January 2020
I recently ordered the optional brake ducts. These come with a simple template for inside the wheel arch. Cutting the side pods fills me with trepidation.
To assist with making the holes in the side pods I make a crude cardboard template for the outer hole - the templates that came with the ducts are only for the wheel arch hole.
Using the supplied template I mark out the wheel arch hole and use a Dremel with cutting disk to remove the bulk of the fibre glass.
I then use sanding wheels in a drill to cleanup the hole. Once the hole is cleaned up I layer some masking tape on the inside and offer up the duct and mark out on the tape
the outline of the other hole.
I use my home made template on the outside of the outer hole to mark out the area. With the marking on the inside masking tape I can then double check my hole position and size. I then use a hole saw in the drill to crudely chain drill the area.
The outer side pod cut out was also dressed with the sanding drums in a drill. To get a good fit for the ducts I also had to sand down the thickens of the fibre glass, along with a lot of fine tuning with a hand file, just sneaking up on the final fit.
The ducts still have flash lines on and the finish could be improved. I cut the flash lines off with a scalpel and Stanley blades, I then flat the black gel coat with wet and dry using progressively finer grades up to 2000 grit.
I then polish the gel coat with Farecla G3 finishing compound.
Here we can compare the finished duct on the left versus one with the flash lines still on.
Temporarily installed the duct looks pretty good. I will permanently install when I am ready to open a tube of the Wurth bonding sealant and complete a batch of bonding jobs.