Suck in the paint fumes, certain to dispell flu symptoms
Lancer is the answer! What was the question?
Bit the bullet and decided to remove the original seat mount.
First step is to identify the spot welds and centre punch them… 
Then use this magnificent spot weld drill…
…until this happens:
I am still going to have to modify the tunnel at the front left corner of the seat, but this is a decent start.
Terrible lighting for these photos, but this is where I got to. Note the adjustable rails ($55 from ebay). The 35x35 RHS is CAMS specification, about $12 worth.
It needs a bunch more work with end plates and so on, but this is a start.
The challenge with all of this is that the tunnel is really wide at the front, and it’s difficult to get the seat low enough. I think the best compromise is for me to drive without the seat cushion, and the other (shorter) drivers can use it/booster cushions as needed.
- Edited
I was hoping to avoid cutting the car. The whole idea was to make everything a straight bolt in if (when?) the car needs to be reshelled…
But sometimes you just have to do what works…
.
This is the backing plate with the captive nuts, before it was welded to the inside of the sill panel.
I had lots of paranoia about getting the two beams on the same plane… and didn’t get it exactly right. They’re parallel, but the front one is rotated slightly. Not enough to worry about.
They both fit quite well. The back one is damn near perfect - it just drops into place and the bolts all just line up! The front is a bit tight and needs a bump to get it into place, but no big deal.
And in. The seat mounts to some threaded sleeves welded into the box section. This isn’t exactly how it is supposed to be done - it’s supposed to be an unthreaded sleeve with a nut on the bottom, but my method gives more thread engagement… and I can still put a nut on the bottom if need be.
Fitting the rear mounting bolts has hugely reduced the rearward travel on the runners. It’s still got enough travel to suit both El Wifeo and myself (being the shortest and tallest people expected to drive it), but the extra rearward travel makes it easier to get in and out of the car, and also makes the harness easier to do up.
I will have a better look tomorrow - I ran out of time, daylight and energy pretty much simultaneously this evening.
I think the seat will need to be tilted forward, and maybe slightly inwards, but it’s good.
The Boy and El Wifeo both sat in it and immediately declared that it feels good, so that’s nice.
I am super low on welding gas - hopefully I’ll have enough to weld in the harness mounting plates tomorrow.
Still flu ridden, so still doing a lot less than I want.
Did manage to paint the floor and the seat mounts.
.
Also worked out where the harness waist straps will mount.
This is the seat at the full extremes of its travel. The reason it wasn’t going back far enough is that I had put a too-long bolt in and the two bolts were clashing. A few minutes cutting it down and the problem is solved.
I wasn’t consistent with the angle of these two photos, but looking at the bottom of the steering wheel gives some context.
How would a 3.8 24V motor go into a 240? Work?
- Edited
I painted the door and the bonnet today. Today was the day because it was clear and sunny by 9am… we’ve had lots of lovely weather lately, but usually a cold, damp start to the day.
No photos because “upload max filesize limit reached from php.ini”.
Short version is:
Quick sand back with the orbital sander. Slightly less quick hand sand with 800 grit wet and dry.
Quick coat of etch primer. 
Quick sand with some more 800 W&D.
Battle with the “good” spray gun for an hour, but can’t stop it spitting and farting at me.
Dump the paint into the cheap, crappy spray gun a mate gave me.
Paint.
Work out that the new paint is a bit darker than most of the paint on the car, but much darker than the paint on the RHR quarter panel.
Sand back with more 800 grit, followed by 1200 grit.
Clear coat with the crappy spray gun.
Sand back with 1200 grit then 2000 grit.
It still needs a proper buff, but I am impressed with how well it’s come up. I stopped because I had to take the car down to the windscreen place, and needed to bleed the brakes.
Brakes were weird - despite swapping front calipers, I got literally no air out of the rear brakes or the RHF. Only a bit from the LHF caliper and now the pedal is beautiful!
I did buff the bonnet under where the bonnet pins go.
Haven't read this thread in a couple of days..... and I'm again amazed at how much you do so quickly and so well. And then document it! 
That magnificent spot-weld removal tool you wrote of earlier - where did you get it? Looks like what I need to deal with some panels for the 145.
Major Ledfoot
It came from a workmate. There’s (presumably lower quality) ones on ebay.
