ERA vs Unique FIA

[DanEC]

Of course you have to dissassemble nearly all the assembly that ERA does in the first place but if your buying it unpainted you would probably be doing so anyway. After that bonding the body and chassis was really fairly simple. I have the impression that since ERA revised their body a few years ago, the process has become much simpler. There are sufficient alignment plates and screws installed by ERA that it would be almost impossible to not get it aligned right in the bonding process. I bought a 2-part epoxy and empty caulking tubes for a caulk gun. I mixed up the epoxy and loaded it in the tubes and applied it to the bond joints that way. The only place I was a little puzzled was at the rocker panels as the manual (from memory) says to bond it in one place and I think refers to sealing it in another. The rockers do rivet to the the frame tube installed for that purpose, and after that I used a caulk gun to run a heavy bead of epoxy in on top of the tube and down on the rivets to firm everything up. Then I kind of trowled/spread a marine adhesive/sealant into the crevis along the bottom side.

Far worse than the bonding is all the riveting. A pneumatic rivet gun will probably save one from carpal tunnel syndrome and one from Harbor Frieght will work fine. It takes a week of evenings to drill all the rivet holes also and many of them go into the frame metal so it's some pretty heavy drilling activity. The aluminum panels are punched for virtually all of the rivet holes so there is no mystery as to where to drill. Figure on going through a bunch of bits depending on the quality you buy. I applied marine sealant to all panels and joints and riveted panels in for probably a period of at least 3 weeks working week ends and a few evenings. I drilled out the rivet holes before painting but did 98% of the riveting after paint. There are a few rivets that go in at the time of bonding (nose, rocker panels, firewall).

Dan