Monday, 25 December 2023

FHC resto nr. 156; Rear parcel shelf & rear screen

It’s been a while since my last update on this car, about time to continue where I left! The rear of the interior to be precise. When I dismantled the car almost 10 years ago I found out the board material of the original three compartment parcel shelf was well beyond repair and only fit for the bin. So a GRP replacement was ordered and recovered.

Fast forward more than nine years and it is time for the final preparations of the parcel shelf: Drilling the various mounting holes. As you can only screw up that job just once, I ran a few extra measuring sessions for the various mounting points on the car’s body. Also fitted the hard foam support blocks I removed from the original shelf. One measuring session remaining, for the shelfs lower mounting edge. Mainly due to the way this part was fitted to the car, using drill screws. As a result of this the four holes for the lower edge are all over the place. So I will probably drill new large diameter holes in the body’s mounting brackets, and use spire nuts. This should give some room to manoeuvre.



And that’s where the weather intervened with long periods of strong winds and lots of rain during the short spells of spare time I have. Not ideal when the shed’s gate is the main supplier of light and the wind is blowing straight in. So I switched my attention the sound insulation pad (WKC 3340) that is fitted to the rear of the parcel shelf. Sadly somewhere in a previous life this was attacked by mice. So unfit to be re-used, but more than adequate to act as a template to create a new item. The original pad is shown at the top, the reproduced one below. For this I used 8 mm thick black high density EPDM rubber with a slightly profiled surface.


As you can see the mounting holes still need transferring as do the slits to negotiate the flanges on top of the rear inner wings. But that has to wait till I can go to the shed for at least a few hours. Hopefully somewhere in the coming two weeks!

Final job for this post was selecting the rear screens and mounting seal. Turned out the items that came from the car were in pretty good condition!




As you can see from the pictures above the rubber seal is in very good condition. It just needs a good clean before it can be fitted.

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