31 May 2012

Well, the wheels are on, hooray! This was to get the car into the barn, not because it's started raining (although that would help to stop it getting rusty) but because of the fricking midges. With a coat, hoodie, goggles, gloves, and tracksuit tucked into my socks i *still* ended up with bites, frantically trying to get the wheel nuts on, surrounded by a hundred midges and feeling slightly freaked out by the number that were on my clothes. Occasionally I had to escape and empty the goggles. I've never felt intimidated by nature before, but it had to be done.

Well, the shape of the bodywork of this car critically depends on where the people sit: it's very close form-fitting. So, perhaps unsurprisingly the first priority isn't "Where Does The Steering Wheel Go", it's "Where do the seats go". As there is a third seat directly 8-10 inches behind the front ones, that means that there has to be a gap for legs, between the two front seats. Also, there has to be room somewhere for the handbrake! At this point, and also given the weight of the seat rails (and the supports on the bodywork for them) a decision was made to have only one front seat, spanning the width of the passenger compartment, with holes for all the bits that go through it, like legs, handbrakes, seat-belts etc. This being the prototype, there are a reduced number of people likely to fight over how far the seat goes forwards or backwards, to accommodate two pairs of legs.

Hmm, it turns out that there's a bar down the middle, which, ahh whoops, is used to ratchet the other seat side forwards/backwards.

It really shouldn't be this hard to make one seat out of two. Cut bits of metal, weld them back together, including that seat ratchet bar at the right length, and reinstall the cables for allowing the seat to drop forward from the lever at the side, and... ahh, yeah maybe it's a bit more complicated than it first seems, eh?

and now for something random: Lilyana eating beans with painted hands!