Back to Square One

After setting a deliberate skew in the bodywork to offset the nose cone, and even up the clearances around the upper front wishbones. Andrew called Chris Masters to clarify the bodywork measurements and the find out the correct part for the boot box.  The boot box was definitely wrong and needed replacing with one for the "ZK" bodywork.  Chris said that a skew was automatically set in the bodywork and we should get as close as possible to 400mm each side at the boot box opening and 915mm each side to position the scuttle. “You can offset the measurements if necessary, but not by more than 5mm to avoid problems fitting the doors and side screens”.

Armed with all this information we set about repositioning the bodywork again. Exactly 400mm between the rear of the boot box and chassis upper cross member. Then set the scuttle in place. We had been unhappy with the line and standard of fit of the LHS of the scuttle every time we tried it. We suspected the problem was with the mounting blocks molded in to the body and the scuttle.  When asked? Chris Masters said the mounting blocks were sometimes more trouble that their worth.  It seems that, Like us, Chris Masters had had trouble with the LHS mounting block raising the scuttle away from the body. We had already made some alterations to the LHS socket set in to the scuttle, opening the top and widening the opening. However try as we might we could not get any side play, in the fit, to correctly align the scuttle and the lower body panel.  Then we noticed the block in the lower body panel had been molded in on the skew compared to the RHS and the corresponding recess in the scuttle.  There was nothing for it but to be brave and cut the back out of the recess. As soon as we had done this the quality of the fit improved dramatically.  Following this improvement, we set about positioning the scuttle for and aft. We were struggling to get the 915 mm recommended by Westfield, but only by about 1mm on one side.  We knew we were going to be tight for space around the front suspension when it came to fit the nose cone. If we moved the body forward we could correct the fit of the scuttle and it would not harm the fit of the nose cone. We decided to reduce the boot box opening down to 398mm and clamped it in place. This done we checked that the boot box would still fit ok.  Now we could position the scuttle exactly.