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.

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.