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 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.

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 :-)