Engine Management Splicing Completed

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post, as I've been away trying to do myself in by strapping a couple of planks to my feet and chucking myself down a french Alp. However, we're back home now and I've been able to make a bit of progress on the car in the Christmas-New Year Lull.

Basically today I've just about finished splicing the engine management loom into the beastie. I think you'll agree it's looking a whole lot neater.

In no particular order I have

• Removed the existing starter solenoid and main fuseways (these are already on the car and not needed from the bike loom)


• Identified and spliced the switched and unswitched power supplies from the switchgear in the car to engine management loom.


• Identified the interlock cables (Pin 22) and tied these to permananetly to earth.


• Lenghtened and reorientated a few cables.


• Identified and removed all the wiring, relays and fuses in the bike loom that correspond to existing car systems such as lights, indicators etc.


• Fitted and spliced the alternator\rectifier circuits into the battery after the EFI switch.


• Identified and routed the engine kill circuits to the EFI cut off switch.


• Identified the Oil Pressure, Neutral, L & R indicators and main beam cables for the indicator lights in the clocks and got these ready ot be spliced into the car circuits.


• Removed the Fan power feed. The fan is controlled by the ecu via a relay as the ECU knows the coolant temp. As I already have a water pump\fan circuit in the racer I didn't want to power the fan from the ECU power supply (as it was in the original bike loom) so I looped my fan power supply over to the bike looms relay so that it can still be ECU controlled, but is actually powered by a seperate circuit.


• I looped the Fuel pump power supply from the bike loom relays via my seperate dashboard switch to ensure I meet the blue book requirements for a seperate switch.


• I spent at least 5 hours (on and off) staring at curcuit diagrams


• Fitted the high current circuit from the existing solenoid to the starter motor.


• Connected the clocks.

So after all that I was ready to to power it up and see if I had fried the ECU.

Ok! Kill switch on .... mmm no smell of burning. So ignition on and it runs the fuel pump for about 5 seconds and then it stops which is normal, plus the tacho does a full sweep to indicate that it is working properly too. Graeat Stuff!

Then I hit the start button, I think I can hear the injectors firing and the fuel pump runs continuously... so it looks like I've defeated the interlocks correctly. Huzzah!

I did have one problem. The CBR1000RR has a thing called a steering damper or HESD which is under ECU control. This I don't have and it's causing the ECU to display it's Malfunction Indicator light in the clocks and giving me a flash code of 51... "Steering Damper Open Circuit".

As the MIL light is bright red and also turned on by things like the low oil P switch I'd quite like to kill the damper based error so that I can see "real" engine based errors as they occur.

Now the ecu controls the damper using a two wire solenoid to open and close a restrictor valve (not unlike a normal ISCV in an ignition circuit I suspect) both cables connect to the ECU. According to the manual the damper test procedure is to measure the resistance of the solenoid. It should be between 6 & 8 ohms. so after a quick chat with my electron herder friends on CAM7 I cross connect the appropriate two wires with a 68 ohm resister and bingo the warning is gone. It seems that the diagnostic circuit is none to clever and anything other than an open circuit in roughly the right range will be fine.

Now when I short the low oil pressure line to earth the light comes on and I get the appropriate warnings, fab!

So now all that remains electrically is to

1. Identify and connect the tacho feed to the DL1


2. Ditto the coolant and oil temp feeds


3. Connect the throttle position sensor to the DL1


4. Connect the light circuits for indicators, main beam to the clocks so that the appropriate warning lights work.


5. Fit the new Palm pilot display for lap timing and temp displays


6. Bind everthing up and clip it into place.

After a day doing nothing but wiring I decided to do something mechanical and made up a little bracket to mount the clocks. I'd been pondering how to mount them for a while as they need to be a fairly long way from the plane of the old dashboard! In the end I decided to mount them on the steering column itself so that they rotate with the wheel, mainly because it was the simplest thing to do!

While playing with the clocks I also found that the CBR1000RR appears to have a configurable shift light. If you pwer them up holding the select button it seems you can set the rev limit\shift light point to be anywhere between 4500 and 12500 rpm... cool I wander what other tricks this thing has up it's sleeve.

Engine Build Up, Ready for Mounting

So it’s been a few days since my last update and in this time I’ve made significant progress in fitting the new engine. The mounts have been finalized, trimmed down and fully braced up with strengthening gussets. This may seem a bit of overkill, but experience has shown that the high frequency vibration from the bike engine can the welds. Lastly they were painted up. They are fairly sturdy and probably wildely over engineered, but they do hold the engine nicely rigid.

I've also completed the floor mounts, in the engine bay, and painted up the tubes. It is all nice and clean now waiting for the engine's installation

I’ve collected the new sumps internals from Nova. Here you can see it’s component parts including the sealing O ring, swinging arm and bearing and internal gauze debris filter.
So I bolted it together and got it already for fitting to the lump. As part of this process I drilled and tapped the sump to take an NPTF oil temperature sensor. Unfortunately I had to use a NPTF converter to step the oil pressure sensor out a bit, as it initially stuck to far into the sump and stop the swinging arm from rotating which would have been a bit of an own goal!

Lastly I drilled the sump plug so that I can lock wire it into place and fitted this to the sump. After which the engine was ready for fitting.

Another good piece of news was that I discovered that those nice Chaps at the Kit Car Workshop can cut down and customize my drive shafts to make them fit the new Diff. Although I will be facing a challenge of linking Fiesta inner CV joints to my existing Escort outers

nts

Engine Mounted, Engine Management Wiring Started

I felt I got a lot done this weekend. Firstly I got the engine mounted up and loosely fitted in place. I say “loosely” because none of the mounting bolts is yet fitted with a nut and tightened up. Nonetheless the engine feels rock solid in the chassis. Which is very pleasing.

So with the engine position finalized I could now start working on the major connections to it. First on this list was the gearshift.

The Gearshift on the CBR 1000 RR is on the same side of the engine as that on the Kwaka, but that is where the similarity between the two ends. Not only is the CRB shift lever at the top of the gearbox, but it also shifts in opposite directions to the Kwaka. The upshot of this is that I need to put a bell at the rear end of the gearshift connection rod, to change the direction of the shift action and ensure that I keep the current action of “pull the lever to shift up and push to shift down”. Nova have kindly supplied a neat little bell and so I spent a good couple of hours building and welding in this little tower to support its pivot point and a short extension bolt for the existing connection rod.

