Rally Quattro Build Update: Grill Mounting & Alignment

Posted on May 13, 2021
We took a break from cardboard engineering and decided it was time to grill, or attach the grill. This concoction of aluminium slats has been on and off the car for a while but, until now has never really been fully integrated into the front of the car. Sadly, we’ve just been wedging in in there and taking pictures of it. Ultimately it needs to be attached to the upper intercooler support in such a way that the two components can be removed as one. It also needs to be black eventually and we are thinking of having it anodized. Any thoughts on that? Also, part of this project is to attach the intercooler to the intercooler support bar. That way it will, er, support it.

The first thing to do was make it fit. Right now, the top plate is just wedged between the intercooler and the upper support bar but it didn’t go in far enough and was the wrong height. It also wasn’t parallel with the bumper, didn’t line up with headlight bezels and didn’t seem level! And we thought this would be simple.







So, the first thing we did was remove some excess material from the back of the top plate.





And then clamped it to the upper support bar and asses what we had to play with. The bolt head will be to attach the intercooler later. Stop getting ahead of yourself.





With a little bit of measuring, we determined that the bumper was level but a little warped and that the right side (left in the pics) headlight bezel was a little inboard. Otherwise, it looked good. We could have riveted the bar to the grill at this point but are not sure if we want the bar to also be anodized black so clamps will suffice for now. So how to fix the uneven bumper? We’ll tell you next time. (unless we fail)