Two Go Mad In The Garage

Cack handed fool

2011-02-13T16:45:00.002Z

Because I am a complete idiot the last time i took the westie off the jack I let it down onto a piece of wood on one side that flicked up underneath the car and slightly damaged the rear wheel arch gelcoat - now pondering what to do about it.

I also desperately need to sort the car out a bit before i put it back on the road for the summer - so I need to bleed the brakes and change the oil and oil filter as a minimum.

Front number plate

2009-04-02T11:41:00.003Z

A front number plate has been attached (airbrushed the reg out here) and we took Dennis down to Cromarty for a little run out....the highland roads are so fuill of 'muck' that even six miles has left him needing another wash.

Muck Stoppers and Anna

2009-03-31T19:00:00.006Z

Prompted by the imminent arrival of Chrissy for a few weeks I have been trying to do some fettling on the car - including getting it taxed! - and fitting the funny aluminium bits components that were in the 'bits left over box' that every builder I'm sure must have!

These bits are 'muck stoppers' - that is the polite term, the more normal term will I am sure be obvious to you.

They are not mentioned in the manual at all, and despite trawling the net I couldn't find any really good photos of exactly where and how they fit.

So below is a photo to show the position of them

Helping me fit them is new star car builder wannabe - Anna, previously the 'official photographer' for this project... and now sporting Chrissy's green overalls...in fact Anna's help was only offered on condition she got to wear the overalls !

Here is our new star at work on the silicone sealant around the 'muck' stoppers... having previously done her first rivetting.

Cleaned in scotland

2009-03-01T19:45:00.003Z

Sadly working on my own as Chrissy not around, but preparing for some real work here is Dennis cleaned up....

Chrissy back for the weekend

2009-02-10T12:42:00.007Z

Chrissy was back for the weekend, and so we put some work into the car, despite the freezing weather. 5 layers and woolly hats were the order of the day.

The car was still filthy from it's trip up. The battery was completely flat. We recharged the battery (reminded of the stupid way it is mounted which means it is almost impossible to get in and out without removing the nose-cone which in turn means loosening the headlights which loses their alignment) and delighted to say the car started first time (last started in August)

Then we cleaned out the cockpit and refitted carpets (new velcro) and seats.

As always it took longer than expected - about 3 hours in total.

The 550 mile tow

2008-12-06T13:54:00.003Z

Dennis has arrived at his new home, after a slight nightmare getting him from Oxford.

Stupidly I choose the coldest, snowiest iciest week of the year to get him from Oxford.

I picked him up from the lock-up in Kidlington on Wednesday night in the dark and the freezing cold the seats and carpets were taken out and the westie was loaded onto the trailer. Then after delaying for 24 hours to avoid the worst of the snow I towed him up on the 4th of December through wind, snow and rain to arrive at his new home covered in salt and water.

Going over Drumochter pass in the snow with the trailer was interesting!

The drive on arrival was very very icy even after salting but he was put away ok.

Big thanks to Ann for lending us her lock-up

Big thanks to Steve for lending us his wonderful trailer

Big thanks to Dave for helping me load - not trivial in those conditions.

Big thanks to Martin for slating the drive and helping me unload.

New home in preparation

2008-11-05T19:19:00.005Z

Our westie is stuck in a small lock up in Oxford gathering dust and gently rusting....

....but there is a plan for an escape - here is a new home for our Westie -

The garage door should be fitted next week and the second fit of the rest of the building should be finished by the end of November.

The current plan is to run a rescue mission for Dennis (our westie) in the first week of December.

Though I have to say that I am not looking forward to towing for 540 miles in December.

An update and a new helper

2008-07-15T16:18:00.002Z

After completing all our work on the car, we kind of ran out of steam. Getting the car built was an end in itself. I have hardly driven it since.

Work has been busy for me and Chrissy disappeared off to University shortly after the car was finished.

But now it is going to get properly finished off over the next few months.

Chrissy and boyfriend Tom came and took the fuel tank out at the weekend and extracted from it the shutter from the filler cap mechanism that fell off and has been floating around the fuel tank ever since. This was, for once, not our cackhandedness but a mismanufactured part.

The car looks like it will shortly be going to stay with my sister (thanks Di) as we are moving out of this house and Dennis (the name Chrissy has chosen for our car) is having a new garage built in the highlands of Sotland, where Tim will give it some TLC and fit the hood etc.

We're On the Road At Last - Hoorah!

2007-04-23T18:38:00.000Z

Yes today we got the DVLA phone call the paperwork was ready, we could pick up our V948 Number plate authorisation certificate - which contained a princely two rubber stamped and a biroed in scrawl of the registration plate - quite why this took two working days I have no idea.

Anyway we got number plates made, and fitted and went for a quick drive around the block before the rain arrived - we were too quick for the photographer, so here is the only known photo of the first ever test drive - and here is a picture of the odometer with our very first mile on the clock...

Chrissy then had to return to A level revision (boo) while tim took 'er indoors and the official photographer each for their own little drive.

Key stats are:

Top speed achieved so far 55mph!
No. of times we have grounded - 2
No. of bits fallen off - 0

Courtesy of advice from friends on the WSCC website (and Steve's short 18mm spanner) we seem even to have fixed the oil leak coming from the the pressure sender on the side of the engine.

In the last photo - the old geezer is to be seen with a smile on his face....

The day is to be remembered, and not just because the good ol Current Bun ran a story about Her Maj being a lifelong Gooner.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2007180703,00.html

bl**dy paperwork

2007-04-19T19:44:00.000Z

Another lovely sunny day and still not managed to get the car registered....

If you have a car made up of new bits you can have a new registration (currently '07) as opposed to a 'Q' plate. To achieve this you need to fill out form V55/5 which you find is not downloadable from any govenrment website, so you phone up DVLA and eventually find someone who will send it to you - they say they will but of course they don't.

This doesn't surpise you as no-one at the published central DVLA nunmbers seems able to answer any of your questions about registering a kit car for the road, and you obviously know more than they do.

The only thing they agree on is that you need to speak to your local DVLA office.

Now local DVLA offices seem to make a point of publishing no phone numbers so speaking to them means going to one, and queuing up....and when we say queuing up we mean take a flask and a good book. Additionally DVLA offices do their best to be inconvenient by opening 9-5 weekdays so don't think about popping in on saturday mornings or on the way home from work.

Arrive at DVLA office having nipped out from work at lunchtime, with form V55/5, and your precious SVA certificate, and your insurance - which is wasting away as of course you need insurance to register but can't drive the car, and your passport, and your certificate of newness which can't be sent to you until you have your SVA certificate as it needs to cross reference it, and your invoice for the kit showing the chassis and engine numbers and your form V750 if you have already reserved a registration number oh and of course last but not least just over £200 - (presumably so much to pay for all of the paper pushing).

Your turn gets close, the anticipation builds....surely I have all the right paperwork?...have I filled in the ridiculous V55/5 form correctly?..do I have time to pop into halfords on the way back to work to get some plates made up?....can I get the plates on tonight in the gorgeous sun and go for a spin?...why didn't the bloke next to me use some deodorant this morning?....

You arrive, at the window, your heart sinks in early exchanges as you realise that nice bloke at window doesn't have experience of registering a new kit car...you produce all of the documents he needs, his superior comes to the window and demands the invoice...there are questions about the date of the invoice "it's sixteen months old"...."er yes that's because it takes a little time to put together - you see it's a kit as I explained"

Anyway fifteen minutes in and your spirits soar as it is agreed you have all of the required paperwork - hoorah! - open road here we come.......you pay your 200+ readies over knowing that these fine people deserve every penny...and then the vision is ripped from your eyes....

"now would you like to come back and pick up the documents when we've prepared them in a few days or would you like us to post them to you...what no I'm sorry that won't be this week now sometime next week".....Arghhhhhhhhhhhhh!

You leave disconsolate, walking back in the sun, worrying that you have left all of your precious documents with the nice people, contemplating certain suicide if they lose them all and you have to re-sva.

I say Terry Leahy for head of the civil service.

SVA Passed on Friday the 13th

2007-04-14T21:14:00.000Z

Lucky for some....

Second time lucky - despite the date....

though the night before was a complete 'mare as when we went to load it onto the trailer, we found that the brakes on one of the trailer wheels had bound on and we couldn't free them. By the time we had tried it was dark, and our SVA test was booked for 8am next morning 70 miles to the south of us in Southampton.

Whilst Tim swore, Chrissy remembered that we had been offered another trailer borrow, so a quick phone call and a drive to Northamptonshire meant that we got a second trailer - that made us a four car, two trailer house briefly! Fortunately 'er indoors is in Scotland so didn't see that general chaos of parking that ensued.

Anyway we got loaded up by 11pm and off very early next morning - a tense hour at the centre and we got a pass.

Now have to work out all of the paperwork.

Meanwhile Best Wishes to Father/Grandfather Bob who has spent much of the last two weeks in hospital.

SVA Fail, but we think a good one

2007-03-26T17:43:00.000Z

We didn't pass our SVA first time, but few do, and we are not despondent. The SVA process is a peculiar mix of the sensible and the mad. Before you can take your homebuilt car on the road you have to take it to a special VOSA test centre - we had to go to Southampton. Where some guy with a mixture of high tech, and frankly home brew test instruments takes a 3 hour look at your car. Yes 3 hours of prodding poking, brake testing, speedo checking etc. etc.

On the whole this is probably a good idea to prevent people putting complete 'heaps' on the road - but the lengths that they go to are sometimes OTT.

For example one of the eight or so failure items we had was the bottom of the suspension struts - where there are notches to insert the adjuster tool - these were considered dangerous edges - though frankly if you are hit by the car in this position whether it is a rounded edge or not seems a little superfluous.

It is also true to say that such things are not consistent between test centres, Westfield said they had only ever heard of a single other example of an inspector picking this up when I spoke to them this pm.

Here you can see the fix which involved some cut done 'wing piping' - a sort of rubber edging you can get from nfauto and a cable tie.

equally silly in my opinion was failing for the edge of the centre hub of the spare wheel no seriously! It's pretty hard to imagine an accident where you reverse at high speed into someone bending over so that they get a little rubber protection on that edge - which miraculously saves them.

other stuff that is silly is that they can't test a car which has a speedo drive from the front wheel and so want certain manufacturer certificates that may be a pig to get.

That said this is overall a creditable process in my mind, and they picked up a small hydraulic leak in the brake system, some missing fuel hose clips (though it was WF that supplied the engine without them fitted) and a missing split pin in the handbrake connection.

The other nice thing about this test is that it is iterative, i.e. they only test the failed items on a retest.

When we got back, Chrissy was persuaded to have her first little drive (off the trailer and into the garage).

Thanks to Bob, Rory's Dad and Ewan for their kind thoughts, they are much appreciated.

Restest is two weeks on Friday.

SVA in the morning

2007-03-25T20:46:00.000Z

We are unlikely to pass our Single Vehicle Approval test, but we at least have a chance.

And I (Tim) would like to say as the car is 'finished' and on the trailer to say how proud I am of my daughter (Chrissy) for all those hours in the garage for persevering and smiling (mostly) and putting up with my grumping (occasionally). Whatever happens in the test, we have built a car which can be driven and looks nice, and there wasn't a single time when Chrissy 'couldn't be bothered', and I'll say it again I'm proud of her.

A very busy week, so no time for blogging. We had an initial list of 37 jobs from Westfield to do from their 'pre-SVA'. We added a few to that as we went along.

