Further work on the Diff.

While I've got the Diff unit out of the old cradle, and I'm while working on its mountings I thought I weigh it and see how much the thing weighs. So I dragged the bathroom scales down to the garage (Mrs M had already had a gentle chat about using the kitchen ones :-) ) and shoved the Diff and and reverse starter motor onto them. Total Weight a smidgen under 13Kg. Relative to both the old mounting frame and the blue diff that is a saving of 14Kg. Fourteen Kilos! Finding a single lump of fourteen KGs of weight saving in what should theoretically already be a stripped down race car is incredible and certainly more than off sets losing the convenience of an engine driven reverse.

The old electric driven reverse used to kill then engine due to the load on the starter motor when I engaged it. I wondered if this was because it was an old unit from a scrap yard. I've scrapped my former race support van due to the dreaded Tin worm , but one of the parts I saved was the brand new starter motor I had fitted to the engine. When I fitted this the old Cologne V6 span over  nicely and the new motor drew a lot less power. So I'll try and use the new one for the reverse on the racer,better still it is another whole Kg lighter. It may mean that I'm going to have to make up some new bracketry but I was going to have to d that anyway.

Reverting back to old Diff

Well after four months of shaking off the disappointment of a season and development cycle wasted , I've decide that I do want to race again, and this year I'm going to be ready for the start of the season. So after finally deciding to abandon the other diff it is time to revert to my old one. I'll lose the swanky engine driven reverse, but there's no point in having a swanky reverse if you can't go forwards is there?

Previously the old diff was mounted in a huge steel cradle and all told it weighed in at a massive 27 Kgs. I don't really want to mount it in this way again so I've set about hard mounting it to some new chassis rails I've welded into the engine bay. This is the method that Tim Pell uses now and it seems to work OK, the Chain is tensioned by shimming the diff rearwards from the rails. So for the first time in months I've spent a couple of days in the garage and got some oil in my fingerprints. :-)

I managed to get chassis mods done and the original Diff refitted. This involved drilling and tapping the bearing mounting blocks to take some M10 bolts, and welding in two sturdy 1x2" box section members to a couple of cross members in the engine bay. I'll brace these new members longitudinally to the engine once. I finish fitting the reverse motor. As the drive chain is now being pulled pretty much centrally between the bearings it is unlikely to twist sideways like the blue one and as a result hopefully the Diff will not require any lateral support.

Now If I'm lucky, (and I could do with some) the original driveshafts will also fit. The chain is also shorter by 6 links and that too weighs a surprising amount.

Long Time no Post- so what happened?

After the Brands meeting I took the racer to the following meeting a Mallory park in early June. Here again I suffered major overheating problems. Mallory is a lovely short circuit, I qualified last, and in the race I managed to keep with the slower members of class C for a couple of laps but eventually I had to start short shifting again to control the engine temp and lost touch with them. So running glacially slowly and treating it like a bit of a test I also finished last and was lapped by everybody else in the field at least once. Not a good day.

So I took it home and set about building an oil cooler & air intake in the left side pod, using a take off plate provide by Colin D from the paddock. This took me a while and as we had four or five weeks before the next race I took my time and I'm pretty pleased with the result. This is a 40 row cooler, so it had better keep the damn thing cool.

So I was looking forward to the Double Header at Cadwell at the end of July and it seemed that finally I might have a chance of going a bit quicker once the thing was being kept properly cool, by the oil cooler.

This was not to be, When doing my pre race checks the week before Cadwell I discovered a full 10mm of play in the Diff output bearings on one side.

Obviously I couldn't race like that and with 5 days to go before the meeting there was no possibility of getting it repaired either... So that's another set of entry fees wasted.

After losing half the season to rebuild, engine swap and diff change, along with all the blood sweat , money and tears. Only to be much much slower than I was before... I'd had enough, and simply closed the garage doors and went inside to consider if I really wanted to carry on doing this racing lark as it was offering me precious little fun at the moment.

For those of you interested in the gory details this welded globule of steel is all that is left of the needle roller bearings that should be restraining the output shaft from the diff. Ohh I think that has got a bit hot!

So that was it for the season, Unfortunately I've been unable to get the diff repaired as the very nice chap who loaned it too me is simply swamped with work. I've basically had four months off and ignored all things race car related to try and rustle up some enthusiasm again or decide to give the whole thing up.

Still I have save a few quid in unspent entry fees.

Brands Data Logging + Bypass Cooling

Tim and I use the same data loggers and analog inputs so that we can share our data for comparison purposes. Tim had put together some graphs for comparison between us. My Laptime is 59.xx his was 54. and some change. He's in a class C car with some 40 less horsepower too so lets see where those 6 seconds went. (I'm blue he's the black trace)

Click on the graphic to see a more detailed version.

The answer to where did those six seconds went is simply "everywhere" and at a uniform rate. The bottom trace "timeslip" shows my rate of time loss relative to Tim's lap. It's an even uniform line that shows I'm not bad in one particular spot but simply slower everywhere. The speed trace confirms this in that on average I'm 10-15mph slower than Tim everywhere except in Graham Hill Bend where I'm slightly faster. Interestingly I'm pretty much on the throttle everywhere before Tim is and I brake harder and later than he does. This i guess is a function of not being on the limit of grip like he is.

The top chart is corner radius which shows how tight we are turning and the traces are very similar so I'm not way out of position or driving the track in an odd way. I'm just a bit slower in ever corner and at every apex. The reason for this is shown in the G circle, this particular one is Druids and it shows that I'm not working the tyres at anything like the limit of their grip. Tim by contrast is nicely tracing the edge of the G circle as he transitions from straight line speed and converts longitudinal braking grip into lateral turning grip uniformly and evenly.

Basically if the tyres will give you 2G of grip you should be using it all for maximum braking and turning at all points through the corner. Although the Brake vs Turn proportion will change through the corner. Initally you start using all the grip for braking and will get full longitusinal brake G and then go to full Turn G and use all the grip for turning. I do each seperately Tim plainly transitions nicely between the two states using all the available grip at every point as his G curve traces a rough circle around the line that denotes the limit of grip.

It also shows that I'm largely back to my old habits of braking in a straight line before turning rather than turning and braking together into corners ( the Majority of the trace is moving along the Axis)

Of most concern is Tim's ability to out accelerate me out of Clearways . He thinks my engine is underpowered. Personally I think I'm overweight. When I analyse the corresponding RPM traces the problem is clear. On average I'm 2000 RPM lower in the rev range than Tim is pretty much everywhere on the track. Therefore I'm always at least one and possibly two gears to high, this is killing the engine's ability to rev and hence I'm accelerating slower.

So lots of things to work on here, Brake into corners, carry more apex speed, push the tyres and rev the nuts off the thing, change up later and change down further on the run in to corners to get the right exit gear. No more mechanical sympathy!

But with the thing cooking even when I'm effectively short shifting, revving the nuts of it is not an option until I resolve the over heating problems.

However I am in the process of fitting an oil cooler, plus I have an idea about the water cooling. I suspect that a fair proportion of the coolant is simply passing from the thermostat housing on the exit from the cylinder head and returning directly to the water pump on the side of the engine via the bypass hose (remember I've removed the thermost). The bypass is quite large bore and the pump will be applying a degree of suction to it as it connects on the input side of the pump. A good deal of the coolant is simply cycling through the the head, the pump and the bypass getting hotter all the time. At no stage is it going through the radiator and simply being re heated in the cylinder head with the corresponding problems controlling the temperature as only part of the coolant is actually being cooled by the radiator. So I'm going to clamp off the bypass hose for the next Meeting at Mallory and see what happens.

