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.