Don't have time for all the details as have to be up at 5:30 to drive it to the SVA test centre in Southampton for 8am.

Anyway - struggled to get the brakes right - and picked up some hydraulic fluid burns on my hands from long hours of various activities.

In the next picture you can see 'er indoors sitting in the car being our brake pedal pusher for one of several 'beeding'sessions.

Things had been going OK, until Sunday lunchtime-ish when things started to go a bit adrift - no dip beam on the headlamps - took an hour and a half to debug. An oil leak, and running out of petrol caused several other headaches.

But anyway it's complete and on the trailer ready to go. The nil time to run the car or drive it anywhere means I think our chances are slim - especially with the brakes as they are - which is much better than they were but possibly not test passing quality. But we'll give it a go, learn some stuff and if we fail we'll put it in again in a few weeks.

Message to Bob, we're thinking of you - don't worry about the small stuff - let us help wherever we can.

Blizzards and Progress

2007-03-19T20:45:00.000Z

A Speed Blog as short of time and loads of work emails to catch up on.

Up very early, cleared snow off car cover, drove carefully through clear but freezing conditions to Kingswinford - after a Mr Bean type attempt at reversing the trailer, we got the car unloaded very efficiently ( about 15 mins compared to the several hours it took yesterday to load it and tie down etc.) and met up with video-star Ian Ridgway (ref: A sportscar is born). Ian is a really nice guy and did his best not to laugh at our build attempts.

Here he is on the right.

Anyway the clutch was stuck and he freed it, he replaced the ify starter motor corrected our dodgy engine wiring, did the car setup and a couple of other little jobs.

The pre-SVA test he did amounted to a page and a half of failure items (which apart half of which we knew as hadn't really preped the car) - here is the list...
.

ian is the first person to drive our car..... and here is a pic of the first drive ... Ian driving it onto the trailer (sans seat).

The home through the blizzard...poor car got VERY wet....then unloaded it and Tim drove it for the first time in sleet into the garage.

Not a good weekend

2007-03-18T21:24:00.000Z

We thought we had a small list of mostly easy reassmbling tasks this weekend, but despite working Friday night, Saturday and Sunday we seem only to have gone backwards. Tim now has a bad back, and Arsenal lost in injury time. Argh.

On top of this we are due at Westfield tomorrow and the weather is forecast to be variously, Snow, Hail, Ice and Gale force winds - just peachy for towing an open top car.

Still some perspective is required, much worse things are happening in the world.

Anyway here the key lowlight was the disappearing into the fuel tank of the little shuttery thing that you push the nozzle of the petrol filler through. I have no idea why it came off it just did. removing the tank with the body on does not look very easy.

Aside from that we broke the washer jet, failed to get an engine start, had a big leak of coolant, and didn't get through our list of jobs. Other minor failures will not be recorded as there is enough misery in the world...

We took the carpets and seats out to protect them from the elements on our journey to WF. Here is Chrissy taping some plastic over the dash as some limited weather protection.

We umm and ahhed about removing the tank on Sunday morning, but decided that there was too big a chance that we would not have it secure for the journey so chickened out.

Here is Chrissy pushing the car onto the trailer (Tim is out of shot on the right on the winch - honest, Anna is photographer in chief).

The offending item (well actually that's the missing bit).

Two other messages - first Bob, sorry to hear you haven't been well hope you have had a better day today, and to Steve - thanks for being so kind as to drop round and check our tie-downs really very much appreciated.

Stuck the Scuttle down

2007-03-15T23:05:00.000Z

Two and a quarter hours each in the garage tonight, to stick the scuttle down - why so long - well first we had to mod the heater outlets a bit to stop them fouling the ECU, then we had to mod the top of the scuttle a bit (is this the last bit of GRP hacking?) to get a better fit on the sashboard - Carpet Queen Chrissy insisted this was done off the car so we didn't get GRP dust all over her carpets. then we had to masking tape up the sides of the car, and then of course we had run out of M6 x 20 bolts to bolt on the scuttle and nose cone. Wanted to put nosecone and bonnet on as the silicone was starting to dry in case they push the scuttle back a bit.

Then we siliconed on the other side repeater that we hadnt done on Sunday, and finally the scuttle itself...then wipe off any excess silicone and so on.... and suddenly we were worn out and it was time to go and wash the GRP dust off.

scuttle rebuilt ready for sticking down

2007-03-14T02:01:00.000Z

We put the heater in, fixed in the washer jet to the scuttle and put it back on the car ready for sticking down (probably thursday) we thought this would be simple but the heater now fouls the cables coming out of the transmission tunnel - well probably be able to route them though with a bit of bodging.

No work tomorow night as Tim has a work dinner thing.

Things to do before the SVA test in 13 days time are ...

Pre factory visit

adjust wipers
Nail and stick scuttle down
refill water system
start engine (buy oil can to squirt oil in through the pressure sender hole)
rivet secondary panels below the dash
crashpad
headlamp raisers?
headlamp setting?
shift brake pipes so dont clash
bleed brakes

Post factory visit - pre SVA

carpets refit
Bleed Brakes
seal pedal box cover
interior mirror
sva stuff
grommets on rear bulkhead

Gumping in the garage

2007-03-12T22:27:00.000Z

Don't know why, we normally work well together, but perhaps because of tiredness we got on each others nerves tonight.

Anyway have to be very quick in the update.

We got some owrking windscreen wipers (hoorah) although they do appear rather pathetic - childs toy like.

still havent stuck the scuttle down tho.

8 days til we go to the factory

2007-03-11T19:26:00.000Z

Tim had a very difficult week at work with a lot of late nights so no progress til the weekend.

We picked up a trailer and tow car on Friday night, and some extra tie downs on Saturday night although we probably wont need them.

Tim fiddled about with the wipers and their fittings for much of Saturday, and although not happy with them, we think that we will have a go to see if they work.

We had to fit the wiper motor, and then bend the first of the pipes out of the wiper motor so that it reaches the first of the wiper boxes. Top tip - from Mark at WF - do the bending with the cable inside the pipe it lowers the chance of kinking.

we decided to work out where the motor should go by cutting a piece of coat hanger to the same length as the 'A' pipe and then bending that to give a good position for the motor, of course the only place the motor would go fouled the ECU, so Chrissy moved the ECU mounting position and Tim fitted the wiper motor to the scuttle.

Chrissy has worked on the carpets most of the weekend, as we got the main tunnel carpet back from WF, with the gaiters sewn into it. However it still needed a fiar amount of cutting to fit

around various chassis members.

After working on the carpets, Chrissy reconnected the dashboard here you can see her sitting relaxing having a cuss at the manual.

And here you can see it in the finished but untested state.....

One job that required help from 'er indoors, was to turn the car around, as we will need to mount it forwards on the trailer, and so as it was a lovely spring day, we thought we'd do that now rather than in the inevitable rain next weekend, however as our drive runs upwards and is bounded by walls, we had to push the car up into the road and do a three point turn and then roll it back down into the garage.

Chrissy looking a bit worn out after the weekend's work...

Our last job was to seal the windscreen, which before we could do we had to strip about 87 layers of prehistoric masking tape off the scuttle and clean the whole thing off. We just put two new strips of tape on to catch the worst of any silicone seal spills.

We also got some ali cleaner and cleaned all of the windscreen surround, as once the screen is sealed there is no getting it out again.

Its in the garage drying now.

lack of confidence

2007-03-05T20:25:00.000Z

Tim had to drive almost past Westfield's front door this morning, so he dropped off the tunnel carpet to have the gaiters sewn in.

The famous Mark Walker also spent 5 minutes talking through how to get around one of the problems we had run into at the weekend.

Specifically the rubber tube that butts up against the scuttle underneath and goes around the wiper shaft, was fouling the air distributor thingy that takes the air to the demister vents.

This is a problem other builders have reported on their blogs. Mark however had a solution that we had not seen elsewhere. Specifically rather than butcher the air distribution moulding instead butcher the rubber tube so it fits around it....obvious really.

We have just spent a couple of hours out there tonight, and made some progress - widening out the holes in the fillet to 16mm so the threaded buses for the wiper boxes fit through, and in the bottom photo you can see the lower rubber tube fouling.

What we hadnt bargained for however was the upper little rubber tubes that sit between the scuttle and the fillet also have a 3D problem - they protrude under the screen and will interfere with where we are to seal it.

We could butcher the back of them so this didnt happen, but worry that this is just symptomatic of the screen being badly out of position.

rest of the pics from the weekend

2007-03-04T21:31:00.000Z

Speed Blog

2007-03-04T21:22:00.000Z

Lots of time put in since Friday, but little time left to write the blog.

So here is the short version....

put on front cycle wingy mudgard bits, took 10 x longer than thought, one of them had deformed in storage, one hits the body, both foul the flexible break hoses, took a chip out of one of them filing the fitting holes ... oh b*gger

put on the rear part of the carpet using velcro strips, and similarly the rear retainery finisher stip thing.

fettled the fillet that sits at base of windscreen and did some work on wiper drives, but run into problems

cut transmission tunnel carpet to take gaiters for handbrake and gearstick.

timed out

Brakes Bled?

2007-02-26T20:56:00.000Z

We have bled the brakes this evening, using an Easibleed thingy. Not really sure if it's worked or not.

You can pump the brakes up a bit but don't really know what is good/bad. Anyway the brake pedal works, and I think we will leave for 48 hours do some more bleeding and leave it at that til we take to the factory for set up.

Sorry this isn't really a very visual post as not much to see!

Of course if we haven't done it right we'll let our relatives post the crash pictures.

Lots of time, little progress, dont mention the football

2007-02-25T19:55:00.000Z

With the help of local Westy owner Steve, we have made a little progress with the windscreen, here you can see Chrissy and Steve with it sort of in place. The dimensions are still not perfect so a phone call to the factory tomorrow.

Tim has a bad back so was very grateful for Steve's help.

We pressurised the brake system using an EZbleed thing, but didn't actually bleed them as noticed that the master cylinder had some fluid in and didn't want to mix synthetic and non-synthetic fluid. Another thing to ask the factory about.

Lots of other little jobs fiddled at over the weekend, including some holes for the windscreen washer pipes and jet (another area where the manual lies - don't drill an 8.5mm hole in the top of the scuttle, about 6.5 will probably do...doh!)

We also fettled away a bit of the return flange from the scuttle to enable fitting of the upper interior panels that were previously fouling the scuttle and body.

Then we fitted the cover for the pedal box - this - as always - required hacking away some of the glass fibre so it didn't foul either the bonnet catch mounting or the bottom of the bracket that holds the header tank up.

We have used three thread cutting M5 bolts as we will need to take it off again and run sealant under the outer edges ...but we'll save that until we have some sealant on the go.

A degree of panic is setting in as it is only three weeks tomorrow that we are due to take to westfield for set up....

A date for SVA and a bad back (again)

2007-02-23T21:39:00.000Z

Oh dear oh dear oh dear!

I don't know what is more worrying - the old geezer having a bad back again or the fact that we now have a date for the SVA test - 26th March - eeek!

Anyway due to recurring injury the best Tim was able to do was put some connectors on the headlamps, while Chrissy got on and put the kick plates on using velcro (the kick plates cover the lip of the body where you get into the cockpit) The rounded end needs to go towards the back.

