New front wing stays, old ones broke again
 

The front wing stays rusted and broke again, did a temporary fix a few months ago, but finally it’s time to make some new ones which will hopefully be more resilient to the elements.

Started with two 1 meter 10mm diameter solid rods
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A piece of bar to turn into the bracket that will hold the rod on to the front uprights with a U clamp (51mm u clamp)

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Bracket cut shown with U clamp.

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Test fitted to the uprights

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Used a clamp to hold the round bar to the bracket to get a it roughly lined up.

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Used a caliper to evenly space the round bar away from the alloy wheels

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Held in by hand for a better view of the bracket and round bar

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Tack welded the round bar to the bracket

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My temporary workshop setup – don’t recommend using a workmate for welding due to the risk of burning wood and fire. Use a metal welding table, which I don’t have in my garage. Grabbed the round bar quite far away from the weld so it was fine. Also used a TIG so no splatter.

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I’m still a total amature at welding but these are OK

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The main thing is that is holds together well. The angle grinder hides the bad.

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One of the most time consuming parts of the build was creating a jig so that all four final bends ended up very similar.

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It may only look like two bends, but there are hours of measuing, eyeing up and carefully deciding where the bends need to go.

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The rod lines up with the holes on the carbon wings.

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Now here’s one of those things that happens all too often on a project – the rods ended up 10mm too high on the first go. This is jig MK2 with the height adjusted. It did mean having to straighten out the rod and rebend it to the right position.

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Here’s a test fit of the front of the rod bent into place

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The jig is holding the back up.

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Left to right the mount positions are little way off on the back, so some creative bending and P clip positioning evens out the rod placement.

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The back bent into shape, again two bends took many hours to get to the right position.

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Here are the P clips that will mount the wings to the rod

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First test fit of the driver side, got some really nice new A4 grade cup washers, bolts and nuts from Westfield Fastners to finish it off.

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Test fit on the passenger side. The wing was too close to the tyre so this one needed a bit more fine tuning to get it right.

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A view from underneath with the wheel off.

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There is enough gap between the tyre and the carbon, looks quite close from this angle. If there are problems it is easy to tweak the bends to create more clearance.

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Before and after, the before is version 3 of the mounts which also failed eventually.

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Ahh shiny parts!

Good job , what form of heat did you use for the bends ?

Where you were 10mm off I think I would have cut and shut the straight section especially if you had TIG to hand :badgrin:

regards Paul

Thanks :) I used a yellow MAPP gas container with a blow tourch (it says that's is a replacment for MAPPon the label). The type you get in DIY stores for plumbing. Did the trick pretty well!

If my welding skills were better I'd have considered it, straightening out and rebending was easier for me to do! It added some extra time but most of it was adjusting the templte. The template has some globbed on ali welding on it - now that's something I've only tried one other time, but it was string enough to hold it together for a template. I've spent more time stainless welding as made up a new exhaust last year.

Good work Paul. Time consuming but very satisfying in the long run.

Liking the MCM stickers and wall covering by the way. Love their show as well as Skid Factory, Binky and recently Nathan’s Garage.

Hope they last as the fit and finish deserves that

Dave

Thanks Dave, yeah MCM is up there amoung my fav YT channels. I quite like bad obession motorsport too. Also Roadkill, Roadkill Garage and Hotrod Garage but those are now behind the motortrend paywall. The 3rd party content they've licensed for the UK has gotten a lot better recently, to start with it was mostly only their own content.