Time spent: 3h
Cumulative time: 120h
Main activities:  Torquing up the suspension, fixing the steering wheel

Not much left to do but one really important job is to tighten up the front and rear suspension, and when this is done, I can align the headlights hopefully.

Whilst the final suspension adjustments should in theory be pretty simple, in practice its really tricky, because of the reduced access.  Whilst it was awkward, the rear suspension was doable, although you need to remove the seats to get to the radius arm.

Apart from the front lower wishbone, which you can get to easily from the front of the car, everything at the front is a nightmare in terms of access.  I am really not sure how I am going to do this.  What I have done is buy some Helicopter Tape which will at least protect some of the paint around the suspension that has already got a bit scratched.

I have been putting off doing the steering wheel as it needs some very careful drilling.  But I really felt I needed to have the wheel in place so I can control the car when I push it out of the garage.  I took my time to mark up the position of the holes (on the back of the wheel where there is a small punch mark to locate its centre).  I had many goes at doing this in the hope that I would get it right.  Once I was confident that it was correct, I used a punch to mark the drilling spots (which helps stop the drill skidding on the surface) on the back of the wheel and drilled the holes. 

The aluminium is very soft and my drill went through in no time.  It was pretty well there but one of the holes was about 1mm out which required a bit of filing to allow the bolt through.  I also ran a countersink bit into the front face as the bolts need this.  I took this very slowly as I didn’t want to go too far.  The countersinks are not quite right yet and I will come back to this later, but it looks OK.   I just need to adjust the steering rod on its splines so that the steering wheel in centred, but as this has to come out for the IVA, I might as well leave it for the time being.

It was a lovely spring day so I decided to take some pictures of the car with all the bodywork in place for the first time.  There is a trick to getting the nosecone on (which took a while and took a toll on the paintwork), but I haven’t worked out what the trick is yet. 

I am really pleased with the outcome which actually looks pretty similar to what the ‘configurator’ indicated when I placed the order.