Westfield carbon effect rear lights

[chunk]

Morning, help required please

is there an easy way to mark the position of the 4 mounting holes and should there be some form of rubber strip between the light housing and the bodywork  

thanks

chris

[Darren B]

Hi chunk.

I have the carbon effect rear lights on my V8.  I haven't fitted any rubber strip around the light housing on mine, I guess you could, but IMHO they look good flush with the body.  I seem to recall that I put tape around the edges of the light, marked the tape with the position of the holes and how far in the holes were from the mark on the tape.  I then taped the lights onto the car and transfered the markings to the tape on the car.  Measured in from the mark by the required amount and drilled there.

As usual with bodywork stuff, I remeasured it several times and triple checked it all before actually drilling anything.

Give me a PM if you want a better description of what I mean.

Darren

[Big R]

Hi Chris

In my experience this was a bit of a nightmare.  My carbon effect mouldings were not square and looked terrible when offered up to the body.  I made up some metal spacers which I put between the two faces to hold them square for marking out purposes.  I removed the spacers before final fitting.

I did put some vinyl strip between the mouldings and the fibreglass (supplied free upon request by Westfield).

Apart from that my method were similar to Darren's.  One thing I did notice was that the captive inserts were not at 90 degrees to the mouldings - which made initial threading of the bolts tricky -

Good luck and measure and mark out several times before lifting your drill.....

[davew]

Here's what i did.

Cover the wheel arch in masking tape in the area where the light will fit.  Carefully trim with a stanley knife / file the light housing until it sits correctly agaist the bodywork.  At this point you can draw a line around the light housing so you know the positioning it.  Now for the blue peter bit.  Take a cornflake packet or similar and trace around the mating face of the housing to create a template.  Cut this out and mark through with a small nail/screwdriver the holes in the mounting bracket.

Transfer the template to the wheel arch and hey presto you can mark on the positions of the mounting holes.

I trimmed mine off with rubber edging and it looks good.  The easest thing to stick the edging on with is superglue.

That's my method anyway.

[chunk]

thanks for the advice, it was all going well untill I found out that the self tapping screws provided for holding the lights in were to small,

   

so i found some 4ba screws and nuts, removed the light housing's and fixed the lights in place and then tried to refix the housings to the arches, that was at 3 o'clock and there still not fixed, the problem is you now cannot get your fingers inside to assist with mating the screws with the nut inserts.

so now my knees hurt, my back hurts, my fingers hurt and iv'e gone mad

[Mark Stanton]

In that case walk away - Count to 10 - drink Stella, read The News Of the World - and let your mind go numbingly blank.

Go back to it tomorrow - Everyone has these moments of knee ache and back ache - but whatever you do don't throw a spanner through your garage window        

Good Luck - it'll be worth it in the end        

[Barry Ashcroft]

Link to a bulid site for E M Engineering used this site for info for my build scroll down to new rear lights section.

Hope it helps

Barry

EM Engineering

[mb893]

Try my ... Build Diary about half way down December 2003...

[deano.1]

In that case walk away - Count to 10 - drink Stella, read The News Of the World - and let your mind go numbingly blank.

Go back to it tommorow and you may need to drink some more stella before it all comes clear    

[chunk]

Thanks for all the advice, the lights are finally fitted and I think they look pretty good.

the main problem was getting the 4 M5 screws to locate and pick up the threads until I picked up an idea from mb893 to run a tap down the captive nuts and use slightly longer screws, this made the final fitting of the lights a lot easier.

thanks

Chunk