We have also drilled out some rivet holes for the little interior panels that fit in front of the kick plates as you can see here - this is ok on the near side but on the off side the body and scuttle return flanges stick too far in to the body to allow the panel to fit ... can't just trim these flanges as they are used at the relevant places to provide the mounting which allows the two to positively fit together....we'll have to put our thinking caps on ....as well as get our skates on to get the car finished in time for the test.

VIN

2007-02-19T20:23:00.000Z

Today we put on the VIN plate, hardly an earth shattering job, but a little task to tick off the list.

Mark said the correct place to put it was on the scuttle face - here it is ....ta daaa -

Having a little fight with Vosa over the SVA test application, they wrote back asking for us to swear on a stack of bibles that we had built the car (apprarently normal) then they also suggested we had got the weights wrong,...but we hadn't. The maximum weights for car and 'axles' are actually shown on the VIN plate that we have just installed.

Windscreen tacked in place

2007-02-05T19:45:00.000Z

We have tacked the windscreen in place tonight, at the moment it is only held up by two bolts through the pillars instead of four. We need to fit all the hinges to the sidescreens to be able to check the measurements. Tim is worried the offside pillar is set a bit too far forward, but then he always was a worrier.

As always our productivity was low, this job taking us an hour and a half each. So many ways you can get the measurements wrong!

Boot box fixings

2007-02-04T16:54:00.000Z

Three and a half hours each in the garage today, and some small but forward steps. First off we did a big tidy up. Then we did some finishing off on the spare wheel holder, filing out the body holes a bit so the large bolts that hold the spare wheel wouldn't fould on the body at all, and putting some convoluted tubing around the cables where they feed to the number plate lamp.

Here is a pic of the spare wheel in place, which for some reason the old geezer was really pleased with and 'er indoors had to be brought out to admire..

Chrissy then spent some time constructing a boot box securing mechanism that didn't involve reacing underneath the rear wheel arch with a spanner if you want to get the boot box off.

She put some rivnuts into some 3mm aluminium and then araldited those pieces onto the underpart of the body having drilled through both boot box and body, using some bolts to ensure the rivnuts were aligned with the drilled holes.

This is now complete, but Tim had to order on ebay some longerM5 bolts as we don't have any long enough to go all the way through the boot box into the body.

Tim spent a lot of time sorting out the rest of the top covers for the transmission panels. For the rear panels, we used thread cutting M5 bolts that we got the factory to send us, as the heads on these should stand less pround and therefore enable the carbet to go over better. Another simple job that took a long time due to various trivial snags.

In the meantime here for our records are the things we have to do to get the car finished,

We have added 21 tasks since we last put a list up, so it doesn't feel like we are much closer to the end! But on the other hand, the key obstacle to pass now is the windscreen, and before we packed up today we made a start on that, by cutting some lengths of wood to 1010mm - to act as a sort of jig as recommended in the manual. We hope to get that on tomorrow.

fix fog light switch
Drill out dashboard
reversing light connection
Empty water system
Disconnect dashboard
Brake Lines template?
Drill and fettle Rivnut holes for scuttle in body
Drill and fettle Rivnut holes for scuttle in scuttle
nose cone rivnut location and drilling
Bonnet Grommets and lugs
nose cone grill
front indicators mount
front indicators wire up
Bonnet Locks?
Fix top Body
Nail on lower body
speedo wire up
handbrake rubber gaiter and bezel rivet in place
cut second hole in top transmission panel
split top transmission panel
splint top transmission panel
mount other solenoids
Scuttle wiring loom hole
spare wheel bracket
spare wheel retainer and fixing stud
number plate panel
number plate light
number plate light wiring
attach wing mirrors to pillars
interior panels
indicator repeaters - need double sided tape
Bleed Brakes
Attach windscreen pillars to scuttle
Fit windscreen
Fit Windscreen fillet
Side screens? when?
Wiper wheel boxes
wiper motor
wiper motor rods
wipers
washer jet
demister pipes
kick panel things - how?
Rewire up Dashboard
Nail and stick scuttle down
fit pedal box cover
VIN plate
boot box bolts
front cycle wings
interior mirror
dashboard trim
top cover aluminium panels
mark up carpets for cutting
carpets
crashpad
headlamps
refill water system
sva stuff
crash pad
rear crash pad retainery thing

Interior panels

2007-02-03T16:39:00.000Z

We spent the day fitting the interior panels, this was another classic underestimate of the time to take - the panels are flat and fit perfectly in the sides of the car, so how long can it take to drill forty holes and fit forty rivets - surely two hours at most.

Well I reckon we've now spent a total of 10 person hours fitting them.

Working out where to drill to hit chassis rails. Needing to source black 3.2mm peel rivets, 3.2mm black regular pop rivets, and finally some really top quality bosch hss-g 3.3mm drill bits -

were some of the problems - but getting any drilling done down in the footwells was also a real pig - in one of the pics here you can see Chirssy doing her impression of a mole.

You can also see her wearing some expensive bose headphones as makeshift ear defenders, as the dremel-a-like makes a hell of a racket when trying to go through the chassis rails. Anyway job done.

number plate, spare wheel and a scratch

2007-02-01T20:45:00.000Z

Tim has done some fiddling around in the garage for about four hours over the last week without Chrissy - as she has been off on her selection board being shouted at by burly NCOs and told to put on some weight.

Tim has soldered on the bullet connectors for the number plate lamp, and rivetted the number plate in place, and then worked on the fitting for the rear wheel upper bracket. This sits inside the body as you can see from the photo on the left, all seemed to go well until very close to the end Tim's file slipped as he was cleaning out one of the holes he drilled and he put a bl**dy great scratch on the rear body work. This will be covered by the spare wheel, and anyway can probably be fettled away, but even so very annoying.

In the meantime we have had some black peel rivets (from WF) and black regular pop rivets (from ebay) delivered to allow us to rivet on the interior panels.

2007-01-27T17:01:00.000Z

We did some work trying to drill out the rest of the rivet holes for the interior panel on the drivers side.

Here you can see Chrissy using the dremel-alike with schnozel extension to try and drill into the lower chassis member.

This did not work very well and overheated our dremel-alike, therefore going to try waiting until we have a better drill bit. Which is on order.

While Chrissy popped out this morning, Tim worked on the lower spare wheel bracket. It is another of those very difficult measuring jobs as everything is a curve. Here you can see the 3mm pilot hole in the back nearside of the car.

And in the next picture you can see the picture from underneath, with a pencil pushed through the bracket to see if the pilot hole is in the right place.

Because these holes fall on a step in the rear body, they don't look round even if they are. Still at least they will be largely hidden by the spare wheel itself.

Attaching to the lower spare wheel bracket is the numberplate, and attaching to that is the numberplate light. We drilled out all of the necessary holes for these to be fitted.

But haven't actually attached any yet, as the spare wheel is heavy and we need to see how much the bracket bends down, so may have to enlarge the holes in the body work so that the bracket is not being supported by the GRP.

In the final photo you can see the number plate resting on the bracket, just held in place by rivets push in and friction, the rivets are still to be rivetted.

Wing Mirrors and Interior Panels

2007-01-25T20:33:00.000Z

We got the wing mirrors mounted onto the windscreen pillars by dint of fettling, and then screwed them in place with some number 10 self tappers through the pre-cut holes in the pillars.

Here you can see the finished items.

This has taken us a little while on Tuesday and today (last night we had to watch Arsenal come back from 2-0 down against sp*rz).

We have also made a start on the interior panels. First thing to do is to cut out the paneling where the bolts for the lower seatbelt straps fit onto the chassis bosses. Here you can see Chrissy doing that.

We have also started drilling the rivet holes now we know that yes on the top edge just attach to the overhanging GRP of the body using small peel rivets and elsewhere use regular rivets to attach to the chassis rails. Thanks to Mark at WF for the advice.

We have also done a little work on measuring and drilling the body at the rear for the spare wheel bracket to mount.

The garage is a cold place to work these nights though.

An hour each but little progress

2007-01-22T22:59:00.000Z

After making some good progress on Saturday, Tim spent Sunday afternoon at the emirates (2-1 against ManU hoorah!) and we made little progress today.

Our first job was to rivet on one of the interior side panels that hide the chassis rails. However we had several questions that stopped us before we started - (a) we needed to work out which of the two harness points to use as we would need to cut a hole for them (b) we wanted to check with WF if it's OK to put a rivet just into the GRP as the body stands clear of the chassis rail at the top.

We then had a little fight trying and failing to tap some holes which I won't bore you with - then we decided to cut down the side mirror mounting lugs as the first of the jobs to fitting the windscreen - something we are not looking forward to. the wing mirrors are obviously off some production car and the mounting lugs are too long.

Even after cutting them back the mirror won't fit nicely in the windscreen pillar - it's hard to see what is fouling, but we suspect we need to file away some of the plastic surround as it is probably just a little too big diameter to fit nicely in the circular receptable moulded into the pillar.

We'll carry on tomorrow night.

Staurday's post - part II

2007-01-20T21:09:00.000Z

Here you can see us screwing down the front top transmission panel.

The rear part needed a rubber gaiter riveting to it, through a circular metal bezel.

This process involved several Tim bog ups, including the fact that the original hole for the gearstick Tim had managed to cut too far back and so we had to elongate. The other problem we found was that a lot of the rubber had to be cut from underneath the gaiter to give the wimpy aluminium bezel any chance of compressing it without bending as the rivets were compressed.

In the next photo you can see us pushing the final rivet through ready for the rivetting tool ....

Whilst all this was going on Chrissy was re-engineering the Ecu plate that we worked on months ago, as we realised that there were solenoids/relays from the main loom that also needed to mounted on that plate., or at least we assume they do, the manual doesn't seem to mention them at all.

When all this was complete we tacked the front panels in place, not wanting to tighten them up yet as we are bound to think of a reason why we need to take them off again in the next few hours!

Any way here is a picture of the finished arrangement - with the two sets of cables protruding from the two holes encased in large rubber grommets, and the gear stick protruding from the rivetted on gaiter. Most of these sins will be covered by carpet!

the Ecu plate can be seen on the bottom left of this final photo.

Lots done today...

2007-01-20T20:40:00.000Z

We got lots done today, wth about 4 and a half hours in the garage each. We started by refiting the front speedo cable and threading that with the ecu loom through the transmission tunnel,
this is incredibly difficult. We both have incredibly small (girly) hands but even we find it difficult. There is almost no way to get your hands into the transmission tunnel and cable tie these cables onto the existing (main loom cables) that already run through there. You need to have these well secured (and covered with some protection) as it if the cables come free they drop into the road/rotating prop shaft - neither event likely to make your day.

Here you can see the speedo pickup attached to the front wheel, several attempts required as you need to get the head very close to the bolts on the wheel hub as it is the bolt heads passing that induces a current which registers as a pulse at the speedo.

While Chrissy was using her ultra tiny hands to do that, Tim was off on one - deviating from the manual.

His first job was to cut a second 45mm hole in the aluminium top panel - it is hard to cut big holes in flimsy 2mm? thick aluminium as it bends and generally tries to run away rather than be cut up - to the left here you can see the method we found best - clamp to a flat old piece of wood and drill against that -

Of course Tim didn't have the required 45mm hole saw, so a trip to HomeBase was required, and they only had expensive ones (£9) then of course on returning home none of the Mandrels we have to mount them in the electric drill would fit, so a return trip was required to shell out another £10 for a suitable Mandrel. Anyway at least these cut nicely and cleanly.