This worked really nicely and I ended up with a nice short throw on the shift lever at the front of the car. Currently it feels a bit stiff, but I was pulling it from outside the car with my arm at the wrong angle and it is likely to become more free moving when the engine has hot oil flowing around it’s insides.

With the engine and gear lever in place, I could now move onto the engine management and wiring. This is a major piece of work as reworking the engine management loom to fit the new orientation is always time consuming, but basically the process is to fit all the sensors and connect the loom to them. Then decide how the loom should run back to the car to reach the ignition switches, instruments, battery etc. Then you unwrap and dissemble the loom and move wires around to their new positions. Invariably there are wires that need to be shortened or lengthened to handle the new orientation. Then you rebind the loom. The process always involves staring at fuzzy wiring diagrams for a couple of hours and always remember to check twice before cutting out cables. It is also a prime opportunity to add any additional circuits that need to be run for such things as oil and water temperature sensing, tacho feed and anything else that you might want to feed to the data logger.

At this stage it is also time to identify the ignition interlocks cables. Interlocks usually eventually switch an ECU Pin to earth via the side stand, clutch and neutral gear indicator switches, usually via a diode cluster in the fusebox. They can all be defeated by identifying the ECU pin affected and permanently connecting it to earth. On the CBR1000RR the affected ECU Pin is pin22.

So before I could actually do all the wiring detailed above, I had to build up the top engine of the engine, including the TBs and airbox. So at the conclusion of the weekend I had achieved a lot ,I had an engine in the bay, with most of it’s induction system fitted, a "work in progress" engine management loom and a working gearshift. There is still much to do but for once this is good progress.

At the end of the day the wiring loom looked like this... Sorry about the crappy quality of the picture but it appears my camera didn't know quite where to focus... currently I know just how it feels ! It's a bit of a rat's nest of cable at the moment.

More Engine Mounts - 90% there now

Well a day spent in the garage has resulted in the engine mounts being almost completed. I've fabbed up the right hand mount. This one I decided to make in a single piece, without the necessity for a central bolt as it doesn't have the nearby waterpipe obstruction that hampered the left hand mount.


Here it is in it's 95 % complete form. I just need to trim off the excess material and fit a strenghthening gusset.


With the second mount in place, even with the bolts not tightened up the engine is pleasingly "solid" with no play or movement, careful measurement between the bulkhead and the markers for the centre point of the exhaust camshaft indicates that my fabrication is within 1mm on each side. Fab.


So now I could move onto making up the mounts for the gearbox. These will be located onto a chassis cross member. This I also had to cut out, trim down and move further forward in the chassis, in fact you can see the stubs of the old fitting that I still need to grind off the tube. These mounts are made from 1"x"2 rectangular section with some bracing tubes welded in. The plan is that these will be welded to the cross member, allowing sufficeint space for the diff mounting plates between them on both sides of the gearbox. Again I'll fit a strengthening web, as the diff is a faily hefty piece of kit and I want it very solidly mounted to the chassis.


Lastly I positioned the diff in its probable final position in the chassis. It all looks like it will line up nicely along the longitudinal axis so thankfully it looks like all my careful measuring may well have paid dividends. Once I've welded the lower mounts in place I'll be in a position to take a whole load of more measurements to finalise the rear shear plate for the chassis and the diff mounting plates that Graeme at Nova will make up for me.

So Now I need to weld these mounts in, then remove the engine and finish welding various bits that are just tacked in at the moment. Then I can clean up and paint the engine bay, and finish paint the mounting hardware. Once that is all done the engine can be permananently fitted.

One Side Done

Only time to spend an hour or so in the garage last night, but that was just about time enough to finish the engine mount for one side (well bodge up the first go and then finish the second one properly). It is finished all except for a small gusset to stabilise the joint, it is within a mm or so of my desired dimension so not a bad effort really in controlling heat distortion from welding.

Now for the other side, and then the floor mounts

Engine Mounts Started

Well after a night to contemplate my engine mounting choices I made a few decisions

1. The engine will be hard mounted... it is quite a long way from the perimeter of the chassis so I'm hoping it will be OK
2. I'm going to externally bridge across the two mounts on each end of the cylinder head to distribute the loads across them.
3. The front mounts will be triangulated to the existing mounting ears if possible. and the rear gearbox mounts will be fitted to the chassis floor members.
4. The upper gearbox mounts will be connected to the main diff hardware, and I'll stabilise the diff hardware by connecting it to the rear chassis rails, thus stabilising the rear gearbox mounts.
5. If possible I'd like to get the engine in and out easily... which means no inaccessible mountings like the cylinder head fittings on the ZX12r.

So having got it all worked out in my head, I then went into the garage, looked at the engine "in the flesh" and then spent a further 45 minutes umming and aaarhing as I reworked my ideas.

First job was to align the engine height. This was easily achieved as I simply sat it on some 2 inch box section that was positioned on the sheet of blockboad. This positions the sump about 1 inch above the main floor level, but it actually still sits in the airflow as the floor slopes upwards towards the rear. I did this deliberately to get the sump in the airflow as I think I'm going to need the additional oil cooling.

Next I was necessary to align the engine so that the output sprocket points along the longitudinal axis of the car. It took me a while to work out how to do this. But eventually I spotted that the center of each camshaft is marked on the casing. The cams will be definitely be perpendicular to the output shaft so measuring from the bulkhead chassis rails to the centre of the exhaust cam on each side of the engine and ensuring the measurements are identical should align the sprocket correctly

So I spent three or four hours today cutting welding, measuring, drilling and tapping bits of steel. By the end I had ended up with two pieces of the first mount as shown in the picture. The piece that is bolted to the block bridges the engine mounts. It has some standoff sleeves welded into each end to move the mounting away from the engine so that it can clear the water pipe union that you can see just below it. the middle boss is actually tapped M12x1.75 and has sufficient room at the rear for a jam nut to be fitted once the mounting bolt has been wound through it, that way it shouldn't come loose from the vibration. Incidentally this sleeve isn't threaded all the way through, the first 5mm or so is drilled to 12mm clearance to allow the bolt to get a start in the correct alignment. My experience with holes threaded right to the end is that they are a pain to get started, particularly if you trying to align heavy stuff like engines, but with a short section of clearance the job is much easier, having changed an engine in the paddock I'm hoping that little things like this will help a lot should I ever have to do it again. This was another reason for going for the single bolt connection on each side of the cylinder head.

