S1 Exige Conversion

The strip has begun, wheeled the car out the garage and got to work removing bolts and fixings ready to take the rear clam off. Shame I don’t have a double garage for that extra space.

Up on axel stands I took the floor and diffuser off, engine bay side finisher panels off (the bulkhead one stays), wheelarch liners off, clam to roof fixings out and unplug the lighting loom.

There were a few other elements to undo. The air intake came off the throttle body to allow it to slide back off the clam side scoop. I was able to slide the alternator cooling pipe off the RH side scoop without cutting anything, but I imagine this will come off later for access. I chose to leave the sheer panels on the clam so these were unbolted from the longerons, with the ECU backplate unbolted from the LH sheer. The pull chord for the boot latch was disconnected and that just left the final numberplate bolt to undo.

One area that held me up was one of the wheelarch to clam brackets. Both sides were pretty rusty but the LH came apart fine, the RH however was rock solid. The first attempt to undo the bolt twisted the bracket before rounding off the head on the clam end. The sill bolt I was able to get moving, but just ended up spinning in place. In the end I decided to cut the bracket in 2 as it was buggered anyway and deal with it later. I don’t think I’ll re-install these back again as they just get covered in too much crap and rust up. I’ll just put the bolts in the holes to keep aesthetics.

Clam slid off fine and has allowed me much better access to the bits I need to get at. I left the engine cover on the roof (which has the support struts bolted to the bulkhead finisher panel) on for now as the alignment was a pain so ideally I don’t want to touch this, depends how access is taking things off. If the engine needs pulling it’ll definitely have to come off.

Finally I needed to get the clam out the way, so I used the undersill holes to put screws into the ceiling joists and some rope and bubble wrap to protect the paint to tie up the heavier back end.

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