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!