Tidying the cockpit

Yesterday, I removed the drivers seat which required cutting through some bolts which went through the floor of the car with the angle grinder. This enabled me to strip out the cockpit of the car and remove all the rust and cut back the rough paintwork, and scrape off a ton of carpet backing and more duck tape. Once I'd got the steelwork clean I put a coat of anti rust primer on all the steel panels. Later I'll paint over this with some black paint.

I also removed the panels behind the seats which sit under the roll bar, between the cockpit and the boot. This panel had two large apertures with speaker grills over them, but were very roughly cut and I'd like to panel this section a lot better and carry the aluminium panelling round to the back edge of the doors in a curve. This will need some odd shaped panels so I'll cut it all out in cardboard first to make patterns for the aluminium. I've also got to make new panels for the tunnel top and I'll get some stainless steel allen key bolts with round heads to fix these.

I'm starting to get a shopping list together for the kit car show at Exeter in a couple of weeks time, but I shan't be driving the Stylus down there. Top of the list is some new headlights so I'll have to remove one of them to take with me.

Pic below shows the passengers side footwell after I've cleaned up and applied primer to the steelwork.





Got to go now, and watch Lewis Hamilton win the world championship..or not..

Flooded!

In the last couple of days I've found out a bit more about the history of the Stylus, including some details of restoration work carried out a couple of years back. It appeared that the car had at some point suffered some water ingress which had been allowed to sit in the footwells for a while.


This was all I needed to convince me to investigate a little further.



So out came all the seats, carpets and interior panelling. It all looked a bit horrific at first, but on closer inspection it appears to be surface rust only, and certainly hasn't weakened the chassis. I've never seen so much duct tape used. For a while I was beginning to wonder if the original builder had used any rivets. (The rivets they had used were all unevenly spaced. A bit of a mess really for a so called factory built car)

I'm glad I've done this now though. So it's a good scrape and rub down, on with the Kurust, then a couple of coats of anti rust primer and a good coat of black acrylic chassis paint (much better than hammerite which is too brittle in my opinion). It should all look much better once that's done.

Strangely I really enjoyed this evening..... Hacking away at a rusty car is quite fun really

First few changes

Since getting the car I've found several problems, fixed a few, and started a list of the others. The first problem was on arriving home. I took the car for a quick spin round the block, parked it on the drive when I got back, after which it wouldn't start. The battery was quite flat so off it came and onto charge overnight. The next day the car started again, but the voltmeter was showing it was hardly charging at all. Nice... I then noticed that a wire from alternator to engine block was melted through, so replaced that and things looked better. I did notice however that when I turned on lights or anything electrical the charge dropped below 12v..(not so good)

The next problem on a later drive was the exhaust breaking where it was routed up and over the rear wheel. I was planning to remove this so I was saved that job. For the moment I've made the exhaust a side exit just before the rear wheel but I think it would fail a noise test for a track day, so a better silencer with side exit would be the best solution.

Finally I changed the tiny steering wheel for a 300mm wheel which gives much better feel. That's better.

Why am I here?

I've created this blog to record details of my ownership of my SSC Stylus kit car, which I bought last week. Having previously built a Tiger Cat E1, which I sold recently, I decided I needed a car with similar performance but with a full body and windscreen, to make it a bit more usable in our wonderful British weather. So the Stylus seemed a good choice. I think I have a good one, but only time will tell. I'll start by posting a quick pic of the car on it's journey to its new home, so you can get a rough idea of what it's all about. (The Stylus is the one on the left ;o)