Back on the seat mount

I ended up not liking my work on the previous seat mount setup, so I started over today. I took a fresh piece of 2" flat steel, and started measuring and marking it to get bolted both to the frame of the car and to the seat bracket.

We're getting a little closer here. All the green pieces lying around are marking tools I 3D printed to help me get lines drawn on this piece of steel. Here we see the first two bolts in and all of the holes drilled.

And here it is all bolted up. It's not quite done yet - it's going to need a bit more work there on the aft end to trim it to length and get a tab welded on to mount the harness to. I'm designing as I go. But the holes are drilled in the frame, so this is where it goes, forever.

 

Brazing aluminum in order to modify the firewall.

Since the fuel tank I will be using for the build is not the tank Factory Five supplies with the kit, I am going to have to make some modifications to the supplied firewall. It comes in two portions. One of them, shown here, will want to be stretched a bit in the horizontal leg; the other one will need to have some material removed.

Since I'm not set up for welding aluminum, I have been doing some tinkering with brazing. I bought some test pieces, and I cut them into chunks. This is 1/8" aluminum flat bar, cut into nonspecific lengths - but these are maybe 3 1/2" long.

Using a flap wheel on my grinder, I beveled the edges where they will be joined, and also went over the margin to remove the normal oxidation.

Then I clamped them to a piece of steel scrap and sprayed them with non-chlorinated brake parts cleaner to remove any traces of grinding dust or oil or other contaminants.

Then I heated them with a MAP torch and filled the groove with brazing material.

Here's a previous piece I did - after this one was cool, I used a flap wheel again to smooth out the braze a little bit. It's bent into that S shape because I tested its strength by beating it with a hammer. The aluminum bent, but the brazed area did not bend or crack at all.

Seems like this just might work out.
 

Lower portion of the aft firewall is in!

Not a very big or exciting update today, but I did finish the process of tapping all the holes for this panel, then got them all countersunk and screwed it onto the frame. I may never need to remove it, but I think there's a chance, so I am prepared just in case.

The upper portion of the aft firewall is next. That one is more likely to want to come out at some point, because the front of the engine will be right there, and it may facilitate replacing the timing belt or something.