- Edited
This is the best painting I’ve done in many years. Not saying it’s brilliant, but it’s come up really well considering the effort I put in.
Makes me much more confident going into the next painting projects .
Stripes on the door, hoping that they would distract from the colour mismatch… I mean, they do a bit, but…
This lead me to consider repainting the quarter panel, but I:
a) don’t have enough paint left;
b) am getting too anal retentive, knowing that there’s a relatively high probability that the quarter panel will be rubbed up against something in the first event or two.
.
.
New windscreen ($360) means that I can also fit the wipers and cowl panel.
And finish the stickers on the bonnet. They’re a bit “more” than I wanted, but don’t look too bad.
A reminder of what it looked like a few weeks back…
A bit of silliness to fill in a few minutes.
.
Will try to get the bumper bars repainted tomorrow.
Have also decided that the seat is too far to the right. It feels fine in the car, but I should be able to move it over by about 25 or 30mm which will give more head clearance from the rollcage. 
- Edited
Sanding bumpers….
Forgetting to take photos of any of the intermediate steps.
Breaking the cheap spray gun. 
Using the recalcitrant gun, and actually being very happy with the results! I was actually getting a really good result from the cheap gun too.
This is a dark, metallic, acrylic paint straight off the gun. Absolutely stoked considering I’ve been half-baked with my preparation and am painting on a pile of old tyres in my driveway.
Haven’t even buffed them back in the photos. Will do tomorrow after the paint has had more time to harden.
The front bumper is missing most of the factory mounting points. The bumper skin has these flimsy little tabs moulded into the inside of the skin - they are often broken, but this one has ALL of them broken.
Will try to work out a better solution tomorrow.
Power steering belt turned up this morning. Took two minutes to fit, and now the PS works, which is nice.
I also sikaflexed the floor plates back in. No biggy, but another thing ticked off the list.
Still to do (off the top of my head):
Rollcage!
Move seat to the left.
Fit the harness mounting eye bolts.
Tidy up the wiring.
Use foil tape to block up holes in the interior and firewall.
Fit the resonator to the exhaust.
Make an adapter to fit an air filter to the air flow meter.
Lower the rear/raise the front suspension.
Refit the wiper strip to the passenger’s door.
Deal with the broken heat shield on the fuel tank.
Finish the interior cable for the battery isolator.
Finished the isolator pull cable. Cable adjuster from a MTB brake lever, was the simplest way to hold the cable outer.
Fire extinguisher mount. The original mounting hole is some weird thread (M11???!) rather than the 7/16” UNF I expected it to be, so I had to use an M8 bolt with a nut instead, but it works fine. 
.
Holes taped over. Did the firewall too.
Rare, factory option S40 T4 strut brace fitted. 
So very tired of this flu.
- Edited
Moved the seat over today. Got 38mm in the end. 
Of course it was more difficult and time consuming than expected…
I extended and braced the left hand seat bracket, and then welded in new threaded sleeves under the right hand side
I swapped the base cushion with a Sparco one, because the Sparco one is about one-third the thickness, and allows me to fit better - both more head room and the harness holes over my shoulders are in a better position.
The short-arses that drive the car can use a booster cushion.
Swapped the clock over. The replacement dash section without the poxy blue paint had a non-working clock, so I had to re-use the original clock. I got about 95% of the way through scraping the poxy silver paint off the clock surround before it occurred to me that I could just use the unpainted surround.
Here’s the junk that was left over.
And then the big news:
I drove it.
Seems to run really well. The broken heat shield on the fuel tank bangs and clanks, and there’s a rattle in the rear suspension, but everything else seems good.
Did a dozen or so slow laps of the back yard and then left it idling to see if the thermo fans work, but it just wouldn’t get hot enough!
Rollcage is due to be made mid next week, so I left it in the shed to stop the garbage yellow stickers fading in the weak winter sunlight until then…
@Spac I found the question
[
24 days later
The rollcage turned up to my mate’s business on Thursday but I couldn’t get it until today.
It weighs 52kg, including all the mounting plates and bolts, etc.
It will come down slightly when a few bars have been trimmed to length, so calling it 50kg will be close enough as a working figure.
Might try to get a quick test fit happening tomorrow if I have time.
18 days later
Bit of a turd of a week put me behind schedule with fitting the cage, but found some time today.
