Necessity is the mother of invention!
Today’s job was to finish off the Nearside of the car by fitting the side skirt.
The skirt is held on by some little ‘tangs’ that are welded onto the sills and held by a metal clip on the side skirt, that bite onto those ‘tangs’. My problem was, there were no ‘tangs’ on the new wings I fitted to the car, so I was scratching my head as to what I could do to fix that..?
I was thinking that I could perhaps stick the front of the side-skirt onto the car with some of that 3M moulding tape, but after looking at the skirt, there wasn’t enough “meat” there to stick it on… so what can I do???
After a LOT of head scratching, I thought I would give a riv-nut a try, so bought a set complete with the setting tool.
After some thorough measurement, I whipped the wing off, and drilled a hole in the bottom of the wing:

Then I installed the riv-nut in reverse into the wing, so the threaded portion was sticking out, towards the side skirt:

I was hoping that the riv-nut would be sticking out enough for the side skirt to bite onto it, but after it was compressed, it wasn’t long enough for the side skirt to reach…

Balls!!! What now…???
This is where I came up with a sterling idea.. what if…..???
Yes, I got an M5 Allen Cap Head bolt, and ground the head down on the face of a file held in my vice with my drill (aka Pikey Lathe) until the diameter was small enough to match the shank diameter of the riv-nut. When I got the right diameter, I screwed it into the riv-nut with a bit of thread lock to hold it.
CHUFFED AS F**K with myself for thinking of that!!
So the side skirt was then ready to fit, but then I remembered, I needed to add the rubber seal to the top edge, before I fitted it. After a bit of groping around, I dug out the collection of old seals I had.

After a bit of scrubbing, scraping, polishing and swearing, I found the best one to use for the Nearside and fitted it to the side skirt, then bobbed the skirt onto the car:
Absolutely delighted with the final result, everything fits nice and tight as Renault intended.
Even the little side-skirt end-cap (That covers the torsion bar) fits up nicely, with its black TORX fastening:
Thanks for having a read!
