I’ve been working on several fronts since I returned from Boulder last week. I decided to order a gas pedal from Breeze Automotive— it’s manufactured by Russ Thompson. The pedal takes care of the problem that the Factory Five pedal had of hitting the inboard aluminum panel of the driver’s side footbox (left hand photo).
I’ve also begun assembling the passenger footbox. It’s quite straightforward and the aluminum sheets fit together almost perfectly (upper right photo). One modification may be adding footbox cooling vents— I’ll need to do some research to see if that is something worthwhile. It would be a substantial add-on project.
The significant step I completed was the the bulkhead port for the master cylinder remote reservoir hoses. In the last blog entry I wrote that I’d ordered some grommets from Grainger as well as purchasing a 13/16” drill bit. I bought the bit at McGuckin Hardware in Boulder— the best hardware store anywhere and one I really miss here in SLC. Drilling through 1/4” steel plate with a large bit was a bit of a challenge, particularly at the end of the process when the bit was breaking through. However, I ended up with holes of the correct size. The grommets fit perfectly and the 1/2” hose fit the grommet hole as planned:
An important step in drilling holes, and one that is rarely mentioned, is deburring the holes. Carrol Smith points out that all holes intended for rivets are not complete until deburring is complete. I use a countersink tool from Noga. The holes for the grommet were pretty rough on the back side and deburring took a bit of effort.
I have two more steps to complete for the brake system: 1) getting a plate cut for holding the remote reservoirs to the 3/4” strut (shown in the blue tape in the upper right hand photo) and 2) testing the brake lines for leakage.