The other section of tube connects to the existing mounting ears on the upper bulkhead chassis rail. The sleeve in the end is not threaded but is accurately drilled to a 12mm bore. Next I'll triangulate the end of this mount down to the mounting ears at visible on the lower chassis rail in the left of the picture. So I've made a start... just this side to finish... the other side to do and the gearbox mounts to get done. Then I can say the engine is mounted.

The threaded bushes and clearance sleeves are all made from 5/8th OD, 12 gauge wall steel tubing. One of the oddities of steel is that it is still mostly sold in imperial measurements. However it is important to buy tube that has smaller a bore than required and then drill it out to the bolt shank size. This will stop the bolts rattling in the tube and hold everything together nice and tightly. I'm using M12 bolts and 5/8th x 12g is a very handy size as its bore is about 10.2mm. This means that it can be perfectly tapped to M12x1.27 without the need to drill a pilot hole and it can of course be drilled out to 12mm for a nice snug sliding fit. Lastly it's OD is almost exactly 16mm which makes it easy to cut mounting holes in the box section tube using as stepped hole cutting bit.

The new engine is in ...well sort of

The CRB 1000RR is in the chassis, well when I say "in" I really mean "resting in" the chassis. It's not in any way connected to the chassis but it is within the perimiter of the chassis rails.


I started off the day by cutting out the main rear cross braces, it transpires that these tubes are actually only 18guage wall thickness, and can be cut quite easily using just a hack saw. Along with the brace went the last of the remaining diff hanging hardware and the old rear brake pipes which ran across it.

Next it was time to remove the drive shafts and my usual olympic standard ineptitude came to the fore. I'd just cut the brake pipes ... the easiest\only way to undo the highly torqued hubnuts is to have a willing assistant sit in the car with the brakes firmly on while I undo the nut with a socking great breaker bar! With the brake pipes cut that wasn't going to happen so I disaasembled the inner CV joint, and removed each of the rear corners from the car completely.

It not a major issue as the suspension bushes are badly worn and need replacing anyway... but it did slow me down a bit. With the drive shafts, suspension and brake pipes removed the engine bay was very empty, so I set about it with some more rags and thinners to get rid of the last vestiges of grease... It looks a whole lot cleaner now :-), Although my finger nails dont!


Next I cut out and replaced a useless bit of steel plate that had previously been welded into the chassis. I guess this was to allow a larger diff\chainwheel at some stage, but it is plainly useless as anything other than a spacer and its lack of rigidity probabaly contributed to the bad chassis cracks that occured in the joints at both end of that particular section last year. In fact the plate has a definate bend in it which cannot be a good thing! So I welded in an over long length of 16 guage 7/8th tube that slide nicely inside the existing rails with an inch or so of additional material inside the "parent" tube on each side of the joint


So I now the car was ready to lifted onto axle stands. However before I did this I marked all the engine bay tubes with a center line to help the alignment of the new engine installation (that's what the yellow tape is for).


Then using a couple of engine cranes I hoised it into the air and dropped it down onto some axle stands and a large sheet of 3\4 block board.




After that it was a simple matter to drop the engine into the bay and use the flat bottom of the alloy sump on the blockbard to sit it level in relation to the chassis rails. So there it, I' ve just got to decide how to mount the beastie now. If you look closely at it you can see a pair of bolts sticking out of the sides of the cylinder head close to where the lifting straps connect, there is two of these on either side of the cylinder bank. plus the four holes at the end of the gearbox casing (only two are visible in the pic)

I need to think pretty carefully about mounting frame. There are a number of factors to consider and in no paticular order these are.

• Engine alignment and centering in chassis
• Rigid mounting or mounting with metalastic bushes
• Output sprocket to diff input sprocket alignment
• Clearance at front of engine for exhausts
• Front\rear weight distribution which is affected by engine north\south positioning
• Access to clutch\gearbox\oilfilter\fuel & coolant covers & connections
• Suitable hard mounting points on the chassis
• Use the engine as a stressed member to help chasis triangulation or not?
• Height of engine\sump in relation to chassis rails
• Allignment of diff output with driveshafts.
• Access to gear linkage

Clearly a lot of quastions to answer, so to this end I've been canvassing a number of expert opinions.

Martin at the Kit Car Workshop always mounts engines using metalastic bushes, in case the chassis takes a biff. then the small amount of give in the bush can stop an engine mounting being broken off, plus it reducesn overall vibration. Martin also uses support frames that hold the engine from underneath, rather than an "hanging" from the mounting hardware

Ian Gray at Stuart Taylor Motorsport always hard mounts engines directly to the chassis (no bushes) but makes sure that he distributes the load by using all the oringinal engine mounts

Andy Bates of AB performance, likes to hard mount using an external frame or lattice that connects all the engine mounts together on each side of the unit. Thereby ensuring that the mounts can't move in relation to each other and "pinch" a bearing somewhere.

Tim Pell used to use bushes but now hard mounts engines.

Clearly there are lots of differnet answers to my many questions so I'm going to think about it for a bit using a bottle wine as lubricant.

nt

A dirty job

Today I spent a couple of hours cleaning down a generally getting the engine bay ready to have the new engine fitted. This involved large quantities of solvent and whole roll of workshop paper and much cr4p under my fingernails. However the engine bay is now pretty clean and non slimey to the touch. Which will make working in there much easier and should also improve the quality of the impending welding.

You can clearly see the scars of previous development work on this chassis, the triangulation tubes have plainly been moved around to accept different engines from time to time and the floor bracing has been modified to accept different diff\ chain wheel combinations plus there are no end of areas where brackets have been welded on and subsequently ground off when not needed. In fact one of the major tubular cross members has been removed and replaced with a plate which will clearly flex I'll be replacing this with a new tube in the hope of increasing chassis rigidity.





Incidentally the mounting ears you can see on the front chassis rails appear to be just wide enough apart that I could use them for the new side on mounts for the CBR, that could be handy.


Next job is to remove the driveshafts as these will also need changing to match the new diff, an then cut out the diagonal cruciform bracing at the far end of the chassis.



