Sunday 18 April 2010

Boot Seal, Door Seal, FRONT SEAT!!

Another Sunday, another day working on Booger Mobile!! After the obligatory coffee, Damian and Scottie headed to the shed... today's goals were to get started on the door seals and to trial fit (and work out bolt placements etc) for the front seat!!

First cab off the rank was the boot lid... the seal attaches to the actual boot lid (rather than to the car as it does on a lot of vehicles), so the lid was carefully removed and laid on a blanket ready for action!! (Regular blog readers may recognise Damian's childhood blanket under the boot lid!)


But where's the boot lid seal? Scottie, have you seen it? OI... Stop skipping with the boot lid seal, Damian needs it!!




Just in case you don't know where a boot lid goes, this is where it came from!! (The trunk, for American blog followers!!)


Scottie had an attempt at installing the boot lid seal by throwing it at the boot lid... it had limited success!!


Scottie left Damian to sort out the boot lid seal, and moved on to investigating the bench bucket seat that was going to grace the front of Booger Mobile. First step - find new bolts to replace the ones that were cut off removing the seat at the wrecking yard!



Damian commenced gluing the boot lid seal down with special rubber glue... Coat both surfaces, then wait until they are almost dry...



While waiting for the surfaces to dry, Damian and Scottie put the seat into the front of Booger Mobile... The boys like the laid back look - not sure it will pass roadworthy though!!



Meanwhile, the glue had dried, so Damian commenced sticking it down... one painstaking part at a time... that glue really lived up to the name "contact adhesive"... One slip and the seal was permanently stuck where it landed!!



Turned out alright in the end though!! Just needed to be fit back onto the car!



Meanwhile, Scottie had moved on to drilling through the floor of Booger Mobile - the new seat has bolts that are slightly closer together than the original XM bolt holes, so the boys took the opportunity to move the seat slightly rearward to give better leg room in the front, plus to move past some of the under-car obstacles that would prevent drilling in other locations!!


Speaking on under-car obstacles... this one annoyed Scottie a little by pushing the drill off course - so Scottie had his revenge!! BWAHAHAHAHAHA...

After quite a long time stuffing around with the boot lid trying to get it to line up correctly (almost an hour in total), the boys were happy with the positioning. Damian decided that shoving Scottie in the boot with a torch was the best way to check the seal!!


For a giggle, one of the times that Damian was closing the boot, he threw the keys in to Scottie... "Here, hold these" SLAM!! Damian found this highly amusing... Scottie meanwhile was asking for the boot to be opened, jiggling the keys in hope and desperation...



And here's the completed seal, with the boot lid installed and adjusted, and as you can see, Damian did, eventually, let Scottie out of the boot!! (Either that or he put these photos out of order to cover his tracks!!)



And a little bit of black foam tape to really make a nice dust seal!! (Later in the day, the boys decided this will be replaced with some soft pinch weld in the near future!)



The front seat was test-bolted in, and chocked up at the back to get the right height...



The boys really like the fold-down centre seat that forms an armrest!!


The front seat sits up on a little plastic mount on the front (so that the sliding backwards/forwards mechanism doesn't hit the ground), however in the XM, the rear mounts end up on a sloped section of floor, so Scottie had to fashion some kind of angled mount...

Damian suggested using some spare polyurethane suspension bushes and cutting them to size...


While Scottie worked on the seat mounts, Damian commenced the first door seal - the passenger side rear door! Damian thought the boot lid seal was painful - it was NOTHING compared to the door seal!!!


Scottie wasn't happy with the angle of the hand cut polyurethane block, so out came the trusty angle grinder, which turned the polyurethane into stringy, blue fairy floss (cotton candy for the Americans!).


And this is the finished product... one down, one to go!!


Dispensing with formality, Scottie took to the second one directly with the angle grinder... The results speak for themselves!!



Damian continued gluing the door seal on...



Shortly after this photo was taken, Kane from Kerbside Car Sound (and his lovely partner Liz) stopped by to check out Booger Mobile, and take some measurements and notes for the stereo that he is providing to Team Booger Mobile... this will naturally have a blog post all of its own when it happens, but in the mean time, a big thank you goes out from Team Booger Mobile to Kane for his generosity!

Needless to say, by the end of the day the boys were happy with their progress, Damian had a new found appreciation for glue (having accidentally dropped a bit on the back of his leg, which he removed in the shower, along with his leg hairs!), and Scottie had a new found appreciation of Damian's ability to glue bits of rubber to random shaped objects!!

With the front seat almost ready to be installed, Booger Mobile is really starting to look like a car again (rather than just an empty shell). The esCarpade is now less than 6 months away... Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh!!

2 comments:

  1. It's not a competition to post the first blog comment!!

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  2. SUNDAY SUNDAY BOOGER SUNDAY
    Must always start with the "MUST HAVE" cup of coffee to get a good start too the busy day ahead. With all the tasks to do on the Booger Mobile today.
    The Booger Mobile is no ordinary vehicle,Booger is special, so it to be expected for something like the boot seal to be attached in a somewhat different fashion.The boot lid does look nice and safe from any harm safely on Damian lovely blanket.
    Ha ha what a sight to behold Scottie skipping with the boot seal, bare footed on Damian s shed floor.Lucky he didn t end up on one of the bolts on the floor that would have really hurt.
    "Hey" watch out Damian there a big black snake on the boot lid,"phew" it only the boot lid seal that Scottie had sent flying in his attempt to install it,with no success.Think it best left for Damian to do.For Scottie has bigger and better thing to get on with ,like installing the bench bucket seat, a big improvement on the tyres rims used for the test drives around Damian' s pond.
    Great pictures as always (21 in all wow)telling the story of a day in the life of the Booger Mobile.Really love the one of Scottie peeking out of the boot,reminds me of the time of sneaking into the drive in movies with some of us hiding in the boot.
    The Booger Mobile is well and truly on the way to being completed for the Camp Quality 2010 esCarpade, which is only just around the corner.
    Everything is looking fantastic guys.Another sunday working on the BM has come to an end with great success all around, Scottie and Damian end their day with big smiles on their faces as they both did great work on the Booger Mobile today.
    Well done, thank you Damian and Scottie a task well worth doing.

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