Rear Lights - Day One

And the prize for most over thought and thorough job goes to?  Perhaps a little overkill, nevertheless hopefully these extra steps will mean the end product is that little more special.

My new toy is an auto leveling laser rule from Toolstation.  I tried yesterday to get the level right for the rear lights and I could tell after a few minutes that "a stick of wood roughly at the right height" wasnt going to cut it!  After reading a few other blogs, the forum I found some really good information re light positions.  The IVA states that they must be a minimum height of 350mm, maximum 1500mm and a minimum distance of 100mm between fog light and light cluster (http://nw.rhocar.org/SVA%20lights.htm).  Pretty specific!   The first thing I did was to check that the car is actually sitting straight on the garage floor, turns out it is.  It did take a while for the suspension to settle:

I had already measured the required heigh so I knew roughly where I wanted each light to go, next I created a template for the rear of the lamps and transferred to cardboard punching the holes out:

Next I made a top mark on each wing to mark the top of the template:

The laser is wide enough to span accross the total lengh of the rear, this ensures the height is 100% correct.  Even though you can lock the laser and spin it on the X axis, this was is more accurate.

I then measured 120mm on a piece of paper and lined it up with the edge of the fog light and marked the appropriate line on the wing (30mm from edge):

Finally I used both X and Y beams (I can hear Dr Evil every time I write that!) and used the template to mark the holes:

And ready for drilling - not before I double check all the measurements after talking the process through with someone else to sanity check my logic....