Testing and "Racing" at Brands

Not a great weekend, no major damage, but generally a bit disheartening in how slow I
was but the car held together with only a few teething problems. Of most concern is it’s lack of straight line speed relative to a much less powerful car (Judy’s) I think it is just too damn heavy and with less power now there is simply nowhere to hide.

As a result I’ve decided to cease developmental effort on this chassis and contemplate building a new lightweight one over the winter. In the mean time I intend to drive this one to death. Plus I need to lose some flab… but that’s obvious


On the plus side, car is smooth and pretty well balanced, the new brakes work and it is not displaying any nasty habits or snap oversteer in fact the only adjustment change I made all weekend was to knock a single click off the front dampers to kill a bit of understeer in Clearways. And my manual alignment was within 20 minutes of arc of being perfect. Plus the RGB paddock is full of great people.

Friday Testing.
I arrived Thursday night, Tim and I had arranged to share a garage so I unloaded and parked the car up in the garage. Tim was already fettling, so I took the opportunity to do a few extra things like stick on the CAM7 stickers. Tim and I got to sleep around 2 am and where up with the lark, or at least with Brands noisy indigenous bird population anyway.

I managed three test sessions on Friday, The first was a 6 lap shakedown, taking it easy and just seeing how things went. Pretty early on it became apparent that the cooling was crap. Even taking it easy oil temps were climbing to 120 and water towards 100. Not good and on reflection there is something seriously wrong here.

However I came in to check it over and see how things were. The only major issues were that the chain had stretched, and the shift lights were not working. So after giving it the once over and a brief stint to cool down, I went out again and gave it some beans. In about 6 laps I managed a 59.59 (front runners are in the 52s) but the coolant went to 120 and the oil to 140. So I decided to do a couple of laps touring round to cool it. but just then they red flagged the session so I had to bring a cooking engine straight in. Of course when you kill the engine the coolant pump stops and it immediately boiled over. Later inspection also showed that the radiator was also weeping a bit from one for the pressure margins where the metal and plastics are crimped together so the pressure had got just a bit too high and things are getting pretty hot.

After mopping the coolant from the garage floor, giving it a couple of hours over lunch to cool down, refilling it and fixing the rad. I thought I'd go out and do 4- 6lap bursts to get some value from the day. Again it over heated badly in the afternoon so I didn't get to do much, and my data logger failed to record any times either.

On the last session I bought it in and it was sounding like a bucket of bolts and only running on three. Really carp. I thought I'd badly cooked it. However Andy Bates came and looked at it and identified a stick coil that had jumped from the plug... and a couple of missing nuts on the exhaust manifold. Once these were repaired it sounded ok. But I decided not to risk it further.

However I wanted to fix the cooling issue before the race on Sunday so a quick call to Tim Pell indicated that there was a larger radiator that I could fit so I ordered one of these (from a 2Ltr Meastro Turbos Diesel) on the way home and collected the new radiator on Saturday morning. I then spent14 hours on Saturday fitting the new rad, cutting a vent hole in the front bodywork, making the aluminium shrouding to duct the radiator exhaust air out through the hole and fitting an auxiliary electric coolant pump. All in an attempt to get some heat out of the engine. I also refitted the electric coolant pump so that I could keep the cooling system running after shutting down the engine.


Duncan arrived around 5pm and identified an even bigger problem.
The Diff has twisted sideways under drive tension from the chain (this was what was allowing the chain to slacken)and the bolt heads holding the drive sprocket had started chewing into the steel shear plate at the rear, so he spent a few hours making a burly steel support to stop this happening. All in all we finished around 10pm. Essentially the tension under load is pulling the driven sprocket forwards. As the left mounting plate prevents the left mount from moving forward what is actually happening is that the right hand mount is moving backwards and the rear end of the diff moves to the left as the whole thing pivots around the left hand mount.So I need to stop this happening using different tension fittings on the mountings.

On Sunday I was up at 5:30, Dunc arrived at 6 and we reloaded the car on the trailer and set off once again for Brands, hopeful that we had fixed the problems.

I arrived in the paddock to much congratulations for actually making it to a circuit and some gentle ribbing, but it was nicely balanced with some genuine admiration for the neatness of the engine installation and some nice "Welcome Back" hand shakes from the RGB paddock. It was really very very nice to be in the paddock again. In fact sometimes it was hard to get to car to stick the stickers on it because everybody was stopping by for a gawp and a chat :-)

The car passed scrutineering first time, and so it was on to practice. Somehow I arrived early and ended up fourth in the queue. Once the session started my over heating problems seemed to be a bit better, I was running at about 1:05 deg water.... dunno what the oil was as I hadn't managed to load the updated software from Tim onto the palm on Saturday and it crashed on lap one, driving Round Brands... resetting a plam pilot will definitely put a kink in your times. :-)

So after 6 laps and with the whole field streaming past me (not a good sign) and the coolant running towards 110 again I decided to call it a day and come in.

The qualifying times came in and I was dead last. 59.6 I think, which is 1.1 second down on my fastest time from last year, but then I did have the kwacker.

In between practice and the race we tested the engine and were concerned to see that the secondary injectors were not firing, so we spent a couple of hours chasing down the fault. But it wasn't a fault, it was a ghost. Everything checked out and eventually when we re tested them by stamping on the throttle rather than winding it up gently they worked fine. So they are not the reason I was slow. I'm slow because I'm slower than a slow thing out for a Sunday stroll pushing his infirm slow granny in a slow thing's bathchair!

When race time came I was lined up on the grid dead last with Judy in her class C Fury next to me, when the lights went out, she got the jump on me and we were off. At Paddock I briefly thought about diving up the inside but wasn't really close enough and on the way to Druids passed Gordon G's stricken car in the gravel on the left. Round Druids and there were two other RGBs spinning into the ARMCO on the left and so unsurprisingly the race was red flagged while they cleared up the carnage. On the restart we made it as far as Clearways on Lap 2 before we found a spinner in the gravel and we had earned ourselves another red flag plus a group bollocking from the Clark and retirement to the end of the meeting. The Observers reports used words like "disgraceful" pretty bad stuff. Apparently people were still banging into each other when the red flags were waving but I was too far back to see it or be involved.

So as the last race of the day we restarted and this time I managed to hang on to Judy for a couple of laps and was actually trying to go up the inside of her at Clearways when I missed the selection from 2nd to 3rd. By the time I had found a cog she was 100 yards up the road and I went down the straight swearing loudly. Difficulty selecting the right gear for Clearways was to be a recurring theme and marred the rest of the day (such as it was) . In fact I suspect in frustration I yanked the lever a bit hard as I seem to have bent it! I hope I haven't damaged the gearbox selector forks. If not then Mr Honda's engineering really is bullet proof.

Although I felt I was getting faster in Paddock, Surtees and Mcleans, Druids and Clearways remained crap. Particularly Clearways which is the crucial corner for Brands. After about 8 laps and having been lapped the temps started to climb again so I abandoned it and headed for the paddock. Once there I discovered a stone hole in the nice new radiator that had done precisely 15 laps. :-(

So the take home messages are

1. It needs an oil cooler, I think the oil is currently heating the coolant through Mr Hondas standard oil\water heat exchanger and for some reason I can't keep the water cool. Either that or I need a wire basket to cook my chips in the boiling oil.
2. I'm slow, dog slow.... glacial in fact
3. The engine seems to be pretty strong in terms of standing up to abuse.
4. Most of the work this winter seems to be wasted as the power loss certainly isn't counteracted by the weight loss.
5. Last year I was plainly using the power of the kwacker on the straights to mask my crap cornering. with less power now there is nowhere to hide.
   Must get better!
   Hmmph

Final Pre Race Setup before Testing

Well the final week before the Test at Brands passed pretty quickly and as usual I never got to do the everything on my to do list. For years I've been making lists about the car to make sure I don't forget stuff and in this respect (as my wife pointed out) I'm like my Mum. We've never visited her without finding an old envelope and a pencil on her kitchen counter with a list of things to on it. I guess there are things you learn at your mothers knee that you don't even realise. On the subject of lists I also learned from Tim that the categorisation that I tend to do for my lists is actually known as a MoSCoW list. Which is Must do (IE critical), Should Do (preferable but not essential), Could do (if enough time) and Would do (in an Ideal world).

