Gunk tortillas

Well,  the ice age returned this week - just too cold to be out in the garage in the evening,  even with my little heater doing its best. So had to wait for some daytime...

With the front wheel arches now lightly glued on,  time to improve that. I bought some light metal mesh:

Molded it to the right shape:

... And then smothered with gunk:

Used some very dodgy Heath-Robinson style methods of holding the mesh in place while it dries. Man,  that gunk is messy - you just have to vaguely touch a surface and it sticks - half the work is trying to keep it off places it's not supposed to be.

I've only managed to do one arch today,  so the other next time.

UPDATE: sadly, this was not sufficient, resulting in a front wing ejection event. See later posts for an improved method.

Continued with probably the most 'creative' (ie. no idea what I'm doing) task of the build - a steering column shroud.

I've bought the top half of a Fiesta shroud (couldn't find a Sierra one) for £3 and,  amazingly it fits my steering boss quite well. However,  that still leaves the bottom half to make from scratch and work out how to support the whole contraption.

This is vaguely what I have so far:

The black plastic is the piece I bought,  the bottom half is what I've made. The smaller U-shaped strip is intended to be a bracket - there are 4 holes on the side of the column where this will bolt in and my lower metal piece will bolt onto that.

The plastic piece is not quite long enough to cover the column,  so I've made a smaller flap which just slots in to the back of the plastic piece:

The whole thing will eventually be covered in vinyl,  so holes and gaps will be covered up.

I still need to find a decent way of fixing that plastic top half to the metal bottom piece but looking promising so far.