First up was dummy fitting the front part of the cage and drilling the holes into the floor.
This required slight shortening of the windscreen bar and drilling holes into it for the couplers.
Then onto cutting the rear legs to shape and length. The feet for the rear legs come flat, but I was happier with moving them slightly forward on the wheel arches, which required them to be bent.
First photo I remembered to take was welding the feet onto the bottom of the rear legs. First cage welding in ages.
Then I tacked the legs onto the hoop, in anticipation of cutting and mitring the harness bar.
That all went well, with the rear legs parallel, but my brain turned to shit while I was tacking the harness bar into place… its a turd to get to, because you either have to clamber in through the hoop, or reach past the hoop.
So I had the harness bar tacked on one side and it broke the tack when I was moving to the other side.
Did it again, and wasn’t sure why I had to fit it into a different spot to get it level again.
Undeterred, I put a much heavier tack on both sides, and then realised that one of the rear legs was no longer attached to the hoop…
So, out with the angle grinder, and then go inside to have something to eat and get my brain back together.
Back out after lunch, brain working slightly better, and I fixed it - back to being nice and parallel. 
Then I deliberately broke the tacks at the top, and removed most of the cage so I could remove the assembled rear legs and harness bar and weld them properly.
And some more drilling of various parts, before some painting.
At that point, poor light ended play.
Tomorrow, I hope to get the hoop painted and back into place, so I can install it properly and weld the rear legs.
Then I’ll reinstall the front half of the cage and work out where I want the intrusion bars and weld them to the front legs.
Doesn’t seem like a whole lot achieved from an exhausting day, but there was plenty of other stuff going on m, including work/pay BS and having to go down to get a MIG gas refill in a hurry before old mate went home… although when I got there, he said that he would be happy to come down and swap a bottle for me over the weekend… 
.
8 days later
I have been incredibly unmotivated to work on this… dumb when you consider how close it is to being finished, but it has been a messy couple of weeks that haven’t allowed me to focus the way I want to.
Anyway, the rollcage is very nearly finished now - literally just a few small areas to be painted and I can call it done.
Still need to fit the resonator to the exhaust and make some sort of adapter between the air flow meter and the air filter.
Maybe tomorrow afternoon.
6 days later
Finished the last little parts of the rollcage today, refitted the seat and some tidying up the wiring. 
Still more tidying of the wiring to be done, particularly in the boot.
Also need to make a duct between the air flow meter and the air filter, and fit the resonator to the exhaust.
I think it might almost be finished…
First up was securing the wires in the boot.
Then replacing the rear wheel stud with the damaged thread.
Onto the exhaust - adding the resonator. 
My welder is being very uncooperative, and generally made the whole process a lot more time consuming and frustrating than it needed to be. Feels like a problem with the earth cable again, although it all looks good.
I can also advise that trying to weld your finger is a bad idea. 
While I was under there, I “fixed” the flapping heat shielding on the fuel tank.
Its a steel tank, with a curved heat shield spot welded along the front and one side (where the exhaust runs near it).
This one had been partially torn off by running over something in the past, so it rattled and banged around. The spot welds were on the flange, outboard of where the two halves of the fuel tank are joined.
I wasn’t at all keen on welding it back on, considering the hazards of an uncooperative welder and a half full fuel tank… so instead I put a pilot drill through where the spot welds were, and then put some tek-screws to hold it into place.
Sounds rough as guts, but it is very secure now, helped by the heat shield being on two planes. Bending the lower edge of the shield back to shape with multigrips didn’t worry the tek screws at all.
Then it turned out that some of the rattling and banging is from the exhaust bashing on a mount… I spend some time trying to re-hang it, but have only been partially successful.
The good news is that the car is much quieter now. In particular, it has lost the harsh bark when the revs are up. While the idle/low rev sound is quite good, it is still too noisy to be a road car… but at least it isn’t too noisy to be a race car now.
I refitted the 12V power socket (aka ciggy lighter) to supply power to the timing gear. While I was ferreting around in my boxes of CE parts looking for the socket, I had a huge win:
I discovered that I owned an aftermarket adaptor to put a pod filter onto a 1.8 AFM.
The shape of the AFM is awful, and I had been dreading the hours of work to make something fit… so while this piece of plastic is poorly designed, it still made me very happy when it turned hours of work into ten minutes!
.