Most of the last Saturday before the test was taken up with wheel alignment and general chassis setup. I'd never done this before from scratch and so again following Tim's advice I gave it a go. Starting with ride height, then wheel camber, then front and rear toe in, then front\rear alignment and finally corner weights.

This whole process took all day and necessitated the construction of a few adhoc tools. One of these was a combined alignment \ride height gauge made out of a piece of angle Ali angle and an up stand. The gauge is actually 83 mm tall so that when I sit in the car the resultant suspension squish drops the car to the regulated 75mm (which is about the best approach when doing it on your own.) On the back of the gauge was a graduated scale which I used to check alignment. Basically I stuck a magnetic laser level on each rear wheel and held the gauge on the front wheel and then adjusted the rear toe control until the pointers hit the same mark on the scale when it was held on the front wheels. Then with the laser on the front wheels and the gauge on the back this gives me fore\aft wheel alignment around the centre line of the chassis. Then when adjusting toe in if you move each side the same amount of turns the alignment should be maintained as you dial in the settings.

I also made a toe in gauge, which is basically a long U of steel so that you can measure the relative distance between the front and rear of each pair of wheels. The method was to position the bolt head on the wheel rim on one side of the car and then use a set of digital calipers to measure through a hole in the steel to the rim on the other side of the car. Zero the digital caliper in that position. If you then move the gauge to the front of the wheels and re measure you can directly read the toe in value off the calipers.

I was aiming for toe in of about 1.5mm at the front and parallel or a very tiny amount of toe in at the rear. It took me all day and by the end of it I was far from certain that I'd got it right. but it seemed ok

So the complete set of alignment settings were

Front ride Height 83mm

Rear Height 95 mm

Front Camber 1 3/4 deg

Rear Camber 3/4 deg

Rear Toe in - parallel

Front Toe in - 1.5mm

Front Dampers 8 Clicks

Rear Dampers 10 Clicks

Tyre pressure 18.5 psi all round

Unfortunately I didn't have time to do the corner weights, so I still don't know what the ultimate weight saving is from stepping down to Class B and changing the engine

So after 6 months of gestation it was time to take this new engine, diff and chassis combination to the track and see what it could do.

More progress to report :-)

First up I completed the wiring for the new rainlight that is now required by this year's regulations, OOOOh look a glowing set of LEDS that look almost identical to the last set of glowing LEDS that were fitted there. You'll have spotted a pattern that most of my jobs are now the little things that are requried to meet the RGB series regulations. This is a good sign as it means that I am now focusing on the smaller jobs rather than major structural or mechanical components, ERGO I'm getting to the end of this.

Next it was on to that leaky front Calliper. A quick test on Tuesday night indicated that both the left and right calipers were leaking when under heavy pedal pressure. Both from the same place; where the top halves of the caliper are joined by the removable aluminium spacer. If you remember the picture of the handbrake calipers this is where the fluid cross over drillings are located and the two sides are pressure sealed by a rubber O ring. I suspected that the O rings had aged and failed and a call to Hi-Spec confirmed that this can happen. So a couple of rebuild kits were duly ordered and should be here for the weekend. That will mean I need to disassemble the calipers which in turn means I'll need to bleed the brakes ....again!. Shouldn't be any bubbles in my fluid. No sir!.

The other job identified last weekend was that the reverse control needed a control lever to get sufficient mechanical advantage. So I've quickly fabbed one up out of a strip of ali bar stock. This now makes operation of the reverse very easy. So easy in fact that I was concerned that the system would jump out of drive if knocked by my arm, so I fitted a retaining spring to the diff to hold it in the forward drive position. Of course this does mean that I'll have to manually hold it in the reverse position to actually go backwards, but this is preferable to false diff neutrals in a race, also it means it should slip in of it's own accord If I happen to miss the engagement dogs. Also as is my own particular habit I labelled it up clearly because it is slightly counter intuitive (pull back to go forward) but also because I forget stuff!

The other major system ( and the last to be done) that was completed this evening was the handbrake, having finally got calipers to fit I needed to connect them to the handbrake lever. This entailed welding a couple of mounting plates in the rear frame (next time I'll get these made up as part of the laser cut plates). And adjusting the sierra handbrake cable to fit. It took me a couple of attempts to get the routing tight so that the wires didn't get cooked on the exhaust but in the end we got there. And I now have a working hand brake..... well working good enough to pass scrutineering. :-)

The plates will need painting but this is hardly essential before Brands on the 20th.

Then came another regs job. All chain driven cars must have a chain guard fitted to stop the chain exiting upwards or rearwards if it snaps (and they do). So a few minutes were spent with some Ali angle and I got about 60% of this particular job complete. Other small jobs that got done in the evenings this week included torquing and staking the front hub nuts in place, replacing the DL1 sensor, fitting locknuts to the Diff spacer plates and lockwiring the diff and sump plugs.

The To-Do list now numbers just 22 items totalling about 14 hours in estimates and ranges from essential stuff like Set Toe In, Ride Height and corner weighting (4 hours) to the less vital .. check and adjust pedals for heel toe (10 mins) and fit race numbers (15 mins) and finally to the nice if time category including polishing the beast.

Nearly There!

Well over the last weekend I've got an awful lot done, which is good. but pressure of work means that I'll have to cancel my test at Mallory and test closer to the Brands meeting on the 20th, which is less good, although it does relieve some of the time pressure.

No 1 and most importantly I've finally got a complete and working braking system and managed to fit the new 14" alloys to all four wheels for the first time. The hassle necessary to get the various combinations of calipers, disks, offset, calliper mounts, spacers, 14" wheels, leaky master cylinders, alloy bells, rotors, suspension bolts heads and brake pads into a combination that allows the car to both move without the brakes\calipers\pads binding and stop properly when you push the middle pedal is simply incomprehensible. Take my advice If you ever..... ever EVER build any sort of racer or kit car choose one that uses standard uprights (the bits that hold the hub,bearings and calipers) and standard caliper mounts. Then you can choose a known, working off the shelf kit where somebody else has invested the necessary blood sweat and tears. If you have to fabricate or sort any of this part of the car out yourself be warned it is a seemingly endless trail of frustration and woe.

The latest in a long stream of issues was that the pad depth on my Mintex 1144 pads was too thick to fit across the new 9mm rotors, what this means is that you a) have to grind slightly one edge of the pad backing pad and b) reduce the thickness of the friction material a bit using a file simply to get the pads to fit over the disks and then to get them both to fit in the caliper slot. And this despite me ordering calipers with a slot specifically tailored for 9-12mm rotors. I chatted to Hi-spec about this and they said "yeah!.... we're having lots of trouble with the pad manufacturers altering either backing plate designs or pad depth..... file em to fit".

Bah filing pads every time I need to change them seems like a job I don't need.

