A New Hope...
In my defence, I have done most of the work on the boot locking pins on my back, underneath the body shell.
Similarly, I just fitted the pins before trying to get the mounting bolts into the correct position below them.
However, as I now look at the pins, trying to work out why this approach didn't work, it is pretty obvious.
These are the top edge pins and they are clearly set at an inward angle towards each other.
Similarly, the bottom right pin points outwards instead of straight down.
Note:
The area to the left of the pin (as you look at it) is also a bit thin compared to the rest of the boot lid.
So my plan is to "square" all the locking pins up a bit by adding filler.
Although if I increase the thickness of the lid, I will need to file access slots in the corners so the pin will fit through.
So I roughly sanded the four pin locations, plus the area I want to "beef up" a bit & the tail of the passenger hump.
( As this is currently too sharp compared to the end of driver's side hump. )
For the bottom left pin, I needed to remove a small section of the lid.
As this pin needs to be dropped at the top and raised at the bottom.
After some fibreglass filler had been added, the lid looked like this.
I re-fitted the lid to the body shell and tried to use the big washer to set the filler in the right position.
This was not a very good idea as the filler stuck to the protective film on the washers and made a right mess of everything.
( I've already scraped off most of the filler by the time I took the photo.
)
So I had to smooth out the filler as best I could and clean up all the washers before the filler set.
Then I carried the boot lid through the house so I could leave it in the weak winter sunshine on the patio.
At least this is marginally warmer than the driveway which now stays in shadow all day.
When that had set enough, I roughly sanded it into shape.
It had quickly become clear that by trying hard not to "over do" the filler, I hadn't quite added enough in some places.
I also found the easiest way to fit the locking pins was to simply file a slot in both the top & bottom edges like so.
Then I relocated back to the patio to added some normal body filler.
If anything, I probably added a bit too much filler this time.
End of Part 1...