Here’s the floor tray, all nicely bonded in.

Here’s the floor-tray all nicely bonded in. You can see on the right of the picture how the floor-tray now replaces the cross-member I removed. I put several extra layers in there as well to pass even more force forward (than the 6 layers of 300gsm that’s already in there).

There’s also extra reinforcement, like a lardy-blokes truss, to take engine mounts if I decide to do that.

So Mark – tell us how you did it

Here’s the part as it came out of the mould – all sharp edges and over-sized. Next job was to put it on the car – mark it up and trim it. That’s the boring bit and I don’t have any photos to document.

This is the chassis before the part is bonded to it. It had been blasted before powder coating, and I used the right high-temp non residue leaving breaker-tape to mask off the mating areas. The blasting heaves a fantastic key. I was worried originally that the tape wouldn’t make a brilliant barrier to rust after coating but it’s worked out fine. The reason being, the coating forms a seal against the tape so there’s nothing to get in – no air or moisture so no rust.

I marked the part up after clamping it down, and drilled for rivets. The rivets were just soft-ally headed ones to provide clamping force rather than to be anything structural.

Here I am as Clampy-McClamp-Face. I had every surface clamped before I drilled rivet-holes. If you drill-rivet as you go along the part, it starts to creep and your holes don’t line up. Clamping the entire thing before drilling keeps the accuracy.

Here’s a close-up of the rivet holes – I’m pretty pleased with how accurately the holes line up. Structurally it’s not really important, but attention to detail matters.

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One post-trimming, bonded, riveted part in place. I used an epoxy two-part adhesive. It’s the slightly flexible stuff for parts under a lot of vibration.

Once the adhesive set (24 hours for full cure at 20C) it feels rock-solid.