Hmmp, anyway after an inordinate amount of frustrating tomfoolery (which also included me copiously testing my garage floor paint's immunity to brake fluid) everything was finally fitted and ready for bleeding. Bleeding the system identified a couple of leaking unions (one of which was on a master cylinder which then had to be replaced). But eventually we got there. And I finally have a working brake system. Due to replacing the master cylinders and cleaning the pedal in the last post I probably need to adjust the pedal rest position to allow me to heel and toe properly but compared to getting to this point that should be a doddle.

It was only later that I noticed a slight leak on the front left caliper that I'll need to investigate next week.

While I spent a "pleasurable" few hours sorting out the brakes Duncan was fitting the exhaust more permanently. Tony Law had done a good job of fitting it, but had failed to account for the fact that the Diff slides backwards when the chain is tensioned. As a result when the Diff was in it's final position the CV boot rubbed on the exhaust can. The solution was to cut off the existing slip tube which formed the exhaust joint, and add one about 3 inches longer. This allowed the Can to be positioned further back away from the CV joint. With this sorted out he then set about fitting an axillary support to both the can and rear body support frame. By his own admission he wasn't very pleased with either his welding or the fact that he designed the whole thing "in peel". Still it is at least sturdy enough for one or two races so I'm not going to worry about it now and as always I'm more than grateful for the help.

Other stuff that got done today or in the last few days included.
Torque the front hub nuts, finalise and tighten the gear linkage, tap and fit the new gear knob that Dave T had made for me, renew rear suspension Nylocks, flush the diff with petrol and fill with new gear oil. Lock wire diff drain plug, change a couple of CV joint boots, fit new brake lights connector and replace the temporary plastice cable ties with nice stainless steel ones. Tighten rear sprocket bolts, bolt check suspension and fit new calipers.

The other major piece of work that got done in the engine bay was to complete and fit the airbox. This required connection of the secondary fuel rail to the main one via a -4 bulkhead fitting and wiring the electrics via a suitable grommet. Plus I needed to make a new cover plate for the rear of the box. I made this out of clear perspex and finally got to discard one of the last vestiges of the fire... the old airbox cover.

So now the engine bay is complete bar one little job (I'm going to re route that fuel hose left on the which looks to be in peril from a flailing chain) I have to say I'm pretty proud of it. It looks neat and tidy and properly designed.

At the end of the day, Duncan got his just desserts and had the honour of driving the beast up and down the drive.

True to form this small test identified another little job, the reverse select T bat does not provide enough mechanical advantage to make selection reverse\forward easy and so this will need a lever fabricating.

The long list of Odds and Sods.

You know I can always tell when I'm getting towards the end of a build the engine bay starts to look like it has been visited by the NASA fairies, as I finalise the cable and fuel line routing and fit the shiny silver heat protection sleeving.
I got most of this work done on Sunday, and also did some preparatory work on the running the fuel and electrical lines from the main bank of injectors to those in the airbox in readiness for fitting it to the car.

In addition I fitted the catch tank, and bolted the exhaust headers, tightened up the gear linkage and did a few other bits and bobs jobs.

I've also dismantled, lubricated and rebuilt the brake pedal as it had got a bit stiff and recalcitrant about returning to the rest position. I wondered if the master cylinder springs were getting a bit weak and so disassembled the whole lot to clean, strip and check it. Ultimately it turned out to be binding in the pedal pivot point and the MCs were fine. This whole exercise took up a couple of hours and of course I need to re bleed the brakes again.

I'm currently working towards a shake down test at Mallory Park on the 9th May, and the plan is now to complete the build and setup the car over the bank holiday weekend, then go to the test, and then work on the Bus so that I can get it through it's MOT before I need it to go to Brands on the 20th.

Time will tell :-). but currently the planets do seem to be aligning for me at long last

It Moves!

The car has today, moved forwards and backwards under it's own steam. Given that I've pretty much completely replaced the engine, transmission, clutch & brakes you can imagine the was a pretty big moment. :-).
An added advantage was that at no stage did it sound like a milkfloat and the engagement mechanism will not need adjusting in anyway as a result of other changes to the car. People have been DSQ'd for forgetting to adjust or failing to engage reverse when asked by the scrutineers.
First up I fitted the new drive chain, and then removed again once I realised I'd wrapped it around a chassis member! D'Oh! The second time around it was fine though and my new style tension blocks seems to work very well too. however looking at this picture I guess I could easily take 6" out of the wheel base of the car or move the engine back by that amount..



So after a quick check of water, oil and fluid levels and a brief repair of a weepy hose that hadn't been tightened properly during the engine refit last week we were off. 20ft up the drive and 20ft back again. 20ft up the drive and 20ft back again. Repeat until grin is firmly established :-)



Two or three things followed the test.

1. The clutch is nicely progressive with lots of feel.


2. The brake master pedal is a bit slow to return to it's proper position and feels like it needs a clean and lube.


3. The car seems reluctant to move. Getting out and pushing reveals a lot of rolling resistance.


4. The exhaust will need extending and re bracketing. When you pull the diff rearwards to tension the chain the offside CV joint boot fouls on the exhaust.


5. Engagement of forward and reverse is a bit stiff and could probably do with a lever to control it rather than the current T bar.

Of these the rolling resistance was of most concern . Was the diff a bit stiff or was it new brakes binding? I removed the pads and retested and she moved nice and easily so it was the brakes. However this did set me thinking about the Diff and how I needed to change the oil. So I emptied it out and it had a pretty nasty metallic sheen with a fair few particles of aluminium in it. Plus the magnetic sump plug had a nice furry coat of steel particles. I mentioned this to Graham at Nova and offered to strip the Diff down and inspect it. I'm not sure that I've got time for this before Brands and I don't want to miss another meeting. So a flushout with petrol and new oil will have to do until then. On reflection the steel fillings are probably from the dog teeth which engage reverse or forwards and inexpert handling could easily have had the grinding a bit.

Still something to worry about a bit later.

However, armed with a rush of enthusiasm I've set about the long list of odds and sods jobs that weren't on the critical path to movement but which must be done before we are going to the track. These included.

1. A whole bunch of wiring and electrical work, tiding and binding up looms, running a 12v feed to the DL1 for Palm dash's laptimer, fitting 6.7R resisters (actually 10x67R in parallel) to defeat the HESD linear solenoid.


2. Removing the Lambda sensor dial and cabling as Tony Law forgot to fit a mounting boss for it,


3. Running a control line to the bodywork connector so I can have an high mounted oil pressure warning light in my line of sight.


4. Tidying up on side of the car to such and extent that I can actually fit the side pod.

The last job of the day was to commence fitting the external injectors and inlet pipes to the airbox. This is a bit more difficult than it looks as the floor of the airbox must sit nicely on the engine, and the top must of course line up with the bodywork. Still I'd done most of the preparatory work previously and pretty much all that was left was to glue and rivet it all in place.

Work on the airbox also included replacing a perfectly good and previously MSA approved rain light with a new one which must now be FIA instead of MSA approved. Out goes a £7 quid unit and in comes a new unit that should have cost upwards of 40 except I got it off ebay. Bah! this just seems to be a way of adding more cost.

Still a pretty successful day all round and I seem to be running out of excuses not to be at Brands Hatch on the 19/20 of May :-)

Gear linkage and Drive chain Numptyness

Last night I remade the gearlinkage by shortening the lever and returning the pivot to its previous position. The need to add an intermediate bell crank to the gear linkage in order to drive the high mounted actuation lever on the box has meant that the lever ratios and travel have changed.

The upshot of this is that with lever had a very small "throw" but required a lot of effort to move it (force and distance being proportional in levers). Now I'm not small or puny (Dan once said that watching Tim and me both exert maximum effort on the same recalcitrant part was amongst the most scary things he'd ever seen) but not being able to change gear without an audible grunt of effort seems a bad thing.