The configuration of the new diff is to have the chain wheel behind the drive shafts (in the picture the engine mounts to the left), so a chunk of the casing needs to stick our right where there is a chassis rail. My plan is to replace the tubular bracing with a shear plate not unlike the one in the pictures of the new chassis, and I've found a local company (Lasercut in Peterborough) who will make me a one off economically. So this weekend some careful measuring and a couple of hours with a CAD package should see that sorted.
Once the cross bracing is cut out I can start fitting the new engine + diff proper.

Stripping the CBR100RR

Well did I get the new engine fitted to the car? Did I 'eck as like. I spent most of the day
clearing out an entire seasons worth of junk from the garage including the remaing bits of my previously killed ZX12r which the bloke at the dump was somewhat surprised to see arriving in his skip. I also transferred my tools back into into their winter storage in the garage where they are much more accessible than the paddock toolboxes and generally getting ready for the fettling ahead.

However I did manage to make a little progress on getting the engine ready to fit to the chassis. first job was to remove the OEM sump and dry fit the new one, this was primarily to give the engine a nice flat bottom so that it will sit up nicely while I'm positioning it in the car, and it allows it to sit nicely on my work bench. So I undid the bolts and was presented with my first view of a CBRs internals. You can also see in this picture that the new sump will save about an inch ll on the engine's overall height.

Incidentally the CBR oil pump is clearly visible as the large hole in the center of the engine.

Next I set about identifying and mark the wiring and connectors on the engine, when it arrived it was pretty much as it came of the bike, and I find it is important to go around it, removing every part\connection individually and then label it appropriately. It's really important to know where the sensors are, how the wires should be routed and so on. It's all part of the important process of educating myself about this new engine.

So if you've never seen an undressed CRB1000 RR. I've added a few shots


These are simply incredibly compact units. Considering that that lump of Ali produces some 170 bhp, and includes the gearbox, it really is an incredible piece of engineering, with an all up weight of 65kg, actually I ought to sit it in the scales to check this.

When I'd finished stripping the ancilleries and unnecessary cables away it became apparent how incredibly clean this engine is, I was hard pushed to find any grot anywhere. No oil except where I'd spilled it, no discolouration and indeed none of that gritty road grime that normally coats any engine. It maybe that this lump has really done 1000 miles On this view you can clearly see the light alloy covers that cover the emission control air inlet sytem for the exhaust. This is going in a race car so I'll not be using these, so the covers and the reed valves they contain will be removed just as soon as I work out how I'm going to block the holes to the exhausts.

On the side views you can see the two moounting holes either side of the bank of cylinders. These are tapped m12x1.25 which is a standard metric fine thread.

Accepted RGB wisdom is to tap these out to m12*1.75 which is the standard metric coarse thread, and much more easily available. In fact some guys just drill them 12mm and put a nut on the other side. So I tapped them to the larger M12 thread and wound in some long M12 bolts and a short section of box tubing on each side to that I could use my engine crane to hoist the engine and keep it in the correct orientation. Up until know I had been lifting it using the gearbox mounts and the engine only wants to lie on its back

During the initial inspection I noticed a few things.

1. Mr Honda not only uses unique physical configuration connectors all over the wiring loom , but he helpfully colour codes them too, plus the colour codes are alse referenced in my workshop manual making identification a cinch the red one in the pic is crank angle sensor. Mr Kwak didn't make life so easy.
2. I can find no damage anywhere except for the merest scuff on the clutch cover.
3. The engine really is incredibly clean, and this was further borne out by a squint in the sump and into the thermostrat housing. My old Kwaka lump had deposits in the water system and it was a 5 thousand mile engine

So five things to do a a result of today.

1. Stick it on some scales
2. Remove the termostat, I replaced it after taking this shot as it's rubber edge acts as the mating seal for the thermo housing.
3. Do a gearbox strip of the "cassette gearbox", this is one of the major advantages of this engine, and it should allow a gearbox change in the paddock. I just don't want the first time I do it to be in the paddock.
4. Make some hoisting eyes for the side engine mounts for keeping in the paddock tool boxes
5. Remove and block the exhaust air system holes.

Then once the engine bay is cleaned up, I can start the process of fitting it to the car.

Nova Diff and CBR1000 Billet Sump

I've collected my loan differential and swinging sump from Nova engineering so I thought I'd post a couple of pictures. The differential has been a bit of a TV star before when it was used on in the Discovery series "Kit Car Crisis" where a guy was building a car to come and race ion RGB.

Unfortunately the series didn't show Kit car building in a very good light and mainly served to highlight some of the pitfalls that can befall an inexperienced car builder who is badlya advised . Me, I doubt I could go racing without the vast store of knowledge and experience that my mates in Cam7 and the RGB racing fraternity happily share with me.

However none of that is relevant to the Diff.

The main reasons for changing over from the existing diff are

The new diff offers an engine driven reverse. This removes an area of constant irritation because every time you adjust the gear ratios on my existing diff (by changing the drive sprockets) you have to move the diff to retension the chain and then you have to spend a good 30 minutes readjusting the electric reverse system. This discourages me from making changes in the paddock as I know it just takes ages and I'm usually stuck for time. Plus I've been known to forget and an inoperable reverse is a common reason for RGB cars to get excluded (disqualified). Plus after a couple of seasons racing one of the key lessions I've learned is to keep it simple stupid! Any thing that requires unnecessary precise adjustment, or simply adds to your workload in the paddock is bad. You're there to race!.. Everything else is a distraction and the more of those mechanical distractions you can remove the better.

1. The engine driven reverse actually has a chance of moving me backwards... unlike the current electric system.
2. The current electric system which also has an alarming habit of blowing batteries by over discharging them (I've already damaged 3 like this). This means that I can probably lose some weight by going for a smaller battery too.
3. The drive ratios are very easily changed by simply removing the blue aluminium mounting ring and bolting on a new driven sprocket (which also hides a cush drive to help reduce driveline shunt). In fact by changing both the front and rear sprockets you can get a very fine range of diff ratio adjustments although I think this would more faffing around than it's worth. Currently I can't change the driven sprocket as it is encased in enough steel to make the Forth road bridge extension so I can only change the front sprocket which is a bit of a pain and also only give quite coarse adjustment, plus my current diff's chainwheel needs replacing and some of the mounting bolts have a habit of coming lose.
4. It runs entirely enclosed so hopefully won't spray grease all over the engine bay like my current setup.
5. It weighs a bit less than my current setup (about 3 Kg), so I get these advanteges for no weight penalty. Although as it's a prototype unit no doubt at some stage I will pay a penalty of some sort as we hit teeting troubles. However Graham at Nova will hapily machine up some bespoke mounting brackets for me so quid pro quo. Grahams long term plan is to be able to use it as a stressed member, and hopefully over time we can reduce the weight even further.

