The aim for Wednesday was to sort out the Watt's link support in the boot. The first thing to do was to remove the spare wheel support. Thankfully, this is just twelve spot welds to drill out.
And that now gave room for me to start planning out how to actually fit the mount and what it should look like. I figured there were two main options: weld in a brace bar or sort a bolt in version. Weld in is stronger, but removes the ability to easily repair it in the future and it would be harder to fit. A bolt in version would be replaceable but possibly much harder to make. I went for bolt in in the end as it gave me the ability to mess it up and re-do it if need be.
The first thing to do was to cut a pair of plates to fit to both of the rear spring hangers. These would be the mounting points for the brace. Although the photo shows the bolts pointing down, the final version will have captive nuts on the plates to reduce the amount of metal sticking out into the wheel arch.
Then it was on with the cross bar and the mounting feet for the Watt's brackets that hang under the car. These needed to be a good close fit to the 1.5" brace tube, but also be wide enough to provide a wide mounting plate. This is what the final design looks like.
Four of these were then cut out in steel and drilled.
Using the existing mounting holes as a guide, these were then trial fitted to the shell before being tacked in place. The brace was then fully welded on the bench to ensure all four brackets were flat and straight.
Some of the mounting holes that I drilled before will need welding up and re-drilling now that I have a straight set of mounting points to aim for. But this won't take too long to do. The bit that did take quite a while, and even then I binned my last attempt, was to figure out a sensible way to join the cross brace to the spring hanger plate. What I was trying to do was to see if I could shape a short bit of the 1.5" tube to both meet the cross brace and still provide a good wide weld footprint on the plate.
After a good while of trying to get the two to meet I gave up. I just couldn't find a way make the shallow angle between the short tube and the plate work out. I think I will end up having to either use another short vertical section of tube to make the angle flat, which will look like the cups I have been using, or I will need to use two bits of maybe 1" tube to make a triangle between the plate, the end of the tube and the mounting feet. I have some 25mm x 3mm wall tube that would do well for this. I'm not sure which of the two options will be best. More thought will be required before I do either option.
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