So I shortened the bottom of the lever and returned it to the original pivot position which had the effect of doubling the lever ratio. Now I still have a nice short throw on the lever but one that doesn't require enough effort to make my temple throb when changing gear.

So with driveshafts, brakes, gears, exhaust, fuel and coolant the last thing to put in place before this race car moves again is the drive chain. I'd ordered a new one up from B&C express. But my personal numptyness quotient kicked in and it's a tad too short as can be seen from my entry to the "Most inappropriate use of heatshrink in a structural role" shows.

Currently I'm waiting for another one and once that's here to quote the automotive loon Murray Walker it'll be "Go Go GO"

Its running again and getting close to moving

A fair amount of progress has been made this weekend. First up Duncan and I refitted the engine following fitting the baffle plate last week. This took a leisurely three hours. Before fitting the engine I took fellow racer Gordon Griffin's advice and eschewed the exhaust heat wrap as nasty horrible & ineffective. In order to protect the fuel tank and my arse on the other side of the bulkhead I stuck some heat reflective blanket on the engine bay bulkhead. With the engine bay empty I also painted up a a few areas where I'd welded brackets in place and tidied up the wiring an main earth points.

By Lunchtime we were ready to fill the coolant system and restart the engine. With the engine idling nicely we then kept adding oil until the running level at idle was on the Max mark in the sight glass. This took 4Litres in all ( with a new filter) and I now need to understand how much over fill is required beyond this point I'll be asking Andy Bates next week.

With the engine and drive line in place I was ready to move on to the brakes. My ultimate aim was to get the brakes sorted out, fit the drive chain and then have the beast move under it's own steam up and down the drive.

First up was the brakes. The trial fit of the calipers yesterday proved that they would fit under the wheels so I set about permanently fitting them up. However we did hit a problem. The Calipers are made of four major parts, the two halves are separated by a pair of aluminium spacers. In my case the spacers in both calipers were oversize and actually prevented me from fitting the pads. So it was time to disassemble the callipers remove the spacers and set about them with a file. so after a couple of hours of fettling I actually had calipers that fitted on the car AND to which i could fit brake pads. Then I set about fitting the brake lines and doing a first bleed of the brakes system. Unfortunately this revealed a leaking front master cylinder which took a bit of rectifying and burnt through the reaming time in the day. Still the engine is running and I have a largely complete braking system. Although another slight wrinkle is that the mintex 1144 pads are a bit too thick to fit when new.

The Toys are back in the pram... but only just

The saga of my rear handbrake calipers continues. As my paddock buddies are off racing this weekend I'm stuck in the garage fitting brake calipers. The new calipers are really my last option so they better fit.

A trial fitting off the caliper inside the rim of the 14" wheel shows that these new callipers don't scrape the inside of the wheel. This is the first success I've had with this piece of kit so worth a small whoo Hoo!

The second success is that the Hi spec hand brake clapper is a direct bolt-bolt fit for the old Ultralite 2 caliper.

However when I came to fit them to the car things got much tougher. With the calipers in the correct position with the bleed hole at the top. They clear the inside of the wheel nicely and the handbrake mechanism clears the upright but the wishbone obscures the handbrake actuation mounting holes and so there is no prospect of the mechanism operating. The alternative is to swap the units on each side of the car and fit them upside down, but in this orientation the bleed holes are at the bottom and so the callipers have to be removed for bleeding which is just a pain in the arse. However in this orientation the mechanism fouls the upright so they can't even be fitted anyway. Aaaargh! (The picture BTW shows the final fixed solution)

So now I have some callipers that do fit inside the wheels and which I can fit to hubs but which will not operate, or some callipers that can't even be fitted to the car!

At this point my toys were about to achieve escape velocity from the pram, the earth and the hold damn solar system.

However engaging brain, rather temper revealed a lateral thinking solution. In the same way that the callipers are "handed" on each side of the car, the actuation lever is also handed and I wondered if I could disassemble the callipers and swap the actuation levers between the left and right side callipers. This would have the effect of moving the lever away from the wishbone that was blocking the cable hole.

I reasoned that surely any sensible piece of production design would have standardised components that could be interchangeable in order to reduce the number of unique parts that need to be manufactured.

My hunch was right! I can swap the levers, and at last I have a rear brake calliper that I can fit under the wheels, one that can actually be mounted to the hub and to which I can attach both a brake line and a working handbrake cable. Now that calls for a beer and good on you Hi Spec.

I'll complete the fit up tomorrow.

Sump and Sprockets

At last I seem to be taking two steps forward and only one step backwards. Firstly I've fitted the baffle plate to the engine. That was a straightforward if messy process, because there is no such thing as a sump gasket on a CB1000RR and the sump flanges are sealed using blue gasket compound. When you fit a baffle plate you have too make two gooey gaskets (one on each side) in this manner. Still it was pretty straight forward. While I had the sump off I also fitted a new cap to the swinging sump which Graeme at Nova had made up for me (apparently it needed a 3 degree undercut on the connection tube and this had been missed on the original), and I also checked that it was indeed possible to remove the oil filter despite the close proximity of the exhausts. It's fiddly but possible.

When I collected the sump bit I also collected two new rear drive sprockets that Graeme had also made me . I now had a range of 34,35, 36 teeth at the rear which when coupled with some 14,15,16,17 front sprocket give me a diff range of 2.9 to 3.9 in 10% increments.

So a week of moderate success for once.

What is wrong with this picture?

The more observant of you may have spotted that the engine bay is now sans engine. One of the (few) benefits of missing the first few meetings is that I can use the data gathered by others also developing CBR1000RR engine installations. The key pieces of information established so far are

The CBR1000 RR swinging sump works effectively but only if fitted with a sump baffle plate.

The correct oil level is to fill the beast to the standard max fill line in the sight glass and then add a further litre.

Graham at Nova has also provided an upgraded internal component for the swinging sump.

The upshot of all this knowledge is that I have to remove the engine and crack off the sump. This took the grand total of two leisurely hours on a hot Sunday afternoon. Punctuated by many a bottle of larger and a couple of ice creams. This is quite good news as it probably means we could do an engine swap in about 90 minutes in the paddock if we really focused.


With the engine on the bench again it give me a chance to inspect the great work done by Tony Law in fabricating the exhaust headers. Considering these complex curves are formed by something no more complex than a skilled eye, a hammer and some heat the work is quite exceptional with virtually no distortion of the tube.

Taking the engine out also allows me to access the oil filter. This one is damaged (possibly in the original bike accident) and I need to replace it, I also need to tie it in place to stop it working loose with the vibration.

However access close to the exhaust pipes looks a bit close. and talking of the pipes I need to tighten the nuts and wrap them in heat shield before refitting it to the car.

Some Brakes Progress At last

Well I've returned from holiday keen and eager to make some progress. I have some nice new rear brake disks from Hi spec and so I crack on with a trial fitting. Unfortunately this was as much progress as I was going to make on the callipers. The Wilwood handbrake callipers with the actuation levers on the circumferential edge will simply not fit under the wheels. Aaaagh!

So the hi spec handbrake callipers it will have to be instead. These I'm assured by Hi Spec are dimensionally identical to my existing Ultralight 2 callipers so I trial fitted these up with the new disks. Eureka they seem to fit! Although the picture shows just how tight the clearances are.

I love it when a plan comes together!

That's because for me it doesn't happen very often :-(.
Unsurprisingly my brake disks failed to turn up in time for me to trial fit them before I left for holiday, and this caused a realistic evaluation of the amount of work required before the next meeting at Lydden Hill. With no rear brakes, the engine baffle plate to fit, loads of tiding jobs to do and a race transporter with no MOT there is plainly no way I'm going to be ready for Lydden particularly as I'll be on holiday for a week (crucially 2 weekends) between now and the meeting. So I've cancelled my entry.

