High Stop Light

Great fun to drill and tap the holes. By the end of it you become paranoid that the light is the only thing that's level, and everything else is slanted. Become one with the spirit (level).

The only bright tip I have is that when routing the wiring through the roll bar, I grabbed an string off my trusty electric guitar to use as a mouse. It was flexible enough to pass through the curves, yet stiff enough to be pushed through in one go. Needless to say this brainwave occured after I'd spent an hour trying to drop weighted lines through. Ho hum......

Interior, Roll Cage and seatbelts

Not terribly exciting - however I do have a few tips to make things go smoother. Apologies to those with proper skills - these are aimed at novices like ourselves!



1) When gluing the carpet, you cannot have enough ventilation. We had both ends of the garage open, and I was wearing a mask with gas filter filtted, but I could only stay in the footwell for a few seconds at a time without being overcome by the fumes. It was very unpleasant, especially when you stand upright afterwards. Make sure someone knows you're in there!

2) The seats require holes to be drilled for mounting - take your time and allow space for the seatbelt stalks. Our engineer also required the headrests to be strengthened. A change in the ADR's means that they have to be higher, so we had them retrimmed and the mounting bars extended. This didn't bother me as in their original form, when positioned correctly for my head, they were only just inside the seat tubes - not much use if rear-ended by the 4x4 tanks round here! It also cost very little more than a scrap dealer was asking for second hand ute headrests.

3) There's a hole at the back of the recess for the seatbelt retractor mechanism to sit in. You can't get a socket through it, so I pushed an extension bar through and manouvered the required socket around the side of the mechanism. You can just about get it onto the bar to tighten the retaining bolt, but not to be tried when feeling tired and cranky.


4) On our chassis, the cross member that is attached to the top of the differential mount and that runs to the base of the roll bar mounting plate did not line up with the bolt hole for the roll bar. We found that you could use mole grips to clamp the boss against the lip of the roll bar mounting plate, thus allowing you to drop the bolt down easily. This can be done with the boot in place by removing a wheel and going through the wheelarch.You can just see the marks, despite having cloth wrapped the jaws. Where's the touch up paint?!

Exhaust System

Our exhaust was made for us at Meridian by Rob. We got an old muffler (from a truck I believe) and attached this to a catalytic converter supplied by Cateran. The cat has a californian spec mantel - presumably signed off by Arnie himself - and is euro 3 compliant. It's maybe overkill, but along with Pauls tuning skills, it contributed to us passing the IM240 first time. So there!

The flanges on the cat were angled as shown in the pictures, allowing the exhaust to pass neatly down the side of the car. Rob also welded on some bolts so a piece of rolled aluminium sheet could be attached as a heat shield. Finally, I lagged the collector with exhaust wrap so there are no exposed pipes which might upset Vic Roads come registration.