Rather than try and push hundreds of connectors through the 45mm holes (that Tim had just drilled) in the top transmission panel to get the wires to run up from the tunnel into the area behind the dashboard, he decided to redesign - and cut the front panel in half through the holes - then mount a splint of aluminium on the front sections using some rivets and then on the splint mount some rivnuts to allow the back part to bolt on. The splint has several purposes - strength, and water protection - it is likely spray will get up here, so the splint will help protect the cut line from leaking too much water -

You can see our lovely rivnut tool here -

And here you can see the now cleaved front section with the splint riveted to it and the rivnuts inserted in the front of the splint.

Oh dear blogger seems to be objecting to the number of photos so I will have to do another post to complete the story....

a couple of little jobs

2007-01-17T22:21:00.000Z

Just a couple of little jobs over the last couple of days as Tim is still suffering from a cold - sorry to hear you are too Di. We have riveted on the handbarake surround to one of the top panels that has to cover the transmission tunnel, and we have completed the grill fixing - abandoning sikaflex and switching to araldite for the cable tie posts, Tim also put new 2pin AMP connectors on the front indicator cables that can be seen on the picture lying on the grill.

We tried out fitting the interior panels too as probably want to fix them before we put the scuttle on.

Tim in bed with a cold

2007-01-15T08:46:00.000Z

...and very grumpy with it...so no work on Sunday, but Chrissy took this photo of our rivetting underneath the body.

Nailing the body on

2007-01-13T22:23:00.000Z

We spent seven hours between us nailing the body on today. We can;t show you any pictures as the battery on the digital camera went flat. So here is a brief summary of what we did ...
jacked the car up, drilled lots of holes through the body and the chassis and put 4mm body rivets through. Doesn't sound much, but lots of use of the trolley jack and axle stands, combined with lots of measuring out to check the rivets actually went into the chassis meant this was, as always, a slow process.

This is also not a job for the elderly (Tim) laying on your back your back hurts, your muscles are too weak to push up on the drill for long periods and your accomodation is not good enough to focus on the ruler held close to your eyes.

More seriously - if you are another prospective bulder serious advice is (1) buy a really good/expensive drill (18V) and (2) use bullet style drill bits, (3) wear mask and goggles (4) to help get a fix on where the chassis rails run you can drill the seat holes and measure back from them.

Next job is to bleed the brakes - haven't got a clue where to start, despite reading the wscc website! Prepare for a flood of hydraulic fluid.

An hour a hole

2007-01-07T13:45:00.000Z

Four hours in the garage in the last two days, that is four hours each, to get four holes!

These four holes were to mount the bonnet catches. Very difficult to get in the exact position, they needed packing up by 5mm on some aluminium to get to the right height, and the predrilled holes in the catches were in the wrong place (directly over a weld) so we had to reposition rivet holes.

All seemed to be well until we packed up for the day, then we put the scuttle back on and tried to relock the bonnet, although we achieved this it was certainly not smooth as the scuttle seemed to push the bonnet forward a bit - ruining our precise alignment - argh! our current thinking is that if we file the leading edge of the metal flange that mates with the semicircular troughs in the catches that may give us the 'play' that we need.

Still at least we watched Arsenal beat Liverpool in the cup on the tele last night.

Bonnet Catches and Sikaflex

2006-12-17T18:48:00.000Z

The main work for the weekend has been on the bonnet catches. There are two ways of securing the bonnet.

A pair of over centre catches on the outside of the body, that look pretty awful but make it harder for you to set off with the bonnet unlocked (leading to enbarrassing flying bonnet syndrome) - or a pair of nice looking locks that make it easier to pass the SVA test but are apparently right so and so-s to fit.

We have gone for the prettier trickier catches.

First job is to cut some holes according to the templates that come with them... The locks then need disassmbling and reassembling to fit through the bonnet. This is the relatively easy bit, as the next job is to align the catches with the lock on the inside of the bonnet and attach them to the chassis.

This requires triming of the bonnet return flange, the body and then raising up the catches on some sort of packing to get the right height.

Most of this work is done, but we don't have suitable thickness ali so will have to wait until that arrives in the post.

The other job we did today was to mount some cable tie posts onto the inside of the nosecone using Sikaflex so that we can cabletie the front grill in place - a horribly crude fixing mechanism but one that others seem to have used successfully. Here is Chrissy in her oh so fashionable purple disposable gloves applying the adhesive...

indicators and bonnet front attachment

2006-12-10T21:14:00.000Z

Made some progress today - got the indicators assembled (using self tappers rather than the rivets suggested in the manual) Drilled out the holes for the indicators on the nose cone, and did the very tricky job of drilling out large holes in the nose cone to fit grommets into which the pins that are now screwed into the bonnet slide, it seems to work OK, and does improve the 'shut' lines where the three panels meet at the front of the bonnet.

Here is a complete list (we think) of what there is left...

fix fog light switch
Drill out dashboard
reversing light connection
Empty water system
Disconnect dashboard
Brake Lines - template?
Drill and fettle Rivnut holes for scuttle in body
Drill and fettle Rivnut holes for scuttle in scuttle
nose cone rivnut location and drilling
Bonnet Grommets and lugs
nose cone grill
front indicators mount
front indicators wire up
Bonnet Locks?
Fix top Body
Nail on lower body
speedo wire up
rear mud protectors
indicator repeaters
Bleed Brakes
Windscreen pillars and mirrors
Windscreen
Side screens? when?
Wiper wheel boxes
wiper motor
wiper motor rods
wipers
washer jet
demister pipes
interior panels
Scuttle wiring loom hole
Nail and stick scuttle down
VIN plate
spare wheel bracket
spare wheel retainer and fixing stud
number plate panel
number plate light
boot box bolts
front cycle wings
interior mirror
dashboard trim
top cover aluminium panels
gaiter for handbrake
gaiter for gearstick
carpets
crashpad
headlamps
sort out termination of throttle cable
fabricate retaining clips for dash

Chuckle Brothers at Work

2006-12-03T16:02:00.000Z

Another hour each in the garage this afternoon, which saw the rest of the nosecone fitting

We enlarged the slightly off location hole in the right general direction, and then drilled out the final nosecone fixing hole - which by a combination of guess work and measuring (and luck) seems to be in the right place.

As you can see from the following photos, it looks ok-ish with the bonnet on too.

Though in fact the bonnet and nosecone don't line up - the bonnet sticks out further than the nosecone where they both rest on the body.

We are hoping that when we put the pins and grommets in that join the two that will pull them back into line. However we need an 18mm hole saw, and we don't have one, so that will be for ebay to solve in the week.

If we both get some school/office work done now, we might get out again later to start on the front indicator fixing.

Pictures - Copyright (c) Anna Pearson 2006

Two holes took two hours....

2006-12-02T20:18:00.000Z

....and one of them is in the wrong place!

Still nothing can depress us today, as we have just come back from watching Arsenal beat Spurs three nothing.

Tim did a little work yesterday to finally get one of the repeaters to fit through the body as you can see below.

But even now it doesn't sit very nicely, and the only way he could get the repeater in at all was to cut the retaining clip off, as several other builders (but not WF) had advised. We
will stick the repeaters on with clear silicone sealant.

This evening we moved on to fixing the nose cone on, the manual says to fit the bonnet locks first, but we thought that fitting the nose cone first would be better.

We recovered the bonnet and nose cone from Chrissy's bedroom and bolted them together for the hundredth time and sat them on the car, we then marked out a hole to match up with the central retaining bracket which sticks out from underneath the radiator.

In the next photo we have indicated it with an arrow....

We also tried to measure and mark where the two holes should go through the lip of the nosecone into the rivnuts that already sit in the chassis. this is another horrible/impossible 3D measuring puzzle.

Then we took bonnet and nose cone off, undid the bolts that were used to hold them together and drilled the lower retaining hole - this one was relatively easy to get in the right place as we just filed a pencil thin enough to go down the M8 hole and marked on to some masking tape.

However even after a lot of measuring, pilot holes, fettling out, we seem to have got the first of the two holes in the lip of the nose cone in the wrong place, as you can see from the last picture in the sequence it isabout three millimetres inboard of where it should be....

More fettling required tomorrow.

Enough for now.

brake pipes fitted steering is stuck

2006-11-26T12:49:00.000Z

You know how if you fly at very close to the speed of light around the universe that you come back and find thousands of years have passed by but you are only a little bit older (Well at least according to a well known patent clerk).

Well I'm sure there must be some similar effect in relation to kit car building and garages ...

You sit indoors rereading the manual for the 200th time, think oh yeah that will only take 5 minutes and pop out to the garage, but obviously the garage is moving very fast as when you come in and look at the clock, that 5 minute job has actually taken 2 hours.

Over the last couple of days we have been fitting the front brake pipes, in the top pic the thin metal pipe shows it before we started bending it, a job that requires strength skill and precision. We have 0 out of 3.

We drilled a hole in the outer bodywork (7" down from the top of the body and 1" in from the curved front of the body, yes WF still thinks we have an empire and so is reluctant to let go of the imperial system of measurements) .

In the second photo you can see the fitted offside flexible hose

And in the third photo here you can see the fitted brake pipe on the inside of the body, as you see we have had to bend it to run inside the coooling system pipes.

All would be joy except in doing this we seem to have got the steering stuck...

We wound the steering completely over one way to get access to the body for drilling and it seems to have locked in that position.

Oh Bother....

Tim is out for the week from this afternoon so it will just have to wait

.....Late update -

Thanks harv of WSCC for pointing out that it was the er umm errr steering lock!!!! How stupid are we - almost as stupid as Dave Gove!

Scuttle fixing holes

2006-11-16T21:51:00.000Z

Over the last couple of nights we have put in an hour or so each and
measured out and drilled holes in the scuttle to match up with the holes in the body that we drilled out to get at the rivnuts in the chassis.

Once again after lots of measuring we started off with small 3mm holes put the scuttle on, used a tiny alan key as a feeler, drilled out to 6mm and then marked through the hole in the scuttle with an ultra thin metal nibbed tip-ex pen this showed how the scuttle hole lined up with the body holes we then fettled with the dremmel to enlarge the 6mm hole a little in the direction indicated by the tip-ex marks on the body -

Here you can see some fettling in progress.

And here you can one of the bolts which now runs through the scuttle, through the body and into the chassis.

That was all a lot of work for four fixing bolts.

A game of Find the Rivnut

2006-11-14T22:20:00.000Z

An hour each in the garage this evening, in which we managed to remove the scuttle, and undo the heater (we are going to need to work on the windscreen and windscreen wiper stuff in a bit so don't want the heavy heater in there).

More importantly we managed to locate the rivnuts that are hidden under the body where the scuttle sits by some triple measuring and incantations to a selection of mechanical Deities.

Locating these rivnuts means working out where they are on the chassis and drilling holes in the body that covers them - amazingly we seem to have drilled all four holes in the right position AND we don't seem to have damaged the rivnut threads in the process - as this seemed to be too good to be true we packed it in for the night.

Called in sick

2006-11-12T11:59:00.000Z

Tim has had a rotten cold all week (is there a jab for man flu?) .

So no work for more than a week, even now Tim is coughing and wheezing like the old man he is.

Anyway some reasonable work on Saturday and just a little more on Sunday before we go to the football.

We jacked up the front of the car, undid one of the front hoses to drain the water system. Chrissy replaced the bung at the back of the engine that was leaking (and indeed once it was off we could see it had a split in it).

