The results of some Aluminum, a little skill, and hours of work.
The line lock, mounted to the firewall
My SX fuel pressure regulator – rivet-nutted to the firewall.
The new hood on the Talon
Over the last week or two Mark and I have been putting some work in on the Transmission tunnel on the Talon. While it would have been really easy to just place a box around the entire damn thing and call it done, we simply couldn’t do just that 😉 So, we made a transmission tunnel that anyone who’s ever played StarFox would appreciate:
So, there you have it. The transmission tunnel is now done 🙂 That’s a nice, refreshing accomplishment. All in all, I’d say we spent about 10 hours too long on making that. It’s okay, it looks damn cool.
In other car news: The Fuel pressure regulator has finally been mounted, too, along with the permanent mounting of the Line Lock / front brake line distribution block. This thing is actually really neat 🙂
The line lock is simply a Summit Racing line lock kit, with some adapters. I mounted it to the firewall of the Talon using some rivet-nuts. If you’ve never seen these things and you’ve fabricated stuff, you’ve been under a rock, my friend 😉 The rivet-nut is just that – it’s a nut that you stick in a hole, and then deform into place. The rivet-nut then stays in the hole, and provides a threaded hole for you to mount stuff to.
Because I wanted to use Stainless screws, I decided to use Zinc coated rivet-nuts. I contemplated aluminum rivet nuts, but I was concerned about corrosion. SS rivet-nuts are also available, but are ~5 times the price of the Zinc coated mild steel nuts, so I just got those instead. All in all, they are awesome. Go out and buy some. Right now. http://www.mcmaster.com 😉
I also mounted the FPR, as I said before. Back in the day, somewhere around 1998, I purchased this SX Fuel pressure regulator from Buschur. Sure, the anodizing is a little faded, but it does it’s job, and does it well. So, I’m going to use it. Therefore, it needs to be mounted to the car. Sure, back in the day it hung off the fuel rail (how it never leaked, I’ll never know) and vibrated all over the place. Today though? Sorry, I know this car is going to shake when it’s together, so I focused on making a [b]solid[/b] mount for the regulator. Here’s the end result:
I am very happy with how it turned out – you can see I even broke the top mount so that it’d fit around the brake lines, and that body seam on the firewall. That’s the way to do it 😉 So yeah, now that’s mounted.
Oh, and one last thing. In my last post I mentioned buying a hood off John Shepherd. Well, it’s fiberglass, and has the headlight covers integrated.