While at Nova I also collected the billet sump pan, at this stage it is without the oil pickup so I can only dry assemble the engine, but that's ok as my current primary requirement for the sump is that it has a flat bottom. This is because tomorrow after a hefty bit of garage tidying I intend to start fitting the engine and the new diff. And having an engine that will simply sit flat on its bottom while I line it up and make the engine mounting frame around it will be a great advantage. The standard sump is pyramidal and the engine wants to do nothing but fall over at the moment.

The sump is very nicely machined from a large chunk of billet, but again it is a prototype unit.

After handling it, and looking at it for a few minutes two or three potential enhancements come to mind.

1. It needs a small drilling so that you can lockwire the sump plug in place
2. It need a fitting for an oil temp sender
3. it needs an extra mounting eye in the appropriate place so that the oil filter can be lock tied to it. Oil filters tend to unscrew themselves on bike engines if not held in place with a suitable jubilee clip or tie wrap and I know at least one engine that has been blown like this.
4. It could do with some cooling fins machining into the surfaces.

Hoiking out the ZX12- R + Chassis Weights

I've spent the day stripping and weighing the car I wanted some solid metrics against which I can measure the changes I plan to make to the car this winter.

Remember, I'm taking the slightly odd decision to have less power in my racer, as this will allow me to step down a class, and hopefully lose a lot of weight from the car which in turn will make me more competative in Class B.

So having borrowed Steve's corner weight scales I set about taking a bunch of measurements to get a solid idea of weights of each major component. What followed was quite enlightening, well it certainly explains why the marshalls grunt a bit when pushing me around the paddock.

Firstly I weighed the car as it came back from the Birkett, fully fuelled and full of oil and coolant without driver

It weighed 555.4Kg, Gosh that's quite a lot given that Tim's Fury is 470KG in the same condition and our class weightlimits are 560 and 530Kgs respectively, although that is normally at the end of the race when we are not carrying much fuel. Still it's pretty lardy!

Secondly I weighed the car with the driver in it. And ... well you don't really want to know! But I think there's a couple of bags of spuds hidden in the car somewhere or a fragment of neutron star! Let just say that I can easily miss the weight limit by 100KG it's the rowing machine for me this winter I think.

Next I drained all the fluids, oil, water and the 25+ litres of fuel, the weight without the driver but dry with all fluids drained was 531.2Kg. So that is some 24Kg of fluids most of which was fuel. But there is probably 8 KG of oil and water in the car.

Next I removed the ZX12R, and the engine lump complete with the exhuast headers and dry sump pump, it comes in at 90Kg. Given that it puts out over 180bhp that's 2BHP per kilo, a quite impressive power to weight ratio.

With the ZX12R, diff, exhuast and Drysump tank removed the car weighs 378.4KG, so the engine, diff and lub system and mounting hardware weighs 152Kgs.

Which actually gives me a bit of of hope, as the cbr1000rr is reputed to be about 65kg, add the diff at 27kg and say 10KG for exhaust and mounting hardware and I could be looking at a saving of around 50KG on the dryweight on the car + whatever I can off load from the lard arse in the drivers seat. That's got to be a reasonable goal for the winter, to offset the slight drop in power that the new engine will have.

Incidentally the Diff weighs in at 26.8 Kg without the CV joint cups, the Nova diff I'll be using weighs about 27 dead including the cups so allowing for the mounting hardware there is probably a couple of kilos to be saved by making the effort to get it into this chassis. I wasn't going to do this as it generates a bunch of other issues, like a different handbrake assembly and changing the driveshafts so on. But with a small weight saving to be made it must be a good idea. Also after a day dissassembling the engine bay the one thing I can accurately say is that is is absolutely full of lithium CV\Diff grease. It is absolutely everywhere and yucky as hell.

Swapping to the Nova diff is worth it just to keep the engine bay clean, but the other advantages of engine driven reverse, weight saving and so on make it a no brainer.

Such Fun at The Birkett

Team Genesis came 8th on the road in the Birkett!

There are a bunch of Photos at Isadora Poggis' site which far better explain the concept of the Birkett than any prose I can write here. It is a unique event in uk motoracing and if you ever get a chance to compete or watch it I heartily recommend that you go along. Just remember when you are looking at the pictures that all those teams were on the track at the same time and that we were all racing each other.

I'll certainly race in it again whenever I get a chance it was so much fun!

I'm 47D and a couple of specific pictures of me are at these links.
http://www.isadorapoggi.co.uk/2006/750/birkett/061028_184.htm
http://www.isadorapoggi.co.uk/2006/750/birkett/061028_234.htm


In short I had a the most fun exhilerating, entertaining and educational days racing I have ever completed. It was an absolute hoot!

I Learnt more about race craft and overtaking in one afternoon than I had accumulated in three entire seasons racing.

We turned up the day before with the express intention of getting the car scrutineered when there wasn't much of a crowd. Good job we did too, a faulty memory cell on my part meant I forgot to put the extinguisher control box in the car and a faulty earth connection meant I had no brake lights. so for the first time ever I failed scrutineering. All told it only took 15 mins to sort out but I wouldn't have wanted to do it on the morning of the race when 200 other cars were trying to get through scrutineering as well. On Friday afternoon it was quiet and we got our ticket to ride nice and quckly at the second visit.

The only other thing of note on Friday was the fact that the race van got us to the circuit with no problems whatsoever. The recent investements in new starter motor, alternator and switched to control the fridge are finally paying dividends.

Saturday

In the qualifying session I went out early and did 10 laps or so. It has been a couple of months since I raced and I wanted to get used to the relativly high speed differentials between the cars and evaluate the recent addition of the Gurney Strip to the back of the car. I'm happy to report it has made a big difference, the back end is now much less lively, in fact it is pretty planted to the track and when she does start to spin it is not an unrecoverable Snap SPin, more a gentle slide out of the backend which is nicely controllable on the throttle. All of this new stability was now reflected in very much improved grip. Previously I had been lifting slightly through the Woodcote kink in the main straight as the imbalance between front and rear end grip at this point made the car unstable and it felt like it was going to let go. With the new gurney flap it's just so planted and I can now hammer down the straight flat out all the way along. And of course improved stability and confidence meant faster times and I could do 1:11s without really trying very hard.