Bah. Grump!

It Never Rains but....

Typically when I'm up against a tight deadline fate gives me a gentle kicking. The race bus which has transformed my paddock experience failed it's MOT test today with three pages of failures points.

However this I think is worse than it looks.

Basically it needs two new front leaf spring hangers and some patches to the rear box section near the rear hangers.

Plus a couple of flexible brake hoses, a new headlight and some tightening done on the handbrake lever. None if it is insurmountable and it is probably dooable in a long weekend. Unfortunately I don't have a long weekend.

The Critical Path to getting out at Lydden

I'm really up against it now if I'm going to get the car out at the next meeting at Lydden Hill in Kent. I'm on holiday this week finishing off a few jobs around the house and trying to get the car finished

The major issue is brakes. The swap to class B and hence to 14"x 6 wheels has caused several problems, not least of which is the modification of brake rotors, brackets and callipers. I've made some progress on the front disks. I'm using AP racing rotors and ali mounting bells. As previosuly posted I'd modified the front calliper mounts to get the calipers under the new wheels. However I now have a second problem in that the combination of new bells and the existing calliper mounts means that the rotors aren't running centrally in the pad grooves, I need a 2.5 mm ouboard offset of the disk. Previously I've tried resolving this with washers between the hub and the disk, but this simply caused unacceptable runout on the rotors. The solution is to place a small spacer between the hub (and disk) and the bearings in the hub. I'll be getting some of these made up this week by Dave Turner. Yes you've guessed it another Cam7 mate.

Dave is also modifying my existing rear calliper brackets to allow me to use the Wilwood handbrake callipers. Of much more concern are the rear disks. Hi spec are making these up for me to 260mm diameter. So the most crucial component on the critical path is delivery of these disks. If they don't arrive before I go on holiday, my chances of making Lydden will be non existant.

Dave Ts does me a big favour and has turned the parts around quickly, and I've today collected a bag of nicely machined Ali callipers brackets and spacers. Top work and all for the price of a couple of curries.

She Runs... at Last.

Apologies for no updates for a couple of weeks, but a fair bit of progress has been made on the car.

Firstly of course Tony Law has completed the fabrication of the exhaust, and typical of TLE it is very nicely fabricated. interestingly they hav opted for a 4-2-1 exhaust rather than the TLE thier collective experience. However if it is wrong it looks eay to convert as only a short link pipe will be needed. Unfortunately they forgot to weld a boss for the lambda sensor onto the new exhaust so I'll need to do that later.

So with the New exhaust fitted there really wasn't any sort of excuse not to fire the car up and see how she runs. This took quite a while to do as I hade to build up the induction gear, fill the oil and coolant circuits, connect a set of auxillery instruments and 20 other little jobs that needed doing before I could thumb the start button. However having turned her over on the start only to establish some oil pressure (a nice healthy 20PSI under cranking only) I took a deep breath and his "start". After 20 seconds or so of cranking to pressurise the fuel rail away she went. Cold Idle oil pressure is about 24PSi hot is around 14, no oil or coolant leaks,

Fantastic. The new exhaust is nicely rumbly and it is fair to say she burbles nicely at idle. I did have a massive airlock in the coolant system though. Characterised by a rapid spike in the indiacted temperature as the water boilded in the head, and the coolant pipes not heating up correctly. Hoever I eventually managed to clerar this and even on a warm and sunny march day she sat and idled quite happily for 30+ minutes before getting anywhere near the point where the fan should cut in.

Good, it is nice to have some success at last.

The other thing I got sorted out today was, the reverse control mechanism. This operates on a lever at the back of the car. The easiest way to do this was via a push pull cable from Cable-tec.co.uk and a T Bar handle in the cockpit.

Race Stickers Have Arrived

If you read my blog regularly you'll know I'm part of a cummunity of like minded nutters collectively called CAM7 who live and work mostly around Cambridgeshire . Although as with most things related to CAM7 this is not a hard and fast rule. (If you're brave you can subsrcibe to the mailing list at http://mailman.se7ens.net/mailman/listinfo but you better have an asbestos inbox!)

Several of us race, have raced or are going to race and many more have kit cars of various guises. For a while we've been chatting about getting some stickers made up that we can all put on our racers\road cars. Well I Finally I got around to organi$ing some and Lorraine at McIntosh Printing http://www.mcintoshprinting.com/ made them up for us. These were very reasonably priced coming in at under £1 each which is excellent value. The service was good, and delivery nice and prompt. What more can I say

These are Cut Vinyl stickers which look much nicer than printed colour on a white sticker background type. Most printing companies wanted to charge £6 or more for a single cut vinyl sticker like these so Lorraine offers great value.

Odds + Sods Jobs

With the car away at Tony Law's being exhausted there is not much I can be getting on with. So this dead time is really frustrating with the season already underway.

So We've been getting on with a few odds and sods jobs.

Firstly Duncan and I have been doing a bunch of fibreglassing. Duncan laid up some new mounting flanges for the base of the airbox so that the new floor panel and injectors can be fitted.

Using a simple bent aluminium mould and some plasticene to give nicely rounded corners I made up a couple of filler panels. These were to cover the holes we had cut in the body last year when we mounted the full roll cage. Frankly these had always looked crap and I had wanted them tidied up for a long time. So tha plan is to bond these onto the side pods before they get resprayed British Racing Green.

I've also spent a couple of hours chatting via email with Fellow RGB racer Neal Constable-Berry who is also fitting an CBR1000RR. Neal had a wiring problem with no sparks and no fuel pump operation on his car. As I'd already sorted my wiring out I was able to offer a bit of advice and Neal and Andy Bates finally got his engine running so hopefully I helped out inthe trouble shooting process.

The other big thing that we thought we'd get done while the car was away was to build a secondary bench in the Garage. The main issue was that things like grinders and the metal chop saw are pretty dirty and produce an abrasive residue that coats everthing nearby. So I wanted to seperate these from my main work bench on a seperate work surface. Also as part of this process I wanted to relocate my Pillar drill to a better working height and move it to the "dirty" bench.

Of course things didn't go to plan, and amongst other things we identified a leaking gas meter and had to call out the emergency gas service to sort it out. Using welders, and sparky grinders seemd not to be a good idea near a gas leak!

So with the bench half built and not a foot of available space due to the disruption caused by the shift round to build it Tony Law Rings up and says can I collect the car it's ready at last and now he want's out of his workshop as soon as possible. Great! things are finally ready when it is most inconvenent.

Demon tweeks have finally delivered the new front disks, and I'm close to sorting out the rear ones too . So with a bit of luck I might be in a position to start the engine and drive it in the next couple of weeks.

Maybe .... Just maybe

The First Race of the Season... And I'm not in it

Last weekend I watched the first race of the RGB season at Mallory Park nr Leicester.
It was great to meet all my racing mates again and there was much paddock ribbing from various members of the community about the fact that I had a perfectly good working race car but I've taken it apart ...again!

Which is all fair comment and was taken in good heart!

I was particulary pleased to see the novice racer Buzz who had bought Tim Pell's old Genesis racer bring it home in a Class A third place. Although a bit of mental maths indicated that if I had left the beast alone then that could have been me. Or at least Buzz and I could have been fighting over the podium place!

Hey Ho , Ce'st la Vie!

