Okay, so it turns out I was doing
everything wrong on the stainless front. I bought bolts too long because I wasn't sure if I'd need the length, I didn't use any lubricant and I was impatient and tried to drive them with a drill. Three strikes and your out.
It has been raining the last week and the thought of laying in a muddy driveway fighting with hardware wasn't appealing. I finished up my photo work and the 1/2" solid rubber exercise mats I ordered showed up.
When four mats show up in a box truck with a lift gate on their own pallet, well, you know they're not light.
Determined to not repeat my mistake we cut bolts shorter with a hacksaw and then dressed the ends on the belt sander and the scotchbrite wheel.
I considered trying the spray adhesive suggestion but figured I'd try my standby anti-seize. I've had this container for 20 years at least and it's nice to know I'll be able to hand it down to my kids when they start a stainless project.
This mat is what MG recommended (
NW Rubber Stamina Exercise Mat)and it's the heavy solid rubber mats that you'd see in a weightlifting room. It's closed cell around a lead core. Okay, the lead core I'm not sure about but it seems like it. Each 4x6 matt weighs in at nearly 70lbs - it's a lot more than a sheet of plywood. I gathered up a bunch of measuring tools and my handy Festool track saw because I wanted the cuts to be perfect and not as wonky as the ones I did on the MLV underneath.
Let me save you some trouble - you can't cut rubber mats with a saw. It's just too soft and while, perhaps, a more coarse blade would have helped it was clear that this wasn't the way to cut this stuff. Saws create heat and rubber doesn't like heat.
This is how you cut this stuff. With a fresh blade in your utility knife. The key to cutting them is to use a straightedge and to make your
first pass with the knife lightly and solidly against your straightedge. Don't get cocky and try to go deep or fast because your
first cut is the path for the entire cut. Once you've run one pass with the straightedge you can pull it away and keep making light passes in the same cut.
It's helpful after the first pass to let your mat hang off the cutting table at the cut line so it's weight is trying to open the cut up. After this you just keep making light passes and the material just sort of opens up -
exactly like cutting whale blubber. What? You don't cut whale blubber? Okay, so my sister is a marine biologist and that may not be helpful to you but somewhere out there another van owning marine biologist is slapping his forehead saying, "Oh my god-
exactly!"
On to measuring!
I switch between metric and imperial units the way a NYC cabbie switches between gas and brake - with total disregard for your comfort. If I'm explaining a size I'll use feet, if I'm trying to measure something small I'll use millimeters. Especially if I'm going to need to add or subtract them. If I am working on the lathe or mill I may go back to tenths, hundreds and thou. Getting this mat in right required mm's...
...and a marine biologist familiar with cutting whale blubber. So let's just say this is an above average difficulty project. The 1/2" this mat sits just slightly below the tracks - like maybe 1mm or a 1/16th. I'm just messing with you - it's about 80 thou.
Pencil worked great for marking and the wheel wells taper in a 7° or so and the corners are about as round as my Starrett angle gauge. You use what's at hand.
And then I looked around for some weights that I could use to test the installation. All I could find was a set of 50lbs dumbbells.
I think that MG designed this set of floor plates as his first ones and the tracks are probably spaced for his interior builds. I think I'd like to have them centered to assuage my OCD as I was hoping I might be able to flip one of the seats to get it to face backwards so we could have a nice dinette situation. For now I need to make up a way to secure the seat tracks to a horizontal fixture piece that I can then put into the track. That's tomorrow. It has to be done tomorrow because my first race of the season is Sunday.
Gregor