Remember I was also trying to learn how to overtake a Porche Carrera who was braking some 100m before I needed too, while trying to avoid a 2CV at the corner's apex which was plainly doing what seemed to be 35mph. Eventually I got brave enough to show the slower cars in fro ont my nose on the inside lines as we approached the corner so that they would know I was there. Then stuff it up the inside under braking and use the new found stability and grip to get round the bend.

The other guys in the Team, Tim Pell, Doug Carter and Steve Robinson all had pretty sucessful qualifying sessions, however Steve came in trailing oil from a failed union which caused us some concern.


The Race
Timp went out first and we started from a position of 10th on the Grid. Once underway it became pretty obvious that the pace had picked up substantially from practice. Tim moved up to 4th place and was plainly driving the wheels off his car fighting with the big block cobra in front and lapping in the 1:03s which was pretty something considering the mixed traffic they encountereed as they started to lap the rest of the field at about lap 4 or 5. Tim went on to set the fastest time of the day at 1:02:xx a top effort.

Tim came in and Doug went out and continued in much the same vein. Then it was Steve's turn, and as I was due out after Steve it was my job to be in the car, ready, helmeted and strapped in. Rady to go at a moment's notice in case he had a problem. A position some call "the hare" but I prefer the term "ready 5".

Unfortunately we lost Steve Robinson's car early in his session due to a thrown rod and blown engine, so I went out immediately and started mixing it with the different cars on the track. In this session I did 1:11s and 12s and came in some 25 laps later comepletely exhilerated I had been a bit trepidatious at the increased speed and the difficulty of negiotiating traffic. But I had such fun! Hammering along the back straight trying to find a way past three or four tin tops, all fighting amongst themselves for position and swapping lines across the track was really something. Of course it was easier now my car is a bit more planted and amongst the fastest out there but even so it was a hoot. I got overtaken by a few of the faster cars but generally I felt I had performed to my handicap marker lap.

The driving standards were exceptional, civilised & gentlemanly infact. By the end of the day I took to showing the cars in front my nose in their mirrors so that they knew I was chasing up the inside on the run in to Brooklands I had no one turn in on me all day,Ok some only gave a cars width plus an inch but that was all I now needed.

I went around Luffield up the inside of a Stock hatch and I felt I could have reached out and adjusted his wing mirror if he had needed me too. I touched Nobody all day. Top top fun.

With one car out and only three running the rest of the day was very busy with less than 30 mins between getting out of the car after your session and getting back in to be ready 5 for the next guy

I calculate I did 87 laps, 75+ of which were under race conditions, and I was mixing it with such different machinery everything from Toyata MR2s to classic Jag e types. And I got progressively much faster and more agressive during the day, and as a result I got overtaken less and less.

The Highlights were

• Outbraking a Westie and a tin top on the inside line at high speed into Copse , Holding it on the tighter line and then making it stick on the run up to MAggots.
• Outbraking loads of cars all day in the run in to Brooklands\Luffied.
• Stuffing it up the inside of a tin top a Luffied.
• Driving around the outside of Judy at Becketts.
• A couple of four or five lap battles with big engined Morgans and an Original Whale tail Jag.

The car was glued to the track all day, the Gurney flap has really helped it's stability and I was driving the wheels of it by the end... not wanting my sessions to end.

Now I can just play around with it at the limit... a bit more throttle here for controllable back end slide or to turn the nose in, bit less throttle there to get it to tuck in. I'd heard guys talk about playing about on the limit before but I've never been able to do. I guess parallel development of b oth car and driver is the key.:-)

It was such fun and my confidence grew hugely throughout the day.
This was refelcted in my laptimes... 1:11s in fist sessions, 1:9s in the second.
Best in my 3rd sessions was 1:06.87 ONE OH SIXES! Whooo Hooo! That is 3 seconds better than my previous best.

That would put me 10th ot 11th on the last RGB grid at Sillystone a move forward of 15 places from my last position. Bejezzus and that was on old rubber too!

Today I feel I really came of age as a driver, helped in no short part by a solid stable predictable platform to drive. Hopefully higher speeds and mixed traffic will no longer phase me.

We finished 8th of 51 teams on the road which is a fine effort, but the handicap system hurt us as did the loss of one of our faster drivers so we finished 5th in class. but it was none the less a top top day.

I've been wearing a very big grin for two days as a result

New Chassis Pics

I've scanned in a couple of pics of the new chassis. They are fairly poor quality I'm afraid as the paper copies roamed around in my trouser pockets for a while. However you can clearly see the construction method for the new chassis.

Final Preparation for the Birkett

Today I did my pre race checks for next weekends 6 hour relay race at Silverstone. For those of you not familiar with the Holly Birkett relay it is basically a 6 hour endurance race for teams of 4 or more drivers. It runs just like the the Le MAn race in that it starts at 11am finishes at 5pm exactly and whoever does the most laps wins!

Unlike Le Man though it is open to any sort of closed wheel cars, RGB cars, Jag XK120s, Caterhams and everything in between even the little reliant powered Formula 750 cars. With such a wide range of hardware they can't all be in one class and the race is handicapped.

Basically the team of fastest cars are the scratch team, in that they get no gredit laps. All other teams get a certain number of credit laps. The credited amount equals the difference in no of laps they will do and the number the scratch team will do on the six hour period. So if you do more than your assessed handicap amount you can win the overall handicap trophy even if you don't win on the road.

All very complicated but should be great fun... if a little busy with up to 50 cars on the track at once. I'm racing with Tim Pell, Steve Robinson and Doug Carter in a Team which will bring all 4 of the racing Genesii together in a single team and expect to do a couple of 30 minute sessions in the 6 hours.

