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.

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.

Much Progress- Still Much to Do

Well, its now mid January, and the racing season is rapidly advancing towards me.
In the last two or three weeks I've made a significant amount of progress in lots of areas, but there is still much to do if I'm going to make the first race in early March. The major achievement of the last couple of weeks is that I've completed the initial mouting of the new differential. Unfortunately I've had to construct the mounting from heavy old steel. Hopefully in the longer term I can replace the steel bits that I've fabricated with some nice light alloy plates.

Mounting the diff was a key step on the critical path to getting this beast back to the track. With the Diff mounted I spent a long time trying to get the drive shafts sorted out. Of course with the new diff my old shafts dont fit and so I needed to get some new ones made up. It turns out that my outer CV joints are Escort based and the driveshaft cups on the new diff are Fiesta ones, true to form nothing is ever easy and Mr H. Ford seems to have used a myriad array of different splines to join the wheels to the engine on his various models, this is not helped as on a typical car there will be 4 different sets of splines (diff, each end of the DS and then in the hub.) All of which makes matching a non standard DS to inner CV joint, outer CV joint and the hub a bit of a challenge.

After bemoaning this situation to Aiden he mentioned that he has a couple of Sierra 4x4 front driveshafts left over from the Tiger he is building and that I was welcome to them.

Miraculously they had the correct splines on each end, but were too short. This turned out to be a blessing as I was able to cut them in half and fit them to the diff and hub respectively. I could then link the two with a tube and move the suspension through it's full range of movement. This gave me the total lengths of the shafts (54 qand 56 cms so I guess the diff is off center) So now with the lengths and samples of the correct splines I can get some bespoke shafts made up by GB engineering of Natwich.

With the major headache of driveshafts out of the way I was then able to move on to the next item that had been dependant upon the diff being in its final position; the rear shear plate. You may recall that I had to cut some of the structural bracing out of the rear of the car to get the new diff in. This needs to be replaced and so I'm going to get a rear bulkhead cut out of some 3mm steel and weld it to the remaining tubes. With the diff in it's final place I could now get the dimensions I needed to draw it out in a CAD package. The drawing is now with Peterborough Laser Cut and hopefully I'll get the plate back later this week for welding to the chassis. The large hole on the right is for the exhaust and the larger one in the centre is where the diff pokes through. The indent on the right hand side is to mount the push pull cable that I'll be using to control the reverse mechanism.

Next on the list was a handbrake mechanism. As my old diff also had the handbrake mechanism I need a replacement system. Rather than faffing around making something I decided to take the easy option. Wilwood do some new Powerlight 4 pot alloy callipers with an integral handbrake mechanism. These seem a good place to start, and a careful trial fit of somes seems to indicate that they are an almost direct replacement for my existing Hi Spec units so I need to order some of these and feed the Hi Specs to the ebay vultures.

The last major job that is sitting out on my activity horizon is fitting the new engine to the existing anteater airbox. This is more complicated that for the ZX12R as the CBR1000 has a secondary set of injectors that sit in the airbox, which need to be positioned at exactly the right distance above the intake trumpets. I had planned to use the existing airbox and convert it but Andy Bates of ABPerformance produces a bespoke airbox for the CBR100RR, and a quick chat and visit to seeh him indicates that the CNC milled Ally plates that he uses for the top and bottom of the box can be used to mount it to my airbox, so I've got a pair of them on order as well.