nuts). That involves measuring it up so it’s an interference fit in the hole – it has to be perfect. If you make the hole too big, it won’t grab and a pain to get out as it will be spinning. So you have to step up gradually in hole sizes, then finish off with a file or burr tool.
Getting them right on this car took the best part of an hour. However, it’s worth the extra effort, as we’re talking of a handbrake which throws a lot of load on the mounts and you don’t want them to fail. It also makes it future-proof, so if someone has to work on it in the future, it will come apart and go back together again.