The other guys think we might actually win (not normally a word in my racing vocabulary) as there are only one or two other teams with faster average lap times than the RGB cars. However as the slowest member of the team if this looks like becomeing a reality I'll happily let the faster boys drive extra laps

So today I did my normal pre race checks, on things like fuel, water, oil systems, suspension and so on. It usually takes all day to do this and today was no differerent. Infact I was slowed down a bit by the need to change a worn suspension bush on the right rear wishbone. Anther issue is that my front right tyre is pretty worn, (this one takes all the load on our clockwise mostly right hand turn circuits). I'm not going to buy new rubber at this end of the season (it degrades over the winter) so I swapped it with the front left. This reverses the tread pattern, but the Yokohama website says that the tyres are reversable and I know several people in the paddock that run them this way around so it shouldnt be any sort of problem.

I've a couple of little jobs to do during the week and then I'm ready. These are fit a new rear view mirror and hoover it out.

I also went around the car and labelled everything up so that the Team Genesis pit crew who will probably be unfamilier with my car know the tyre pressures to set, correct coolant level and so on.

Lastly I finalised the installation of an oil pressure guage and voltmeter in the race van. So that I can watch these variables.

Details of the Birket are on the 750 Motor Club Website at www.750MC.co.uk, it a great day out and well worth the 14 quid entrance fee.

It is held next Saturday October 28th 2006 at Silverstone

Next Year's Engine Arrives

Today my nice shiny new CBR1000 RR engine turned up from Malc at Yorkshire engines. Very new looking it is too. It looks like an American spec engine as it seems to be fitted with the standard American emissions control systems.

Along with it also arrived the CBR 10000 clocks which contain a very nice sweep tacho, and I’l be finding a way to incorporate this into the racer instead of the Digidash.

The CBR engine has a couple of other interesting quirks, firstly it does not have a gear position switch. Now the Kwaka zx12r has a gear position switch to tell the ECU which gear the system is in, so that the fuel and ignition mapping can adjusted accordingly. Usually the ECUs do things like limit the pickup in first so that the rider doesn’t fall of the back of the bike, provide max torque in the mid gears and them apply a top speed limit in 6th. Some racers have benefited from telling the system that it is always in 5th so that max power is always available without an ECU imposed limiter.

The lack of gear position switch must mean that the Honda ECU calculates gear ratio based on engine RPM vs output shaft speed using the gear ratios of the standard bike to modify the fuelling. The second issue is that I’ll be without a gear indicator in the racer as my current indicator is driven from the KWakas gearbox switch. Still it’ll save the weight of the wiring but will be a new challenge to have additional awareness of how many change downs are needed for each corner.

It also has a secondary set of external injector (injectors that are positioned above the inlet trumpets on the outside of the butterflies) which are housed and mounted in the airbox. Now this probably means that I’m going to have to retain the original airbox, which has a nifty little vacuum driven sealing flap on the air intake which is vacuum driven and closes when the engine is on overrun to ensure any fuel floating around inside the airbox gets sucked into the engine. I’m understandably nervous about fuel vapour in the engine bay. This will cause me some initial packaging issues as the air intake on the bike points forward in front of the engine. In the racer this will be facing the bulkhead so not to much air flowing there then!


On the subject of the digidash, I’m really only using this for oil and water pressure\temp alarms now, and for sporadic Laptiming. But I’ve never been very successful at getting the timing to work reliably and it’s a pretty heavy unit to just feed me Alarm data. Although in fairness I am also using the output from the sensors to feed into the DL1 Data logger.

SO my Plan is to lose the Digidash and replace it either with Tim Hoverd’s palm pilot based dash\laptimer which he wrote the code for. It does lap timing and sensor monitoring based on the serial stream out put from the DL1 and also does useful things like providing a count down timer which help as all our races are now measured as X minutes + 1 lap. Hmm I wonder if Tim’s DL1 software can display the current gear?

Or if I win the lottery use the Specific dash available for the DL1 from Race technologies, and maybe if I got amy arse in gear I could develop a little minidash of my own.

Preparation for the Birkett

I spent much of the day today doing preparation for the Birkett relay race in two weeks time, we have a set of team orders that requires such things as external battery hookups for start\boost batteries and general things like labels for tyre pressure and so on.

I also finally got round to fitting a gurney flap to the back bodywork, I’ve only been trying to get this job done for 2 years but it has always fallen off the bottom of the to-do list. Everybody in the paddockj tells me that this will glue the back end down, I guess my development as a driver is now getting to a stage where I’m beginning to be able to feel these sort of effects and want to do something about it.

Hopefully before the Birkett I can also get an engine bay floor fitted as I’m advised that this will further help to stabilize the airflow under the rear of the car. The other things that I managed to get under way today were some changes to the race van to try and improve its reliability. I fitted a new starter motor. it has a habit of not starting when hot and I think this has largely been due to the fact that the started doesn’t spin very quickly when hot. The volt meter I temporarily fitted a few weeks ago shows that when hot cranking the battery voltage drops to about 9v as the old tired starter draws a lot of current.

So I fitted a new started and it now spins much more quickly, doesn’t sound like it is labouring like the old one did. And when cranking the voltage barely wavers. All very goods signs, I also started a permanent install for the Voltmeter and Oil pressure gauges that I bought for the Van a couple of weeks ago. Hmmm the Birkett is really getting rather close now…. I can feel the nerves beginning to develop.

Progress Swinging Sump for Next Year

Today I popped over to see Nova Engineering. And had a good chat with Graeme about the CBR 1000 RR swinging sump system that I'll be using next year. A couple of useful pieces of information emerged. The first is that he would really like to be able to identify the sump pickup position during use this would require some sort of remote sensing application that watched the position of the pickup from outside the sump pan. Maybe a hall effect or magnetically driven sensor fitted to the outside of the sump (or a series of them at key locations. I don’t know id this is possible, but I’ll ask my electronic engineer mates on Cam7 to see if they have an easy solution that could be used. I suppose the key criteria are that it is light, tolerant of heat, easy to fit and cheap. Hmm not a difficulttset of design criteria then.

The other piece of information was that it looks like the GP sidecar boys will next year also be swapping to a CBR 1000 RR engines…. Or so the paddock gossip goes. The swinging pickup sump assemble is coming on nicely and should be ready in the next couple of weeks, which is handy as that is just after the Birkett and I’ll be looking at fitting the new engine in that timeframe.

A Fruitful Development Partnership

I've just a very fruitful visit to my local engineering company Nova Race Gearboxes. I found them while looking for a billet sump system for the CRB1000RR The owner is such a racing enthusiast so we spent a long time chatting about his Jedi racing and my RGB racing.

