Bodywork improvements - one

30th January 2011
The last day but one of January brought temperatures of 2.5 degrees outside and I knew i had a lot of fibre-glassing to do, which I knew would not be easy to achieve at these low temperatures.

The body work was starting to come along as it was slowly being rubbed down. I had always new that the design of the Fibrefab SWB Rat was very light and that some areas moved when the car was on the road. The worst of these was the front wings and headlights. In addition people for some reason think they can sit on car wings which on this type of buggy is not possible as the wings are not strong enough. With this in mind I had decided that with the body work off I could manage to build a mount that would hold the wings more rigidly. I bought some stainless steel fastenings from an online store these at first seemed difficult to locate as I new i wanted to fibre-glass a block of wood into the wing with some hidden bolts to mount the frame support. The main problem with this is that it is very difficult with a hidden bolt to stop the head spinning when you tighten it. I located some coach bolts that had a square on the underside of the cup. along with this I found some bar that was drilled with 8mm holes in a chain, 205 mm long and 19mm wide. I found that I could make these holes square with a file so that the head of the coach bolt would be captivated in it. I also bought some oak that was wide enough to take a channel to sit this metal work into. I used a router to cut this channel and assembled the two fixings easily. I used a DA to clean the underside of the wing back to the fibre-glass. This would provide me with a location to bolt to on the underside of the wing. I used hairy fibre glass filler to bond the wooden anchor points onto the underside of the frame. After bonding the wooden anchors on by filling the groove up with filler and then mating them onto a bed of filler I managed to build up enough hairy filler to make the bracket slope into the underneath of the wing. I had nearly completed both anchors when I realized I was running out of filler. I would have to wait for this to dry and purchase some more filler to complete smoothing them into the wings.

With the body work upside down I also noticed that the underside of the shell did not mate as well as it could do. I used the the body kit frame on the underneath of the body to improve the angles of the back transom. This was really a try bit by bit operation , which |I must confess was a little easier than mating it to the chassis. used the DA to cut the body work down . It was to high were I had made it up with fibre-glass and improved it significantly by this trial and error approach. There was some areas that needed making up with 5mm of filler so I knew my visit to buy more fibre-glass filler was going to have to be very soon.

With the 1.8ml tub of Fibre filler purchase I started work making up the back section . I knew this was going to be an overnight hardening process so set about making good with the filler using a straight edge to ensure the angles where good and straight . I also filled the center area so that it could be cut back to fit the body kit tighter. You can see the result of using the fibre filler really improved the back section. The drying time for this filler is usually 20 mins and I new as the temperatures was very low that there was not much chance of this drying other than over night.


The next morning I returned and applied more fibre fill to the front wings to smooth out the wing around the mated on block. I built up the edges with fibre fill so that the gradient between the block and the wing was smooth making the block disappear into the fibre glass wing. I new this would take a long time to dry out so left the fibre fiiller over night to really harden up. The smooth finish I would need to coat with a skin of fibreglass mat to seal it in from the weather. I new that the filler would need to harden off and that it needed to be totally dried out before this was applied.

Cleaning up the Body work

16th Jan 2010
Having successfully drill the body lift kit for the chassis and body. After a short search of suppliers I managed to find a supplier for the stainless steel bolts I needed to use to bolt down the chassis to the body lift kit and the body online. This turned out to be from a small company called htt://www.seascrew.com/ This company turned out to be the cheapest supplier of these parts and could deliver them to. This was very important as my daily ride had just broken down with a suspected clutch thrust bearing fault.

I knew I would have to take the body lift kit into AC Blasting in Ticehurst to get it blasted and then sprayed with hot flame Zinc and blacked. I would have loved to have took my chassis in and had this Zinc Coated to but new this be to expensive at present. Once the Body Lift Kit was with the plating company I new I could start to make good the underneath and inside cabin area. I took the frame over with a friends chassis and I was told the cost would be £55.00.

I had cut the back of the body down to allow the drag bar to be fitted to the car. This process had not allowed me to totally clean up the rear area as some of the body work was obstructed by the chassis. The areas where sanded with 120 grit paper and the areas of fibre-glassing was attended to so that the strength of the body work was reestablish Fibre-glassing this area was fairly good as I was able to use a new product fibre-glass filler, which allowed the repair to be completed in 7 degree temperatures . Once this had hardened off the areas where coated with gray Gel coat.

Drilling the 80mm body Lift kit

3rd January 2010
The buggy was housed nicely in a friends garage and the snow was starting to flurry when a call came in this morning.

I got to the garage and we pulled the buggy out . I had decided that the 80mm body lift kit would need to be drilled before it was to be blasted and Zinc plated. This meant it had to be accurately positioned on the bare chassis. So that the holes in the buggy floor pan could be marked with a felt pen. This would have been easy if I had remembered to take a felt pen and my friend had not bought some from the pound shop.

