Small step backwards and a slight hiatus

After cleaning up the inside of the chassis spine I was ready to plug weld the cover tabs in place.

First job was to coat the tabs with weld through primer on the side that faces the chassis spine in order to avoid corrosion at a later date.

Then the first tab was positioned and plug welded in place. Unfortunately this led to a rethink. Where I had pre-drilled the tabs for the Camloc fasteners, this made it very difficult to position the tabs, to the extent that the second tab I tried would have been completely out of alignment. The only thing to do was to start again and leave the drilling of the tabs until they were in position.

Having also seen the tabs in place I decided I didn't like the look of them either so took the opportunity to re-design them. Below, the new tabs are marked out.

Then rougly cut to shape. You can see that this time I opted to make pairs of tabs together. This should resolve any aligning issues.

Here they are trimmed to the final shape. I also chose to round off all the corners.

Masked up ready to prime the inside face.

The rear-most tab clamped in place and plug welding started. Unfortunately at this point I ran out of mig wire so all stop whilst I order up some more! Even at this stage though I much prefer the look of the new tabs so am kind of happy I had the earlier problem.