We also spent a good deal of time chatting about a CBR1000 swinging sump system he is developing, and his ATB equipped diff with engine driven reverse. He simply very keen to see his creations run in competition and by a midfield runner at that. He's not interested in guys chasing championshiops as they want to win at all costs and won't tolerate unreliability. What he needs is a development partner to feed back real world data and help him on the development curve for the items.

The upshot of all this is that he'll happilly let me run both the diff and sump on long term loan for free. His plans for the diff were eventually to give it mounting ears so that it can become a stressed member in the chassis, but it didn't take off after the Kit Car crisis fiasco. So it's just sat on the shelf.

Time to rekindle those plans me thinks.

The diff actually weighs around the same as my existing setup, but has three crucial advantages

1. Change of final drive ratio... I bet you could do this in less than 10 minutes, there is no necessity for split sprockets or other nasties. 6 allen head bolts allows the sprocket to be removed. And it has an integral cush drive too.

2. Engine driven reverse which doesn't need re adjusting after the sprocket is changed, and may actually move the car backwards... unlike my current system

3. Ease of fitting to the engine so that the sprockets are in the same planes. careful design of the CRB engine mounting system would take an engine swap down from a full days work to an
afternoon.

It would move a little bit of weight to the rear of the car, as the sprocket is not concentric with the drive shafts, but behind it to increase the chain length and its life. but as it is no weight penalty it seems an absolute bargain.

Whoo Hoo!

The last Day of Term

Today I went the the RGB meeting at Snetterron. I wasn't racing as I'd decided to skip it to save the engine for The Birkett in three weeks time. I love watching clubman racing as its so entertaining due to the different skill levels. Experienced old hands + novice new boys in their first races

I also picked up the front 3 bulkheads for the new chassis. From Tim Pell. Looking at the picture I suspect it is going to be fairly light weight :-)

The rgb races went well and some of the RGB mob were also racing in an closed wheel all comers race which saw stock hatch pitted against RGB cars and loads of other different machinery. So we all stood on the bank with the rest of the rgb paddock and cheered on our mates

The complete field was being led by a glorious bikesports Speed who led all the way until the last lap when because of waved yellows at Richies Chicane he slowed right down and was caught and passed by the second place Caterhan R400 while still under waved yellows. Overtaking under yellow is strictly forbidden and will normally earns you a good wigging from the clark of the course, disqualification and a licence endorsement!. Scandelously the race was awarded to the R400 and the results were confirmed.

Still with the remainder of the RGB field having a great time on the bank in the autumn sunshine cheering the RGB boys taking part in the last race of the year, there was a real last day at school atmopshere with lots of laughs. Everybody was talking about plans for next year and I'm now fired up with enthusiasm over the engine change and new chassis build .

It looks like Class B could be quite busy as several drivers were talking about engine changes and so on to get into Class B. But first comes the Birkett!

New Plans For Next Season

The 2007 regs draft regs have now been publish on the RGB community website www.bikecars.co.uk. One key change in the regs for next year has been to Class B, which is now being defined as allowing Mid Engined cars and any engine under 1000CC. Crucially however the min weight limit for both A and B is the same

This is important because up until this year all Mid engined cars like mine had to race in Class A. Therefore to be remotely competitive you had to run either an Hiyabusa engine or a ZX12R. Both of these engines need a dry sump system if they are to survive under race conditions.

One of the ironies of running a dry sump is that while it protects your engine it also add a whole bunch of new ways that you can break the engine, the tank can fail, the pump can fail any one of the dozen or so hose connections can fail and so on. All of which will blow the engine. It's also a fairly heavy bunch of kit.

Now my car (and me) are well over the weight limit of 560kg for Class A and I need to shed some 60KG from the Car,chassis and driver.

The new range of 2004,2005, 2006 1000cc "Screamer" engines like the Yamaha R1, Suzuki GSXR-1000 and the Fireblade 1000 are only about 10BHP down on the ZX12r because they benefit from recent technological advances, but crucially most don't need a dry sump system and the engine can weigh up to 20KG less than my ZX12R.

So being allowed into class B, with an engine that is much lighter will help me achieve my goal of weight loss in the car and a less complex install. And also this years class B has been pretty sparsely populated with the best Class B driver only being about 3 seconds a lap quicker than me, as opposed to the leading class A drivers still being some 7-9 secs a lap quicker than me. So maybe I can compete for some class B silverware.

OK so I'll never win outright. but to be honest I was never going to do that anyway as there is way to much talent up at the front of the grid. BUT I can aspire to closing a 3 second gap to get to the front of class B, the 9 seconds to get to the front of class A might as well be a country mile!

So the plan for next season is

1. Swap the engine, dump the dry sump and get a lighter simpler install. I'm going to use a CBR 1000 RR. Compete in the current chassis next year gaining further experience as I'm still very much a novice
2. Build a new lightweight chassis over the winter\next season so that I can actually get down to the weight limit ... Remember my car is the prototype chassis and bit heavier then the current versions
3. Lose some weight!

And to this end I've already sold the zx12r to a Cam7 friend who wants to put it in his Lotus Europa. .

and I thought I was a nutter :-)

So I'd better not blow it up between now and the end of the season

Site Update and Move to Blogger

The more observant of you may well have noticed that my site has not had an update in a very long time, this has been due to a number of reasons, but primarily it has been due to the fact that I was hand cranking the site in Frontpage. This was difficult and clunky and meant that I had to use the same computer to update the site as Frontpage uses a classis publishing model". Now with two growing children and a busy working life it wasn't always convenient to get to the home PC to update the build diary, and hence stuff got missed off

So as my build diary is basically a Blog I've decided to start using the Blogger engine to update the site. This allows me to do such things as post from anywhere using a browser or email and so I hope to update the site more frequently.

Also I've over written the existing Evo driving diary home page with the blog so the driving diary is currently incomplete (although the original files are still there) and I'm currently working out such issues as broken menu links and so on.

I'll be retro entering the existing pages into the blogger format over the next coupleof months to get back to a full record

These retor posts will apear below this one.
Also I'll be adding details of this seasons exploits so keep an eye on the expanding archives for new stuff as I catch up with the missing data.

Also the site's RSS feed has moved it is now at http://www.pellgenesis.com/rss.xml

Sorry for the disruption and if any of your book marks have been broken, but I needed an easier way to update the diary so lets give this Blogger thing a go. :-)