We crawled under the jacked up car to locate the reversing light switch loom - it was there just hidden. We connected that to the relevant connector (hoorah no need to change connector types) We reassmbled nosecone and bonnet (unfortunately both seem to have picked up minor scratches) and used them to position the front body, we then started to nail that onto the chassis see picture.

Hopefully more progress this week.

Dashboard holes

2006-10-31T20:48:00.000Z

It took us an hour to drill out another six holes through the dashboard to fit it properly (although Tim would still like to fabricate attachments on the inside of the scuttle to allow the bolts to be inserted without having to fiddle around holding the nuts and washers at the same time).

We didn't get them perfectly aligned as you can see but they are reasonably hidden under the creash pad that you can see here just being held in place.

More hacking

2006-10-30T21:46:00.000Z

No work for the last ten days as Chrissy has been away.

Yesterday we fitted a new fog light switch which indeed cured the fault that the telltale light was not working (nothing to do with our wiring on this occaision).

Today we (Chrissy) Chrissy unplugged all of the dashboard connections prior to us drilling all of the remaining fixing holes in the scuttle.

We also (Tim) hacked out the GRP for where the side indicator repeator units will be fitted to the body - this took some time and when complete, the repeater units did not seem to fit nor look anywhere close, another email to the factory required ....ho-hum.

After the flood

2006-10-15T20:03:00.000Z

Limited progress this weekend, mostly because the torrential rain in the week had flooded some of the garage for a few hours and so some cleaning out was necessary.

Anyway we did finally get the bushes, which hold the eye bolts, which hold the seat belts, tapped out. (Bob suggested using a bolt with part of the thread cut off as an improvised tap, but since messing these bushes up would be about as bad a mistake as you could make - them being welded into the chassis and all - we decided to get the proper tool). The proper tool was not the aforementioned M10 finepitch tap but in fact a 7/16 20tpi tap, something I wish I'd known earlier as it would have saved yet another unnecessary tap and die set weighing down the postman. We had to have one more hack of the boot box to get the eyebolts all the way home which we now have.

We left the boot box then for a while to look at the rest of the lights, we checked out the connection for the indicator repeaters that have to be mounted half way along the body and tested one. After that we also changed the bullet connectors on the supplied front indicators for the feeble AMP things that are required to match up to the loom.

The repeaters need holes cutting in the side of the body, to a rather odd shape, so we made some templates by scanning the manual and then doing some manipulation on the PC until they printed out the right size.

We'll probably start on that this week.

We have a fog light

2006-10-09T19:49:00.000Z

Following the helpful and complete debugging instructions from Mick (holding the fort while Mark is on holiday at Westfield) we now have a fog light hoorah.

We have also sorted a couple of other little problems.

Fog light wiring explained here (Mick's words)

The fog light circuit is as follows. The fuse is supplied by a blue wire, which is from the main light switch. This becomes live only when the headlights are switched on ( second position ) Then off the other side of the fuse the wire is Blue/Red. This is the output to the fog light switch. The other wire on the fog light switch, also Blue/Red, is then the wire which runs to the back of the car and ultimately to the light. In summary, Blue wire at fuse box should be live when main lights on, then the Blue/Red wire out from box should become live at the same time. At the fog switch, one of the Blue/Red wires should now be live, and as the switch is turned on the second Blue/Red wire should be live. From here the next check would be on the Blue/Red wire in the o/s rear light plug. If there is no power at this fuse then the most probable cause would be the connection on the bottom of the fuse.

Boot box hacking complete

2006-10-08T20:40:00.000Z

Just a couple of hours in the garage this weekend.

We did however finish fettling out the four holes in the boot box that allow the eye bolts and their spacers to fit through for the harness.

This job seems to have taken forever.

We also did a few other little jobs, and ordered yet another tool a tap and die set that contains an M10 fine pitch (1.25) tap which seems to be what is needed to clean out the threads in the bushes that the eyebolts go into.

Immediate things to do list as follows -

2. Fix Fog Light
3. Fix fog light switch
5. Cable up the speedo
6. Scuttle wiring loom feed hole
7. Make the six remaining dashboard holes
8. Fabricate nine dashboard retaining sockets and glue on
12. check if we have front springs mounted properly
16. Drill out acess holes for rivnuts on chassis
17. Nail the body on
18. check hand brake cable routing / tighten handbrake
19. check windscreen washer pipe routing and cut hole in scuttle for it
28. Fix boot box on
32. find something to duct the breather hole at rear of engine
33. adjust throttle idle (how?)
35. fix leak at rear of engine
37. Change bolt on exhaust bracket for longer one
38. Check if there should be a grommet around the exahaust bracket bolt spacer collar
40. Reversing light wire connection?
42. Tighten front exhaust clip/check it's the right one
43. Get 10 x 1.25 tap for seat belt fixings
44 Get 10 x 1.0 8.8 65 or 70mm for exhaust

Measuring 1000 Times Sometimes Works

2006-10-03T19:07:00.000Z

After are hours of painstaking measuring yesterday we discovered after more drilling that our holes were good enough! We are planning on extending these holes tmrw because were extremly lazy and only managed to roll off the sofa for 20 minutes.

And now we know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall

2006-10-02T20:02:00.000Z

just a little time in the garage tonight making some more holes in the bootbox. In order to allow the great big eyebolts and the spacers which hold the safety harnesses in place to pass through the bootbox.

Hard to make though as they have to line up with the bushes in welded onto the frame. Therefore lots of measuring (and a bit of guessing and hoping).

Whilst we were doing this we developed the General Unified Theory of building kit-cars which goes as follows -

1. The manual is wrong
2. If you fit it, you'll inevitably have to take off again
3. and again
4. Whatever the job is it will take ten times longer than you think before you start
5. You really really really need another tool (despite the fact that 'er indoors will swear on a stack of bibles that you have every tool ever made)

Hacking Away

2006-10-01T20:59:00.000Z

Various bits of progress and set backs over the weekend, we turned the holes cut for the roll-bar in the boot box into slots, with the intention of allowing the boot box to slide in and out without having to take the roll-bar off. ...but as you can see with the standard roll-bar (as opposed to the RAC one) this little wheeze didn't work so well -

So after scratching our heads a little we were faced with three options - go back to plan A and have to remove roll bar every time boot box has to come out (it's only two bolts but they are fearsomely difficult to get at and have to be torque tightened) plan B make the slots longer (not nice because the rear of the slots were a circle cut out and maintaining the shape while taking 10mm off is not easy) or Plan C hack off about 1cm from the rear lip of the bodywork that holds the boot box up.

No options very nice but we wen't for plan C which seemed to work ok.

We also found the mystery leak at the rear of the engine compartment - it is from a bung in the water system - needless to say it's hard to get at - that is leaking and dripping on the top of the gearbox and then running in various directions. Think we may have to wait until water system emptied before we can fix.

Failed to fix fog light despite an hour or two of trying to debug it. I wish we had a proper wiring diagram.

dial lights

2006-09-27T21:06:00.000Z

now have the speedo and tacho dial lights working having got the missing info from the ever helpful and patient Mark at Westfield.

Foranyone else it's the orange/red feeds that you need to mate up to the red and white wire on the smiths attachment harness for the white dials.

Lets play..."guess that fluid"

2006-09-24T19:31:00.000Z

Did a few bits a pieces on the car tonight, can't show the pictures as the blogger site seems not to be accepting them.

We spent a happy half an hour playing guess that fluid, by looking at what was being left on the drive and working out what it was. Steve came and helped - thanks again steve your advice is invaluable.

Found a couple of other minor little problems, and fix rather fewer, the current list is shown below.

2. Fix Fog Light
3. Fix fog light switch
4. Fix Dial lights
5. Cable up the speedo
6. Scuttle wiring loom feed hole
7. Make the six remaining dashboard holes
8. Fabricate nine dashboard retaining sockets and glue on
12. check if we have front springs mounted properly
16. Drill out acess holes for rivnuts on chassis
17. Nail the body on
18. check hand brake cable routing / tighten handbrake
19. check windscreen washer pipe routing and cut hole in scuttle for it
21. Restore covers to fuel pump connections
26. Cut boot box slots for roll bar
27. Cut boot box holes for saftery belt attachements
28. Fix boot box on
29 Fix Clutch
30. Change the bolt on the silencer mounting bracket
31. tighten oil pressure sender
32. find something to fill in the breather hole at rear of engine
33. adjust throttle idle (how?)
34. get new bulb
35. find leak at rear of engine
36. work out how main dial lights work

It's quiet(er) ...and it's lumpy

2006-09-17T20:51:00.000Z

We fitted the silencer this morning, here you can see Chrissy doing just that...

We had a problem working out how to fit the heat guard that surrounds it, but then we found some huge jubilee clips inside a plastic bag containing windscreen wiper stuff, these seemed to be what was required.

We also fitted the roll bar and torque tightened that up (a virtual guarantee that we will be undoing it in the near future)

Starting the engine with silencer on gives a much more restrained note, but still a pleasant sound. In fact it was still noisy enough to set the neighbours car alarm off!

However the clutch doesn't seem to work, and the indicators have stopped working, and the engine is running even more lumpily than before and we have some fluid leking from somewhere... so that was a rather depressing note to leave it on.

Chrissy had to spend the afternoon on school work, (apart from watching the match of course) and Tim won't be able to work on it til next Sunday at the earliest... so no posts til then.

inertia switch (again) lambda (again) silencer (first time)

2006-09-16T17:47:00.000Z

A combined six hours in the garage did yield some progress, albeit slow as always.
Our first job was to try and fix the inertia/fuel cut off switch. The original is bolted onto the chassis in the recommended (and almost only possible) location, but this means taking it off will probably mean removing the fuel tank - not nice now that is plumbed in and has the filler through the body work.

Bought a second hand switch from ebay in-case the problems caused by the original were just a faulty switch - see left.

The second hand unit came with the socket that was obviously meant to be used to connect to the switch this makes much more positive connection and in fact in turns out that the problem was that the awful westfield connectors just didn't have a good enough grip on the connection pins so no circuit was being made. therefore we soldered the traces on the socket onto the westfield wiring loom and thus were able to reconnect in the original switch and sure enough the pump whirrs when the ignition switch gets to position 2 - hoorah. I can even sell the other switch back on ebay.

Chrissy spent some time trying to make the other dial lights work, but an hour or two only proved that halfrauds crimp on spade connectors + homebase crimp tool = no good connections and spade connectors that fall out...

We drilled a hole for the lambda wire to go through the body work, intending to put a grommet around it, however the bodywork is thick here and the grommets we had bought would not work, so we resorted to convoluted tubing to protect the wire feed. The had to take off the connector that Tim had previously sweated and sworn at to allow cable to be fed through body and then had to reconnect connector once done...as a very wise blog once said, expect to do everything on a westfield twice.

Final job for the day was to make a start on the silencer. This is one of the better bits of the manual as it doesn't mention the silencer or it's fixing anywhere at all. I always thinking silence is so much more appealing than lies - don't you?

Anywhay the chassis has an extra captive nut (is this called a boss or a bush I never know) forward from the two similar fixings for the seat belt.
Of course this gives the problem of how to position the hole on the bodywork. We had already solved this by drilling a pilot inside to out using the flexible dremmel attachment.

Then we fettled out the hole to take an M10 bolt and ran an M10 tap up the captive thread, thus allowing us to put the bolt and it's brass spacer in...

a few small jobs

2006-09-14T19:20:00.000Z

We acheived various little victories tonight, we fettled out the (six) holes for the roll bar, so it now fits through boot box, this did mean removing one of our previously installed body rivets and putting it back again.

