GD427 in action

GD427 in action

Saturday 16 May 2009

Cutting out for Headlights

Tackled cutting out the holes for the headlights today. I've been looking forward to this for a while, it's one of those jobs that once finished makes the bodyshell start to look like a car rather than a great big jelly mold.

There are various methods you could use to cut out the hole, kindly pre-marked by GD. One method is to scribe a circle 2mm smaller than the hole needs to be and using this line as a guide, drill 4mm holes all the way round. This means the outside edge of the drilled holes form the line which the hole needs to be cut back to. A diagram probably makes this easier to understand.

I used a set of dividers (?) to scribe the line and because GD had already marked the line of the hole to be cut using a similar method, the centre was already marked and I could use the same reference point. I wasn't overly confident about drilling every one of the holes exactly along this centre line because with the odd hole wandering off line, I could potentially make the hole too big. I gave it a bit of leeway and scribed the circle 4mm smaller.
Once I'd drilled holes all the way round I joined them up with my trusty Dremel, effectively leaving a jagged edged hole which was 2mm too small. Using a sanding drum in the end of an electric drill, I sanded the inside edge to smooth the jagged line and enlarge the hole to required size.

I also took the opportunity to drill out the holes for the front indicators. These were exactly 35mm and I'd previoulsy bought a 35mm hole saw so this was a very quick and straightforward exercise.

When it was all finished, I ran around the inside edges with some 600 grit wet 'n' dry to remove any loose strands of fibreglass and tidy things up a bit. The bits of blue masking and polythene are to protect the reference points left by GD for the overriders. I'm not sure whether I'm going to have these are not and until I do, I didn't want to lose the reference points which have been marked onto masking tape stuck onto the body shell. This area gets a little wet when sanding back the flashlines.
Picture from inside the wing.

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