Catch up Time!

So this post is only about 5 years late. A lot has happened in that time, including moving house, building a shed, etc. I'll post about that later, but let's get you up to date circa 2023.

Since the last post, I finished off the rear firewall

After that, I turned my attention to the front of the car.. 

Many years ago, we switched to floor-mounted pedals. The downside to this is that the KCC chassis is quite narrow in the front and has a cross beam right where the master cylinders want to be, which pushes the pedals towards the driver.

So I setup the seat to my driving position and quickly realised it's far from ideal. The steering wheel is a long way in front (nearly straight arms) and the seat is just 100mm off the rear firewall. To give this some context, I am only 160cm tall (5'4")!

This means that pretty much anyone taller than me (aka most of the population) will not be able to drive this car. So we looked at how to move the pedals forwards. We even considered lifting them..

Ultimately, we decided that these pedals are just not going to work and so we sourced some top hanging pedals out of the UK. 

What also became apparent is that the plan of running coolant lines down the centre of the car really doesn't leave enough foot room around the pedals. I was beginning to think of running the coolant lines down the side and it was around this time, I ran into Tony Browne's post on gt40s.com which shows the amazing work he did with a similar KVA chassis.

And so this sparked a whole re-think. We weren't really very happy with the front of our car as it was. It was pretty rough and the radiator rubbed on the body. 

Therefore, we decided it was time to chop it off and start again on the front end. This time I went for side mounting of the radiator, similar to most other GT40 chassis. I also aimed to allow the K-frame to be removed (sideways) if required.

Once at this stage, I thought about how to mount the front body work again. After flicking through the GT40 forums, I came up with a few aims for the new mounts: 

1. It had to be adjustable in all axes. GT40 bodies are notorious for being tricky to align in the final build stages.
2. It had to be hingeable for maintenance
3. It had to be removable

After a bit of thinking and some 3D CAD, I came up with the following mount. With slotted holes, it would allow for adjustments in 3 dimensions.

It was around this time that we decided to buy a new house in the bush with a lot more space. I quickly knocked up these mounts so I could move the car.

Once I finally mounted it all up and did the final fitment, I found that I had setup the mounts too far out. They wouldn't fit! So annoying.

At this point, the garage was packed, the move was imminent and so a rope was thrown over the front end and we moved to the new place.

The new place only had a shallow 3 bay shed for our 3 cars and all my tools. Step 1 would be to build a new shed. I thought it would take about 3 months. I was very wrong...