We repaired the fuel tank breather pipe.

We drilled a hole in the body by sticking a drill bit in the flexible dremmel attachment and pushing it up the middle of the bush that will hold the silencer mounting bracket. This now gives a hole in the body at exactly the place the bracket has to go.

We also worked out how to get the dial lights working.

Things to do

2006-09-13T21:01:00.000Z

...our immediate things to do list, which is all we have time for this evening as the footie has to be watched...

1. Repair Fuel Tank Breather Tube
2. Fix Fog Light
3. Fix fog light switch
4. Fix Dial lights
5. Cable up the speedo
6. Scuttle wiring loom feed hole
7. Make the six remaining dashboard holes
8. Fabricate nine dashboard retaining sockets and glue on
9. Understand coolant behaviour
10. Fix on new fuel cut-off switch
11. Fettle the GRP flanges where roll bar mounts to chassis
12. check if we have front springs mounted properly
13. Fix the silencer mounting bracket and silencer
14. Cut a hole for the lambda wiring (find/buy grommet)
15. Fettle boot box holes for roll bar
16. Drill out acess holes for rivnuts on chassis
17. Nail the body on
18. check hand brake cable routing
19. check windscreen washer pipe routing and cut hole in scuttle for it
20. Work out how we tell if the clutch is working
21. Restore covers to fuel pump connections
22. Copper slip the lambda sensor

measure three times and then c*ck it up

2006-09-12T20:49:00.000Z

We struggled over the weekend to fit the roll bar, you have to drill three holes each side all on the same axis, these holes are 51mm through the boot box, 51mm through the grp flange and 12.5 mm through the thick metal plate that is welded to the chassis. A complicating factor (aside from the usual contradictory advice in Mr Manual) is that the GRP is of course not very symmetrical and so drilling at the same point on the boot box won't drill at the EXACTLY the same point on the chassis on each side. So measuring out took some time.

We were therfore rather disappointed that roll bar didn't fit neatly into the holes cut out in the GRP flanges.

Can't test the fit of the 40mm metal bolts yet that hold it on as inside of roll bar was a bit rusted and we needed to get an M12 x 1.75 tap to clean out the thread.

Good old ebay gave us a suitable tap set, and we have now cleared the threads but Chrissy's desire to crash meant we came in before trying it out.

We have fixed the horn, but the fog light still doesn't work.

We have a (very) long list of other things to do....

HOORAH! It works

2006-09-06T18:54:00.000Z

At about 7pm tonight the neighbourhood was disturbed by two rowdy louts running their unsilenced car for the first time....

It started, and ran - the idling is a bit rough and pick up not too smooth but we did get oil pressure almost instantly having filled the gallery with oil (breaking the newly bought oil can in the process)...

Here is a picture of Chrissy that she would not like the world to see just after the car started...

chrissy takes keyboard
But I am planning on getting revenge on my father with his funny joyous dance when the car started which is recorded on video for posterity. Anna also insists on being credited as video camera operative.

Back to it (with Steve's Help)

2006-09-02T18:36:00.000Z

After a bit of a break with Chrissy away over the summer Tim is back on to the car (Chrissy is busy paintballing in Scotland til Tuesday)

Anyway Steve came around and provide much knowledge and assistance.

Progress -

We have the fuel guage working
We have a spark
We Now have fuel - it seems the fuel cut off switch was doing precisely that even though the red button was depressed, anyway we have bypassed it for the moment, recognising it's going to be a right so and so to get out.

This now has allowed the pump to work and fuel to flow.

Important tip, there is a schrader valve on the top of the engine on the fuel system that you can push the plunger of (just like a valve on a bike tyre) and you can see fuel flow if there is pressure - see below.....

There are still some problems however -

1. We cannot get any oil pressure the guage does seem to be working but pressure isn't being generated. We took the oil pressure sensor out expecting oil to be spurted out when we cranked but it wasn't.
2. The cut-off switch see above
3. The starter motor sometimes sounds fine at other times sounds really grating.

Some help and a flat battery

2006-07-29T18:57:00.000Z

SteveC (pictured) who made some suggestions on the WSCC web site, and who lives close by, stopped by and offered some advice on the build and our current obstacles.

He explained why taking the plugs out was such a good idea for getting engine lubrication prior to any combustion - plugs out = no compression = faster rotation on the starter = higher oil pressure = better oil distribution.

Steve spotted several other things that may be of use going forward, but we also found that the engine earth was not connected (doh!) although this is unllikely to be the cause of our fuel pump problem it is good to identify it now.

However the other little equation that is relevant here is flat battery = no rotation -= no oil pressure!!!!

So battery is charging.

Immobiliser

2006-07-25T14:04:00.000Z

Won't do any posts before the weekend, when Tim will get a chance to look at the car.

It has been suggested that the immobiliser circuit is operating and this needs a loop back on it to disable it. Apparently the immobiliser will stop the fuel pump working.

No combustion....

2006-07-21T20:34:00.000Z

Well we went for it.... we finished the wiring with some help from Mark via email. We put the battery in and some fuel in it.

Then we spent half an hour or so taking it off the stands which was difficult with only one jack and the stands at max height.

We did this as a multi-stage process - the last stage being to rest the two nearside wheels on some wood so we could get the jack out.

Here you can see Chrissy sitting in it while it still resting on the wood.

From the front and the back....

Then courtesy of 'er indoors we pushed the car out and up the drive ...didn't want to burn the house down in case of a fuel fire.

And turned the ignition on...

First the good news...the heater fan works! so does most of the lights and the engine does at least turn over, but no sign of life as far as combustion is concerned....

Also worrying is no sign of oil pressure on the indicator dial.

Here we are trying to start it...perhaps a caption competition!....

It's getting wet in there

2006-07-20T20:48:00.000Z

Some stirling work by Chrissy got the heater re-installed and the header tank fixed back on while Tim was at work. So we then connected all of the hoses around the scuttle and then filled with water (no anti-freeze yet as we rightly assumed there would be some leaks).

We are charging the battery up and we have connected more, if not all, of the dashboard connections.

It's looking like tomorrow we might be ready for ...beep...."this is houston you are go for main engine start"...beep.

However the chances of it actually firing up seem remarkably low and Tim is worrying about putting power throught the loom given the number of possible shorts/bog ups/misconnections.

header tank on / Dashboard getting closer

2006-07-19T20:30:00.000Z

We put the header tank on tonight, and spent most of the rest of the itme on the dashboard, which Chrissy worked on while Tim was at work.

Here you can see front and back but we still have a number of questions to find answers to before we have everything connected.

One of the challenges that fellow builders might be interested in is the consequences of using the Smith's white dials rather than the standard VDO black dials.

As mentioned earlier you will already have found that the speedo runs from the front rather than back wheels --which will later lead you to interesting conversations at the SVA test centre I understand...Now you discover that there are a few other little jobs to punish you for the vanity of wanting white dials.

First you may discover that there are only 4 dip switches not the 6 the manual mentions on the back of the tacho, Mark says 'just leave them alone' so we will.

But you will also need to swap two of the wires (a and B as shown) on each of the connectors on the loom that feeds the three small dials (oil pressure etc.). The diagram to the left shows the connectors. The spade connectors however need a pin or nail inserted into the little hole shown to allow them to be released

Dashboard (first of many times)

2006-07-18T20:51:00.000Z

We made a start on the dashboard tonight, drilled three of the ten or so holes through and secured with some bolts. Several kind sources of advice suggested drilling slowly with a hand drill through the 'leatherette' ...sounds worse than it looks...dashboard cover material and this indeed seemed to do the trick. We cut out the material to allow the lights and switches, and marked up also for the header tank fixings. Struggling with some of the wiring for the dash though...it appears the Smiths dials take different wiring to the standard VDO ones and so rewiring of the connector blocks is required, but I'm b*****ed if I can get the spade connectors out of the blocks.

Solo working

2006-07-17T21:56:00.000Z

Chrissy has gone away for a couple of days to be in some competiton in London, so Tim is working on alone as we'd really like to get the engine started this week before Chrissy goes away for most of the summer.

Tonight Tim successfully adjusted the fuel filler fixing holes - just as well he did as looking down the filler pipe with the cap removed showed a pile of rubber shavings from where we had hacksawed the pipe to the right length.

Anyway this seemed to go well enough - and pictures from inside and outside are shown.

Tim then fitted one of the seats, partly because this looked easy

and partly because if we are going to work on the dash then being able to do so from a seat would be good. Obviously the seat will have to come out later to fit interior trim and carpets.

Body Rivetting and Fuel Filler

2006-07-16T17:01:00.000Z

We have spent a lot of hours today and made some reasonable progress, but writing it down now it doesn't seem like much return for the investment!

We started with 45 minutes of tidying up the garage, which as always gave us both rotten hayfever. Then after a short break to recover and check on the cricket score, we checked alignment of the panels (which meant once more getting all scuttle/boot box/bonnet/nosecone) down from their various locations in the house.

We also tried to get the wheels equally spaced in the rear wheel arches, but weren't aiming for perfection in that. The boot box certainly fits better now we have adjusted the body a bit with the dremmel.

We don't like the way the bonnet sits much esp where it joins the scuttle but overall it isn't too bad. We then put a couple of rivets into the tabs where the roll bar goes and (shown above) jacked up the rear bodywork and used some clamps to allow the rear skirt to be riveted in place. Measuring and drilling from underneath wasn't easy...

Here is a picture from underneath.

Having got the rear skirt riveted up we took the trolley jack away and got to work on the rear fuel filler.

This took several hours of thinking and working, and even now it isn't finished..

First we marked the inside of the body using a pencil and a ruler to project some points onto the masking tape, then we drew around the plastic cap that had temporarily covered the fuel tank to allow us to get a centre point... then using a dremmel with flexible attachment we drilled inside out a small pilot centre hole

Then we used that as the guide for a 64mm hole saw, the book said the hole should be 65mm dia. but in fact even a 64mm saw gave a hole slightly too big.

Still at least we got excellent alignment between the fuel tank filler pipe and the hole we cut by this method.

We wet and dried the edges to clean it up and then did a poor job of drilling out the holes for the fixing screws. This was very difficult as our slightly oversize hole meant the fixing holes were very close to the edge - eek!

We then cut the large flexible(ish) tube to join the rear body to the metal tank down to size - obviously this needed several goes, and then a fair amount of effort to get it on the tank.. finally we fitted the fuel filler cap, gasket and locking ring, as shown below... Tomorrow we'll have to take it off again as the fixing bolts don't really line up well enough and given the closeness of the fixing holes to the edge of the big hole, we don't want to put strain on this.

Our list of things to do before test engine start now looks like this

Finish Fuel Filler
Cut ali plates to hold rivnuts behind dash
Put Rivnuts on rear of scuttle to hold dashboard

Dashboard build up
Radiator Overflow Pipe
Header tank
Heater
Fill with water/petrol/oil
Big Check
Fit battery
Fit and tighten wheels
Take of stands and push out
Engine start (need insurance and extinguisher)

We think this is the min. list to get going, note things like heater are not because we are worried about getting cold this sunny July, but because it is integral to the cooling system.