There was another silver lining to my late arrival in the paddock. Fellow racer Colin Duce has also changed to the CBR1000RR this season and is using an identical sump to the Nova one I have fitted, although in a longitudinal install. Colin has already blown one engine in pre season testing and at Mallory's hairpin his oil pressure was again dangerously low. This prompted much head scratching between Colin, his spanner Man, engine builder Andy Bates and various other members of the CBR1000RR community including me. The upshot of this is that we are all going to fit baffle plates to further control oil surge. Andy thinks that under heavy braking in a north south install all the oil may have disappeared into the clutch housing (it holds over two litres) and no amount of swing in the sump can help it scavenge oil that is actually in the clutch housing

So my late drive shafts may well have saved me blowing an engine by delaying my startup date until these teething problems are sorted. But I do feel very sorry for Andy and Colin over the costs for the blown engine.

The car is still at Tony Law's being exhausted, and I'm still waiting for brake rotors and fuel bits from Demon Tweeks. Unless i get it back together in the next two weeks I'm beginning to wonder if I'll even make the third race of the season at Lydden Hill.

Still I might use the time to finally respray the car in metallic British Racing Green (I've had the paint on the shelf for two years) and get the garage sorted out with some additional storage\tidy.

The other thing I've sorted out recently is some team stickers for all the Cam7 boys who may be out racing this season. The stickers simply say "[Cam7]Racing" which nicely reflects the email subject lines which are a feature of our community\collection of nutters.

I've also got some nice "Driver: Adrian Moore , Mechanic : Duncan Mepham" stickers made up. so it will be nice to have our names on the car at last.

Instruments and Hoverd-Palm Dash

While waiting for the brake disks and other parts to arrive, I've been trying get on with some other useful stuff. First on the list was finalising the installation of the bike clocks on the steering column. This took a while, but now gives me a nice clear view of the instruments without them smacking into my knees when turning corners.

For my secondary instruments including oil and water temp, oil pressure, lap timing, run time, GPS speed and gear indication. I'm using a nifty piece of software that Tim Hoverd has written for a palm. It relies on the serial output stream from my DL1 data logger. Tim and I often compare logs from our races so i took the opportunity to relocate my sensor inputs to match his to make this easier. Eventually I got it working for oil pressure, but water & oil temps and RPM still seem to be eluding me. I'm getting no RPM feed at all, and water and oil temps are both 300+ degrees at Idle which seems a bit exessive. So I'll need to sort that out ASAP.

Also today I did a bunch of other little wiring jobs including sorting out the neutral light indicator, the fan control circuit and so on.

All that's left on wiring now is a 12v switched supply to tell the DL1 where the start finish line is so that it can do the lap timing. A bigger still LED cluster for oil pressure warning and to fit and route the serial cable for the palm.

More Wheels, Tyre & Clappers

Duncan and I, spent most of today resolving the problems of calliper fit and alignment. The output of our labours is shown here.

No this isn't the quest for weight saving gone mad using a perspex steering arm and a wooden calliper mount would be a bit daft eve n for me. :-)

No this is prototyping a solution for the front brakes, using materials that are easy to machine and fashion into shape using the tools available, you do it this way and then transfer the measurements to the metal components and get them machined up.

Using the wooden block we established that the existing calliper mounts need to be thinned down by about 5mm to 16mm thick to allow them to fit onto 265mm disks and this works nicely inside the 14" wheels. We also established that the mount need some pockets machined into it to clear the rotor mounting bolts and pads.

265 mm is a step down from the existing 275mm disks but 5mm on the radius shouldn't matter much. Plus most of the people in the paddock run smaller disks than me, I've event attracted remarks about having "boy racer brakes" :-)

The steering arm has been shortened by about an inch and I'll get new ones cut to this pattern during the week. Changing the arm will make the steering a bit heavier, but hopefully will not introduce any nasties like bump steer, plus we've been very careful to move the mounting hole along a line drawn between the centres of the existing hole and swivel to ensure that the Ackerman angles dont change.

At the rear things are a bit tighter. Using a 254mm disk should give me around 5mm clearance between the handbrake arms, the disk and the wheel. Whether this is enough to allow the handbrake to operate will remain to be seen. But if necessary I'll adjust the calliper arms and hopefully it will be fine! The step down from 275 - 254 diameter rotors is a bit large but most of the braking happens at the front.

Overall the smaller rotor sizes should save about 2.5Kg from the car which should just about offset the heavier rims.

Many thanks to Duncan, when he comes along and helps out in the garage I get much more than twice as much done. Cheers Mate.

While Dunc was wood working I also got the rear suspension bushes and suspension mounts painted up. So that once the brakes get sorted we should just be able to bolt them back on.

So major outstanding jobs now are

1. Get it rolling again (with or without brakes on 15" wheels if necessary) so that I can take it and get the exhaust fitted.
2. Fit revised braking system
3. Modify the anteater airbox to take the upper injectors
4. Fabricate handbrake mechanism
5. Fabricate reverse lever actuation mechanism.
6. Finalise diff & engine mounting when adjusters arrive
7. Fit Tim Hs Palm DL1 based laptimer and temp sensor & tidy internal wiring
8. Pre season suspension setup
9. Get it rolling roaded and fuelling setup
10. Fit Driveshafts and chain
11. Get a trackday and some instruction in before going racing again

So not much left then!

Brakes, Wheels and A Sense of Humour Failure

W ell another week passes and still I don't have drive shafts. I'm beginning to think that I will certainly miss the first two races of the season and my first outing will be the double header at Lydden Hill in April. Still missing races does save me money but while I like making and fixing things in the garage I also like the camaraderie of the paddock and fun of racing. Hmmph.

Anyway, the major issue to resolve this week was getting the new wheels to fit. One of the consequences of moving from Class A to Class B is that Class B is limited to 6" Rims whereas class A is allowed 7" rims. It seems a bit daft as the 6" rim rule hails from a time when class B was limited to (I think) 140 BHP. Whereas as redrafting of the rules to make it a 1000cc class means that modern engines can be used that put out 165+ bhp, pretty much bringing it in line with class A. I didn't spot the anomaly in last year's draft rules regs (when I had a chance to suggest the change) so as rules are rules and I need to get some 6" rims to fit.

I bought a stack of old Ford Escort Xr3i Alloys off ebay for 14 quid, these are actually pretty light and weigh about 6 Kilos each. Unfortunately this makes them a bit heavier than my existing 15" OZ Superleggarers at about (5.5 KG each) but at least they were cheap, are the right offset and fit my Ford hubs. So all in all a bargain. These are also 14" rims rather than 15s because 14" rubber is substantially cheaper than 15" rubber (£200 per set of tyres) so If I'm changing wheels, buying myself some rubber savings down the line also seems a good idea

Like Tim, to make life easier I have also bought some of the new swanky Wilwood Powerlight callipers that include a handbrake mechanism. I had lost my previous handbrake mechanism when I removed the diff and these seem the easy option... Erm No "easy" is not the word

With the mind set of changing as little as possible I performed some trial fits of the 14" rims on the cars. This is much easier to say than do. As I now had a new set of wheels, two different types of brake callipers and two or three different types of brake disks thanks to Tim Pell who had loaned me a stack of ally belled brake rotors to use as alternatives. The permutations seemed endless, If you then throw in the fact that to get the offset right you might need spacers behind the disk or calliper mounts, to get the calliper - disk clearance right you may need packing washers between the calliper itself and the mount And anytime you change anything the calliper has to come off, the wheel has to come,off everything gets unbolted and you pretty much start from scratch you can see that it is a long and frustrating process. Particularly when you get to the end of it and see that without major modifications there is no way it is going to work with the 14" wheels bells and callipers. AAARGH. At the back the operating levers for the handbrake mechanism foul the wheel and at the front the steering arm and calliper both get in the way.

