Removing flash lines
How to polish up Gel coat
What to trim
Chassis Rail
wheel arches - see below
inner wings
Inner panels
fitting around scuttle
When to paint?
Preparing for paint
Fixing to chassis
Caring for your body
Front Inner Wings
The front inner wings come as single pre shaped panels, they fit inside the front wings and prevent spray from water and dirt from the road entering into the engine bay. When fitted they restrict access to the front suspension, exhaust headers, wiring etc so may builders choose not to fit them until after the car is through SVA, on the road and been set up well. Another option is to modify the inner wings to allow them to be easily removable, this gives you the benefits without the draw backs. Below is some info on how to modify and fit removable inner wings but the principles are much the same if you don't want to make them removable.
The first thing to do is jack the car up, remove the wheel, remove the headlight and indicator and try and get the panel in. Chances are it will go in but be a very bad fit, this is fine, they are made oversize as this is obviously better than undersized.
The wings are fitted by fixing it along the large chassis rail at the bottom, to the top chassis rail above the top wishbone fixing point and by fibre-glassing it along the perimeter elsewhere.
When you've got it in the rough position, you can start trimming, this should be done in small stages. Offer the panel up, mark a bit to trim with a marker pen, trim it and offer it up again. If you try and trim it all on one go you're likely to cut too much off.
This is a trimmed passenger side inner wing:
Assuming you are planning to fibreglass the panel in, its not a big problem if the gaps are quite large as fibreglass can easily bridge a gap of 1"+. The picture below shows the fit around the headlamp hole, the gap is around 1" and the curved return was removed.
This is the required fit around the arch lip, remember that you need to leave sufficient area of the inside of the arch bodywork to allow the inner wing to be fibre glassed to it, a perfect fit up against the edge of the arch is not good.
Once trimmed and in place, you can either start fibre glassing and fixing the panel in (more details below on this), or if you are planning to make them removable, you can mark the area of the panel you want to remove. To do this you need to leave all the fixing points to the bodywork intact and just remove the middle of the panel. The area where the panel fixes to the chassis can be done with rivnuts to allow them to be bolted or unbolted easily.
Below shows the marking of the removable panel from the centre.
Once you have decided and marked the removable area of the panel, you need to cut it out….BUT….not fully.
As you can see above the trick is to cut out all but tiny little bits that hold the 2 pieces together.
Front Wheel arch clearance
One common problem is that the front wheels can scrape the bodywork when hard cornering, they tend to catch at the very bottom rear edge of the front arches. This is a significant problem as at the SVA test, they will drive the car on full lock to perform a self centring test, of course any fouling of the bodywork on the tyres is an instant failure. To resolve this is very simple, just round off the bottom edge into a nice curve, this actually looks better too. The red line below shows where to trim.