We will have to take some of these bits off again, but our logic is that we should get engine started before we bolt the body too firmly into place.

body off and on again

2006-07-15T21:28:00.000Z

We took the body off this morning, and tidied up the wiring loom where several parts of it join in front of the pedal box. There is no nice way to arrange the wiring so it lies neatly so just did what we could with convoluted tubing and cable ties. After carrying out various wiring loom jobs we wanted to test the loom before putting the body on, in particular wanted to check that the positive battery cable didn't short to earth. The thinking was that if we were going to debug the loom then we'd be better to do that before the body was fixed in place.

We didn't connect the Engine Management Unit as the connectivity tester was 9V and might damage it.

Anyway it seemed to show a short - ho hum! Several phone calls to Father/Grandfather Bob later combined with some selective disconnecting of loom bits and using a multimeter allowed us to conclude that all we were seeing was some connections via diodes in the alternator i.e. it wasn't really a problem.

Thanks to Bob (and by the way we have now changed the AA cells in the multimeter, found a note in the box telling Tim to change once a year - note dated 1999 - so only six years too late!)

Whilst we had the body off we also 'dremmelled' away a bit of the body to allow a better dit onto the chassis at one point where we had noted it fouling on a prominent weld - this seems to have worked and on refitting the bootbox sits rather better.

Chrissy tidied up the exhaust hole in the body with wet and dry, and we tightened up the fuel tank and did a few other jobs before putting the body and exhaust back on. It doesn't sound very much but we probably spent a total of 6 man/woman hours on it today.

Exhaust fits but at a cost

2006-07-14T22:19:00.000Z

The exhaust now has been made to fit through a body hole that we seemed to just keep having to widen. Thanks to the folks at wscc and mark at westfield for some clues.

The whole garage seems to be full of GRP dust as a result so Tim did some spring cleaning (sporting a face mask) this evening.

We had a slight mishap, in that to make the exhaust fit we loosened the engine crankcase breather plate to help wiggle the exhaust manifold through and when retightening the fixing bolts someone overtightened one of the bolts and it snapped off leaving the end in the blind hole in the crankcase. I shall report this to her first RAF engineering commanding officer if she is successful in getting her RAF sponsorship!!

I have ordered a set of screw extractors from ebay (£1.49 + £1.99 postage), but actually it is probably not the end of the world as the pate seems to be securely held by the other two bolts.

We still need to tidy up the edge of the hole we have cut with wet and dry, but we'll do that when we take the body off tomorrow.

retired hurt

2006-07-10T20:57:00.000Z

We used a power sander to make the exhaust hole in the body bigger and neater tonight, but after an hour of iterative sanding, trying the manifold/down-pipe and finding it wouldn't fit we gave up as Tim had a headache from noice/heat/sickly sweet smell of GRP dust (mask and goggles notwithstanding).

No work for next couple of nights as Tim has work commitments.

A Crack in the Body!

2006-07-09T15:52:00.000Z

First the bad news, we have spotted a crack in the gelcoat. Don't know how bad or repairable this is yet, but can't do much about it at the moment.

We went to a westfield club meeting today, but due to iffy weather and the fact that we had to go early only saw three cars, and none very similar to our build. We learnt several things, but one of them is that aiming for perfection is probably silly. We made several other breakthroughs today (or at least we think they are). Firstly we discovered that the nosecone needs some spacers underneath it, this lifts it up a bit and solves the alignment problems we had been having, we got back from the pub and drilled out the holes joining bonnet and nose cone and temporarily joined them with M5 bolts and this seemed to get a nice alignement. Though later on we have to replace bolts with dowel and large rubber grommet, it remains to be seen if alignment will be as good when we have done that.

Chrissy went off to a party (lightweight) so Tim got himself covered in GRP dust by drilling out an exhaust hole (although it needs a lot of enlargement to get to the right size.

Our technique was to drill inside out using the template we had made from cardboard, and drill inside to out using the flexible drill drive that reminds me of nothing as much as an endoscope!

Then this gave some ranging holes (middle photo) and used those to set a first cutout.

Still struggling with body panel alignment

2006-07-08T16:15:00.000Z

We have worked on a number of things in the last couple of days, but it's relatively slow.

We stuck the demister air distributor onto the back of the scuttle using some tiger seal. Hope it's in the right place, as have seen others struggle later with windscreen wiper boxes.

And we have done the fiddly work of completing the wiring on all of the lamps at the rear.

We have adjusted the position of the reversing light a little by widening the hole at the top and putting some tiger seal at the bottom - crude but seems to work.

Here you can see Chrissy completing the convoluted tubing runs around the wiring...dressed in the total protective clothing of one strappy top!

We have also taken some advice from Mark on the body panel problems and made a little progress but not really solved our two issues. We clamped the nosecone to the bonnet in the garden, off the car, this showed that we did indeed need to remove a little more of the offside bonnet inner lip, but even doing that we aren't getting a great fit. The sides can be made to line up, but the top has a bit of a step in it, and can't see any way of resolving that.

Still planning to go the Wedtfield Thames Valley club meet tomorrow to see what others have done (now that's what real kit car building - research in a pub!)

The car looks misleadingly headed towards completion, but we still have

to take the body off again to tidy up underneath it and cut the exhaust pipe hole out.

keeping our hand in

2006-07-04T21:15:00.000Z

A couple of little items of work tonight just to keep our hand in, avoiding solving body problems right now... so Tim soldered up the AMP connectors on the rear light indicators (and burnt himself!) and then at least for the nearside light we fitted it on and put convoluted tubing around the wiring to protect it from anything thrown up by the rear wheels.

Chrissy pretty much finished off the wet and dry work on the demister vents.

Too boring to put any photos up!

Too hot to work

2006-07-02T20:56:00.000Z

Funny how in the cold days of winter you don't really want to be working in the garage, yet today was so hot that we didn't want to do more than an hour and a half each.

Chrissy has been valiantly wet and dry-ing the demister slots as you can see here....

She has done the two to the right of the photo. but not the one on the left yet...

Still struggling to get the nosecone bonnet to align, removed some of the inner offside lip of the bonnet in the hope this might allow better alingment, perhaps there is some slight improvement but it's nowhere near enough...

Put a couple of rivets in the body and then put the boot box in the hole, but that doesn't seem to fit too well either, so we went in a bit fed up..

Rear Lights and other little jobs

2006-07-01T20:53:00.000Z

Still undecided what to do about the body not fitting well and so don't want to start fixing it until we have thought that one through a little.

So we got on with some other bits and pieces. We p-clipped the little cooling pipe to the car just over the footwells - using self tappers.

Tightened up the earthing strap from the ECU and fixed the ECU plate at the front with cable ties (not the most elegant solution but it works fine). Then we got on with the rear lights. We had mad a little start on this earlier in the week. Getting them positioned nicely is a real pig, there are no nice sharp lines to measure from (the top and bottom of the body curve away) and even a spirit level won't help much as the car is on stands and not very level.

Most of the drilling done with masking tape and by eye. Think we messed up the fog lamp slightly (not shown in these pics). Will have to play around with that to improve.

Also test fitted one of the harnesses to see what fixings it would use as will need to know for fitting the boot box.

Bonnet test fit

2006-06-28T20:52:00.000Z

Here you can see that the nearside lines up beautifully .....

wheras the offside - doesn't line up very well at all, although it only seems to be the nose cone, the bonnet sens to fit on the body ok.

The good news is that to make the body the same width as the body you need to pull it out a little this means it is no longer fouling the cooling pipe.

No time for much tonight

2006-06-27T21:05:00.000Z

We had less than an hour to spend in the garage tonightso not much progress. We got our dremmel equivalent working and 'fettled' out the heater pipe holes in the scuttle, it is a powerful tool and we probably took slightly too much grp away. We also trial fitted bonnet and nose cone, the latter does not seem to line up very well on the offside, we'll get some pictures tomorrow night.

2006-06-26T20:44:00.000Z

Solved last nights problems with the heater fitting, by drilling a couple of extra holes in the heater bracket (see picture).

Also used the heater as a template for drilling other holes (it meant drilling back to front with the pretty side of the GRP on the exit side of the hole, not recommended from a risk of cracking point of view but these holes are going to have big 'repair' washers around them so the aesthetics don't matter that much.

Also used a new 16mm hole saw (bought from that excellent real honest to god tool shop in Fulham called Grizards - a shop that is the opposite of chain DIY stores, they have everything and know what they are talking about, if I say "hand written receipts" you'll get the picture http://www.grizards.co.uk/) unfortunately the specified 16mm isn't big enough for the metal pipework so will need to 'fettle' that out tomorrow.

It doesn't yet feel like we are on the downhill stretch as we know there is months of work still to do, but we are making progress.

Not so easy today

2006-06-25T18:28:00.000Z

Spent the morning mostly clearing up/sweeping out the garage before we continued. This gave us both dreadful hayfever and we had to stop until after we had watched England struggle past Ecuador (is Sven the worst value for money manager in the world?, how many million a year and our cat could do a better job.... and it's dead).

We marked up the scuttle according to the "manual"/guide/work of fiction/book designed to make you screw things up for the heater fixing holes. Made the measurements a dozen times before drilling, but then found that using the manual measurements put the top holes too close to a protrusion on the rear of the scuttle and so the heater won't actually fit! Thinking we may drill some extra holes in the heater bracket rather than redrill the scuttle - both for aesthetic reasons (don't want two redundant holes in the scuttle even if it is on the bit under the bonnet) and for engineering reasons (two sets of close together holes on the fibre glass holding up heavy heater looks like a recipe for cracks).

Also have spotted a place on the front nearside where the body fouls one of the pipes the body, options are move pipe (leaves redundant holes and means moving a rivnut on one of the bigger pipes) or 'fettling' the body and bonnet lip back around that area - thinking at the mo. we'll take the latter option.

Still at least the garage is clean!

It looks like a car!

2006-06-24T16:54:00.000Z

In the hot weather we got our masks goggles and gloves on and drilled the body and wheel arches. We then bolted them together.

As some holes required being done in two parts we had to bolt and unbolt each side several times.

Combined with the very hot weather this meant the whole job took several hours.

Once we had the wheel arches on, we lifted the body into position, this was all ok, except the bits of the body that need to go over the rails at the back of the cockpit wouldn't go. Chrissy eventually worked out how to apply some force to make this happen.

And once the body was on the car, we put the rear wheels on, obviously this was only because it is recommended to measure up the spacing of the body on the chassis, and nothing to do with the fact that we wanted to see what it looks like.

We were exhausted after that and so went in to watch the football and have a beer.

Thanks to Anna for taking the photos.

Preparing for first body fitting

2006-06-23T21:14:00.000Z

Completed a couple more tasks this evening (and spent still more money on tools) prior to hopefully first body fitting tomorrow. Fitted the speedo transducer bracket to the front offside wheel, this is a stupid position as (a) wiring exposed to elements (b) not a great place to try and get precision fit that is needed (c) when it gets to the SVA test their rolling road speedo test won't work as it assumes back wheels drive speedo.

Item shown here highlighted with arrow

Also did some final-ish bits on the cooling system.

Order of work now is something like that shown below, tempted to try and start engine before final body riveting but umming and erring about pros and cons of that.

Before (First) Body Fitting….

Torque up lower steering column again

Fit rear wheel arches to body shell

When the body is on first time….