We finally found a working felt and marked up the holes after taking measurements across the chassis to ensure that the frame was central. The body lift kit was then removed and the marks were spot marked with a punch and a hammer. I had previously used 8mm bolts to hold my chassis to my body and after a short discussion we both decided that 10mm bolts would be a better bet. new I would need 22 x 120mm x 10mm to bolt down the body through the body lift kit and chassis.

The position of the bolt holes that had been transferred to the chassis where then pre-drilled with a 6mm High Speed metal drill bit at a slowish drill speed.
Once the holes on one side was pre-drilled they where drilled using larger sizes until a 12mm hole was achieved. The body lift kit was then placed back onto the chassis with the body work on top of it so that the holes from the body work could be marked. These were spot marked with a punch in the same manner as the underneath holes. The drilling process was then repeated leaving a hole on the top and bottom of the lift kit. Once this was done the 12mm drill was then used to run through both holes to ensure that a bolt would navigate through.

With the hoes drilled it was noticeable that the body work looked untidy and overhung the body lift kit. The body work was marked were it over-hanged the lift kit . This was then trimmed off by my friend with a jigsaw so that it neatly sat along the inside. The picture to the right shows the underneath of the body work it also shows the areas that I had cut out to fit the traction bar. I would need to finish repairing these areas at a later date.

With the snow starting to flurry harder we placed the chassis and the body back in the garage and turned our attention to the troublesome engine. There was a large amount of power all over the clutch which looked as if the clutch had been slipping. The clutch cover plate was removed by undoing the bolts that run round the outside of it as the clutch pressure plate came of the clutch plate shattered into bits on the ground. Luckily both the clutch pressure plate and the fly wheel seemed to be unscathed with no damage. I asked my friend if he had a bar that we could try to turn the engine over with. Amazingly the engine seemed to rotate. It got as far as the number one firing position on the distributor and would not go any further. Counter rotating it allowed it to turn freely round to the number three firing position. This seemed very perplexing . We wondered if a gudgeon pin had come out. But the real reason probably would only been seen when the engine was took apart. In the mean time I had to get the body lift kit blasted and zinc plated.

New Year 2011 Strip down

2nd January 2011
My New Year started with a vengeance to find the problems that had riddled my project for six months previous thanks to a great deal of motivation supplied from a very good friend and fellow enthusiast. We decided to first of all remove the engine which had been rebuilt some months before and which had seized in the garage as it had been left for too long without engine Oil. The process I had tried to re free the engine had obviously had a toll on the clutch and clutch plate. The pictures show the power that had been worn off the clutch friction plate.

Once the engine was out we decided that as time was available we would strip the Beach buggy right down to its chassis, in an attempt to see if the body lift kit would fit onto the buggy chassis as it had been previously fabricated on a donor chassis.

The strip down was fairly quick and everything seemed to come apart really easily. I put this down to the quality bolts I had used.

First the seats were removed by undoing the four bolts that went through the floor pan. Once the two seats were removed, it was then possible to get to all of the 8mm perimeter bolts that hold the body work to the chassis. As several of these hold in the Roll Bar these were removed also and the Roll Bar was lifted out. The windscreen and bonnet then had to be removed along with the petrol tank.The next problem to get over needed the front lights and indicator wiring to be removed from the Fuse box. Additionally the ignition wiring harness and the brake light and horn wiring all had to be disconnected. The front body mounts could be then removed allowing the body to be lifted off. The body lift kit could then be placed on the chassis to see if it would fit. Fortunately it did the work I had done in the summer was fruitful and the two mated perfectly. With the body lift kit on, the body work was placed back on to see how the ride height looked. The front definitely needed to have the adjustable beam that I had been rebuilding and I felt this would bring the front down so that the front wheels filled the wheel arches once more. The front seats were placed back into the car temporarily so that the seat height could be checked . The raised height was fantastic just what I needed so that a soft top could be fabricated that would not need a head hole for my head to poke through. A shopping list was then made to acquire longer bolts some and a new 9mm drill so that the body work could be fixed back onto the chassis. As I had taken the body work off I felt that it was in need of a clean up and thought it would be a good idea to fibre glass the areas properly from the underneath where I had cut out the areas for the cross bracing in the rear.

With the bodywork back on it was apparent that the Roll Bar would be very much higher than it needed to be. We found that it would just fit snugly inside the body lift kit. This would allow it to retain its height and could be bolted through the the Roll Bar and the side of the Body Lift frame. This had the advantage of making a strong structure that contained the people sitting in the beach buggy.

It would be some time before the car was back in one piece again.