A FISHY TAIL

For some while I had been scouring the internet for Brooklands style silencers with fish tail ends, I have found ideal, after market ones for Velocette motorcycles, but they are designed just to be fitted on one side of a bike. I found an ugly cast aluminium one, but eventually found these  stainless steel beauties from a kit "sports car" manufacturer who were happy to supply me. They came complete with reducers to fit my inch and a half pipes.

My piece of ali tubing came in handy again as I used a length to space the distance between the rear clamp and the side of the car. I used a length of M6 stud, a dome headed nut and a M6 riv-nut again backed by a drilled out penny washer. The result is that, in one go, the fishtail is clamped into the silencers and the whole lot rigidly fastened back to the car. Of course the drilled hole in the side of the car exactly matched where a small bulkhead is to be riveted, which necessitate a slot being cut into each of these bulkheads to accommodate the riv-nut, typical, never quite as straight forward as you think.

I need to polish up the spacer tube to look like stainless and I also feel that I would like to drill the customary holes on the outside of each fishtail, but I will mark the hole pattern onto paper first, stick it onto the fishtail and check out the appearance, before making a decision.

By the way, my little camera turned up, neatly stowed in the glove box.

Two other things, Arthur advised me that the bonnet is not as thin as I thought, it is 1.5mm thick and My Build Buddy Pete has pointed out sadly, that my beautiful bonnet catches are not MSVA compliant and I will have to change them to ones without the curled over finger hook. Ho Hum, lets hope the correct ones share the same fixing hole spacing.