Following on from the last post I had to get the old halfshaft bearings off without damaging the halfshafts so I made up a tool out of angle iron and six M10 bolts which removed the bearings very successfully.
New bearings and retaining collars were quite cheap at approx £20 per side so these await being fitted via a friends press.
With work shifted to the back of the Madison several parallel jobs needed to be done such as; calculating dimensions for the fuel tank, working out how to attach a roll bar and seat belt mounts and moving the rear bulkhead back to make more room in the cockpit. The existing bulkhead had been removed somewhat crudely and the saw had left its mark. I started to tidy up the wiring loom where it passes through the cockpit and discovered part of it had been cut through in two places so I had to mend it using several different methods.
A number of wires had missing sections so for those with bright ends I added new pieces soldered in, wrapped in tape and then heat shrink sleeving. One of the wires had that blackness that won’t take solder so I used one of the heat shrink connectors that CBS supply. These have a solder ring in the middle and then a glue ring each end. Although the old wire won’t take solder the new one would and once heat is supplied a slimline join results that is sealed against weathering.
With the loom fixed I rewrapped it with loom tape then put a strong nylon sleeve over it.
I’m not sure if the rear bulkhead was a separate one piece fibreglass moulding or part of the floor pan as there was evidence of sawing on it and the floor pan. Anyway it was evident it would need a lot of work as it didn’t fit the body with a 10mm gap one side. I also wanted to move it back a bit so after some head scratching I tidied it up by cutting a bit more off the edges to get straight lines and even curves. I then cut it in half such that it fitted snugly on the curved body sections and bolted a thin piece of ply to fill in the gap. I then made a curved aluminium piece to extend the transmission tunnel back and additional pieces of ply to fill in all the gaps. Finally I used plasticine to smooth out all the corners etc prior to fibreglassing. The next job was to apply new fibreglass over these sections and also redo the body joins.
The body on the Madison was made in three sections; a floor pan, the body tub and the wings/running boards. These are bolted together all along the body and in the cockpit some fibreglass mat had been applied over the join but quite honestly I don’t know why they’d bothered. The more I work on the Madison the more I appreciate what a quality moulding it is with fine detailing and a top quality layup. By way of contrast the fibreglass over the join was very poor; the surface hadn’t been rubbed down, the mat hadn’t been wetted out etc so I was able to pull it off quite easily by hand. As part of the bulkhead work I’ll redo these sections as the previous poor work had resulted in water getting through and the bolt heads rusting away.
Pictures of the bulkhead next time but for now here’s a shot looking through the boot opening – lots of space at present !
