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.