OK lets use my existing Rim's and forgo the potential rubber savings. Job done!. Erm no ...about an hour later it dawned on me that of course I can't use my existing Rims they are 7" not 6" and are illegal. ArgghggggggGGGGGHHH!

At this point with timescales already tight, no drive shafts, no exhaust and delays being injected into the timetable everywhere I had a real sense of humour failure at the frustration of it all! Even considering junking the entire season.

However common sense prevailed and I thought "OK lets get some new rims, sell the old ones to cover the cost and we are away." Racing usually comes down to choices to spend money in order to make things easier or quicker :-(. Erm No, this wont work either it as appears that 6x15 Rims are not a common size in race wheels. The only options available are Compomotive MO/MTs and these way a full 2.5 Kg heavier than my existing wheels and would cost the best part of £500 pounds.

AARGH! I know racing is a nutty thing to do but spending £500 quid to be heavier and go slower is very simply stupid and the 10KG gained would undo much of the good work that has gone into lightening the car this season.

So after a long think about the problem while on my 2.5 hour commute to work and a chat with my dear wife Katie who is totally reliable at being practically minded and pulling me down to earth we came up with a solution. If I'm likely to miss Donnington anyway, accept that that is going to happen, use the money saved and the additional time to sort out the brakes and smaller wheels by getting stuff machined to fit. That way at least you are ending up with a car that is lighter and will save you money in rubber in the future. Plus the Ford alloys are pretty cheap so getting a second set to use for track days\wets is an option then.

Simple eh Aren't ladies great at common sense, if I had any of that I suppose I wouldn't be racing any way :-)

External Injectors Mounting

Andy Bates at AB Performance has sent me the mounting plates for the CBR1000s intake trumpets and extenal injectors. I'll use the lower plate (pictured here) as the base for my modification to the cars airbox. I was going to use the upper plate as well but when I weighed it it was close to a 3/4 of a Kilo. The upper plate
only supports the injectors, but these are already supported by a casting fitted by Mr Honda to the original plastic airbox.

I figured if I could mount the injector rail on some aluminium standoffs then I could achieve the same for very little weight gain. Remember that this is on top of the engine and very high in the car so all weight lost here is especially important.

So after much measuring to try and ensure I got the injectors properly centralised on the trumpets I made these standoffs to hold the injectors at the correct seperation from the mounting plate (90mm measured from plate to tip). I'm pretty pleased with it considering I only made it using hand tools, a bench grinder and a drill press. plus is only weighs a couple of hundred grams and doesn't restrict the airflow.

Dift Mounted on New Ali plates

The new laser cut 8mm NS4 alluminium differential mounting plates turned up from Peterborough Laser cut today. so this weekend was spent mounting the diff in it's final position. Here I must credit Dave Turner a mate from Cam7 who spent a lot of time refining my original diff mounting plates drawings. Dave performed a bunch of finite element an analysis (FEA) on these mounting plates. His work allowed me to reduce the plates from those which were 15mm thick and required expensive machining from billet aluminium, down to plates just 8mm thick which could be cheaply cut from flat plate by the guys at Peterborough Laser Cut.

The Diff plates are still awaiting the chain tension adjusters (which Dave T is also machining for me).The small ears close to the rear of the plates are for bolting to brackets which will be welded to the transverse chassis member and provide lateral stability for the whole assembly.

With the diff mounted I could also finalise the engine bay signal wiring, the position of the oil pressure sensor, and all the electrical connections. The engine bay is now beginning to look very neat and complete.

This weekend I mounted the power Commander which I had imported from America and saved over £100 on it's UK purchase cost.


The only fly in the ointment was that I had it confirmed that my new driveshafts will not be here in time for next weeks appointment at Tony Law. So I've had to post pone this to the 6th March. This makes it highly improbable that I'll make the race that I was aiming for on the 25th March. Right nowI'm constantly being promised they'll be here in a couple of days and sent out immediately... but I've heard that at least three times now :-(

Coolant System Completed

Time is rapidly running out now. So it is imperative I crack on with the car. So this weekend I got the entire cooling system completed. As part of this process I cut the center out of the thermostat. I couldn't remove it completely as it has the rubber sealing ring that stops the thermostat housting leaking around its circumference. Cutting just the center out also leaves a slighly restricted hole which Andy Bates at AB Performance assures me is required to ensure that the water doesn't flow too quickly through the head. If the flow rate is too high not enough heat is transferred to the water as it passes though the head and overheating can be a problem.

As part of this process I also removed the old electric coolant pump (another Kilo out of the car )and directly connected the coolant lines to water pump on the side of the engine . Here I managed to use the stock aluminium pipes and hoses from the original engine, this is always a good idea because it is then easy to get replacements (although at a cost) from Mr Honda.

I also re mounted the coolant header tank, to this I fitted a splash guard to ensure that any over flow water does not hit the ECU which is now mounted directly behind it due to cabling limitations. While in the engine bay I also tidied up and bound up the engine bay wiring, and found a permanent site for the exhaust control valve which cannot be removed if the ECU is not to throw a warning code.

I'm really starting to get worried that I will not make my booked appointement on Monday 19th Feb at Tony Law exhausts. I need the diff & dry shafts and engine bay pretty much completed before I can take it to Tony as the exhaust must be routed around all these possible obstructions. At the moment the driveshafts do not look like they'll arrive in time.

New Shear Plate for the Rear of the Car...

The new shear plate turned up from Peterborugh LaserCut who did a great job, except that between us we managed to miss the fact that the drawing I sent them was not at a 1:1 scale . Therefore what they sent me was a perfect 75% scale model of the shear plate I actually needed. In fairness to them they corrected the mistake at no extra charge but I couldn't collect it for a few days, so it effectively cost me a week of time. However I can't fault them for thier service and will be using them to make up some ultra light 8mm mounting plates for the diff.

So a week later, with the correct plate collected I could finally weld it in place and stabilise the rear frame of the car. The plate fitted pretty well and only needed a small amount of fettling around the edges before I could weld it in place. The bolt holes all lined up nicely too... all very pleasing really.

So with the shear plate in place I cracked on and got all the rear brake lines replaced and clipped into place. The panal is all nicely painted up and pretty much finished except for the mounting required for the push -pull cable that will work the reverse control lever on the diff.

More Wiring, Fuel And Clutch

This weekend I did still more dull dull wiring but I think that I'm pretty much there now. I managed to complete the following.

• Signal wiring to the bike clocks for the main beam and indicators , plus oil pressure and coolant temp warning LEDs.
  Wiring for throttle pot, coolant temp, oil pressure and oil temp to the DL1
• Removed the remnants of the old ZX12 management loom and ECU.
• Connect the Tacho feed to the DL1, and shift lights.
• Made up an auxillery spiral cable to connect the steering mounted dash to the rest of the loom.

Pretty much all that is left now is to bind up the looms and clip them into place, a job that I hate because it makes my RSI damaged wrists hurt. Actually Mrs M is really good at this, I think I may have to ask her very nicely.

I also removed the old oil cooler tubes from the side of the car. My plan is to control the coolant temp using a large radiator and leave the oil temp to sort itself out. As a result the left side of the car is much much "cleaner". It's rather nice to be removing stuff from the car... hopefully this will all add up to a significant weight reduction.

I also spent some time reoruting the clutch hydraulic line, as the clutch slave cylinder is on the opposite side of the car on the CBR 1000. And lastly I connected the main fuel feed and removed the now defunct Injector fuel return line.

So now we have fuel, clutch, wiring & diff done. That leaves throttle cable, coolant and exhausts. Finally it seems like I'm getting close to finishing this engine installation.