Something that has come up repeatedly when working on Ermy or even on dismantling Car-Daver, has been the need for a 3rd arm, a spare person or even a spare person with a 3rd arm.
In all cases where we have come across this, what we have needed is to stop, rethink what we are doing and realise that we are being idiots.
The best example of this was probably aligning the engine head. Oddly none of the instructions made any real reference to the alignment pins that sit up from the block and align the gasket and the head. We have changed the gasket twice now and the first time it took 2 of us wrestling the head on trying to align it manually with no guides. It’s a small miracle it ever ran really, or lasted the 10 miles it did but in fairly sharp order it failed.
The second time, after much googling and knowing about the pins, it dropped on absolutely perfectly first time.
Similarly when refitting the roof, we followed the Hayens manual and dismantled everything fine. Reassembly is just a reverse of dismantling, according to the book.
Unless it was rebuilt the wrong way around last time. After an hour, a lot of force and as we were about to reach for a hammer, we finally googled it and discovered the bar was upside down. It went on such much easier after that.
Finally at the weekend, as we delved into the steering column removal, Jamie said he was about to cut the insulation between the cockpit and the engine bay to get to some bolts to remove the column. This seemed odd, as it went in without cuts. So we stopped again and read a different guide and worked out what we needed to do.
Basically the motto we have now is that if it seems overly complicated, involves a sudden and unexplained cutting, hammering or welding of something, we are probably doing it wrong. And it is much easier to stop, reset and rethink it than it is to hack something out that we might need later.
On an entirely unrelated note, there is a reason we are currently waiting on new wiring looms for the doors. It turns out we could have swapped the door looms over as opposed to trying to resolder every cable back to the connectors.