Work out positioning and tack in place with two rivets up and G clamps

Drill 12.5mm hole through metal tabs for roll bar

Work out boot box positioning and work out what to drill on that

Cut out 51mm holes from the body fibre glass around where the roll bar goes

Test fit roll bar

Check light fittings location are within SVA spec and mark them

Mark up exhaust outlet location from template

Mark up Fuel filler location, taking care not to impede where lights go

Check coolant pipe locations on the body

Check front brake pipe locations on the body

Check the final wiring routes with the scuttle resting in place

When the body is off again

Drill at least the pilot hole for the fuel filler (probably best to complete on the car, but pilot hole best drilled when body is off to help avoid drilling in wrong place)

Cut out hole for exhaust

Fit lights

Paint rubber undercoat in arches?

Tidy up all of the wiring we can without scuttle in place

Check everything is torqued up that needs to be

Complete last two P-clips for coolant system location

Check all the wiring we can

Other to do stuff that doesn’t have to be done before body fitting

Radiator Overflow Pipe - what to seal it up with?

Cut accelerator cable unused length (what is the best way?)

Mark up Scuttle for heater pipes (are they too high?)Drill Scuttle for heater pipes

Stick on the demister distibutor thing (buy glue?, find it?)

Work out run of washer bottle pipe…see other document

steering works

2006-06-22T20:36:00.000Z

Well it took us an hour to get the lower steering rack on the splines at each end, and we just pray we won't need to take it off *ever* again as I don't know how we will. But we bashed, wiggled and pushed until it was on. Then just to celebrate we put the two front wheels and the steering wheel on so we could sit in the car and pretend to drive it.

We know it's childish but it seems so great that turning the steering wheen turns the front wheels!!

Tiny Steps forward

2006-06-21T19:59:00.000Z

OK, think we (well Tim) has worked out the wiring of the speed trasnducer, there is no loom connection as such the wire that it comes with just goes all the way back through the scuttle on to the speedo (doh!).

Also have successfully converted the lambda sensor connector block to the little AMP connector that fits the loom. We have not found any crimping mechanism that is satisfactory, though that is obviously what the connectors are meant for, but if, like us, you solder, then you need to be very careful not to fill in the little well just before the blade of the connector as this locates the plastic lock device inside the connector body, and if it's full of solder you this mechanism won't work.

Spent a fruitless half an hour searching and re-searching the remaining bits for the lower steering column support bracket, only to find that ours does not have one, as a single piece unlike that shown in the manual I guess it doesn't need one.

That said have failed to get the lower steering column to fit on the splines at each end despite loosening the steering rack.

Rear Brake Hoses Fitted

2006-06-19T21:24:00.000Z

Nothing's ever as easy as it looks...mainly because the manual sucks. Fitting the rear brake hoses should be an easy job involving a couple of washers and doing up a couple of nuts tight enough, but not too tight.

In fact with the golf calipers supplied the manual tells you to move the bleed nipple (err no that only applies to the Sierra calipers you used to use WF), neglects to mention that you need a couple of convertor widgets,

Result being a five minute job becomes a 45 minute one, involving research on the Internet. Thanks to Nikpro for having such good pictures on his site.

Struggling with many other things too, particularly the Smiths speedo transducer, Mark at WF has sent me some photos of how to fit on to the front of car but (a) don't seem to have been supplied the bracket (b) the wiring loom doesn't seem to be right for the connections....another email to WF tomorrow...

Here is what came with the instruments for the speedo transducer...

Exhaust and Vents

2006-06-18T16:28:00.000Z

Saturday was spent in boiler suits, gloves, masks and googles despite the fact that it was 36 degrees outside. This was in an attempt to cut out the three demister vents on the scuttle. There was steady improvement in the method of cutting. First we tried to keep clamp some wood to keep the three (taped together) hacksaw blades going in a straight line. Unfortunately this didn't work very well cause the wood was clamped higher then where we were cutting and it was difficult to clamp it in an entirely straight line. Then in our second and third attempt we used masking tape to as an edge to follow. This in the end didn't work to badly.

We also decided to fit part of the exhast so we cold make a template for the body. Our car is now kitted out in some cardboard, masking taped onto the chasis. This is currently going to reside there until we mark out the body as to where we need to cut it out.

We used a hole saw top cut out a section at the bottom of the scuttle so it will not foul the upper steering column, seemed to go ok.

We also filled the hydraulic clutch reservoir and had a go at bleeding it, don't know if this worked or not! But anyway it's full of fluid, the bleed nipple is conveniently situated underneath the gearbox.

Apologies to Martin for not adding to the blog recently, and thanks to him for his nice comments.

A/S Levels finished, back is better!

2006-06-16T19:27:00.000Z

It seems like weeks since we have done any work, and in fact there has probably only been a total of about 15 man woman hours in the last 2 and a half months.

Tim did his back in and working on the car was not really an option, Chrissy had A/S level exams which are now over, so we are back...

Over the intervening period we have done various bits and bobs including fitting the radiator for the fifth time having solved the problem of the radiator overflow...a different tap worked.

Here you can see Chrissy refitting it.

We have also finally fitted the throttle stop bolt. I found it needed to be 75mm in length, and that

the 65mm one sent by Westfield would never work. I bought some 100mm ones from ebay and cut them down to get the right size, it's really hard to measure accurately in there so I just did a couple until I got the right size....

We have also mounted the ecu, relays and the monitor cable on to the ecu plate and fitted that to the car...you can see that work in progress on the photo below.

Then Tim got fed up with never finding any of the growing collection of tools in the garage, so while Chrissy was taking her exams (given we have an agreement that we are building the car together) Tim felt old age coming on and was compelled to put up some wall boards for mounting many of the tools on.....how sad is that!

We haven't given up....

2006-03-20T22:29:00.000Z

....but we have been busy on a variety of things, including going to Hghbury to watch us beat, liverpool, Charlton and Real Madrid (Ok it was 0-0 but that was good enough)...

....also Tim has been using one of the new Pentium-M mainboards from work to build a new computer (see photo) and has put in some fancy wiring with thermostats to program all of the fans (including the CPU fan) so that as long as everything is cool enough it can run completely silently...

But we have made some progress, we have now managed to tap a thread out on the radiator overflow, and we have at least part fitted the CPU plate, and we have taken the radiator off (yet again) to flush out the plastic sprew from drilling and tapping the overflow pipe.

Here is our current list of things to do...

1. Exhaust Template
2. Accelerator stop
3. Accelerator Cable routing
4. Radiator Overflow Pipe - what to seal it up with?
5. Mount the main engine loom fuse
6. Wire up the horn - check the connections?
7. changing the connecting block on the lambda sensor
8. Speed sensor
9. Bend the brake pipe to allow completion of cooling system
10. Where do I earth the little loop connector on off-side of engine
11. Cut out the steering rack from lower scuttle (how do I do that, what tools do I need, where do I get rubber edging?)
12. Mark up Scuttle for heater pipes (are they too high?)
13. Drill Scuttle for heater pipes
14. Cut out demister vents (do I have 3 hacksaw blades - do I have the right sort of blades?)
15. Stick on the demister distibutor thing (buy glue?, find it?)
16. Mount ECU plate
17. Mount ECU relays and VGA cable on plate
18. Modify relay to sit nicely?
19. Get new fuel tank straps?
20. Fuel lines at the front convoluted cabling
21. Cut accelerator cable unused length (what is the best way?)
22. Lower Steering column
23. Bleed clutch, (change nuts on bracket?, when is the right time, how does the bleed nipple work?)

We have rivnuts

2006-03-05T22:09:00.000Z

...Having purchased a second, more expensive rivnut gun, we have managed to rivnut the several things we need to right now, such as the support for the top water pipe that you can see here...fascinating eh!

We have also put a rivnut in to hold the horn at the front of the car. We have cut the last bits of hose, for the cooling system, these actually feed the heater, and the arrival of some more jubilee clips has allowed us to pretty well finish it off.

Still haven't sorted the radiator overflow pipe. Have ordered a different tap (from ebay) to see if that helps.

Have marked out the Scuttle (bit of bodywork that holds the dashboard), but haven't yet had the courage (knowledge) to make our first cut in the glass reinforced plastic...here is a picture of Chrissy measuring out the scuttle to cut for the steering column.

We have also finished the fuel pipes at the front, again thanks to arrival of more jubilee clips.

Total man/woman hours this week 8ish.

Special thanks to Bob (Father/Grandfather) for sending through Pearson special audio circuit tester with long leads..

Busy Weekend

2006-02-26T20:43:00.000Z

Between us we spent around 12 hours in the Garage this weekend, but not all of this was working on the car. Some three hours this afternoon was spent pretending to work on it while a photographer with a van load of kit took over 400 photos to go with some profile piece about Tim in some newspaper (now that should get the mickey taken out of him at work!)

Anyway the rest of the time we did actually make some progress. Chrissy finished off the battery tray and refitted it (yet again).

Tim spent an unexciting 30 minutes feeding one grommet over numerous connectors from the ECU loom (it didn't look possible, but a friend from the WSCC had emailed saying it was possible and just that info was remarkably useful - thanks Tony). We have decided, like Tony, to route the ECU cable through the scuttle rather than down the transmission tunnel for a whole variety of reasons.

We have made some major progress on the cooling system and have fitted most of the hoses, in a couple of cases we had to put the hose in hot water to let it expand a bit but generally it was OK. One exception was when putting a lot of force on one of the metal pipes to push it in to some rubber hose it suddenly went in about 10cm i.e. far too far so we then had to spend about half an hour getting it out again!

We have also cut and mostly fitted the front fuel hoses onto the injection tubes, but have run out of the right size jubilee clips so that job will have to wait a little while.

Have run into a few problems (e.g. there is one loop connector whoch says ' chassis earth' but is miles away from anywhere suitable to earth it) and also haven't got a big enough spanner to do up the thermostat switch on the rad. The final and most serious problem is that we (well Tim) has failed to tap out a suitable thread in the radiator overflow pipe - the purpose of the thread is to block it up as it is not used. (Have to phone Mark at the factory tomorrow)

Here is a pic of some of the pipework...

Small steps forward

2006-02-23T22:56:00.000Z

Been limited progress this week as Chrissy has had exams all week, and Tim had to spend Tuesday watching the magnificent Arsenal show Alan Hansen where he can stick his comments and Wednesday watch Moaninho's Moaners lose to Barca. These events both by necessity involved drinking beer.

Anyway a little progress.

Altered the wiring loom in a few places to change connectors e.g. loop into spade.

Wired up the alternator (had to get some deep 8mm and 10mm sockets as was chewing up the securing nuts)

Found out how to secure the battery courtesy certain friendly folk on the WSCC website and Chrissy has done a fine job riveting the bracket up to the battery tray....

Struggling

2006-02-19T22:00:00.000Z

Really not going very far fast.

We have been away on the Black Isle for most of the week, so little progress, but the last two days in the garage have yielded little except a headache.

Looking on the positive side we have now finished fixing the battery cables we have also fitted the radiator back on, this time the correct way around. But stuck on

(a) accelerator stop bolt...could get a longer one, but fitted the one they sent?

(b) bottom hose connection (seems to be the wrong shape)

(c) tried out our new £16 rivnut tool, so that we could put in one of the mounts for the metal cooling pipes, only to find it doesn't work at all, and that I have lost the receipt (argh!)

The one other job we did today was to change the water temp sensor, in the engine block, only to forget that one of the electrical connections needed to go over the threaded section before we tightened it (needless to say we put locking material on it as well so that made it harder to get out when much later in the day we realised our problem)

Went in a little dispirited - need the gunners to beat Real Madrid away in the week to cheer us up (we live in hope!)

Did we say no steps backwards?

2006-02-09T20:48:00.000Z

So after we finished mildly pleased with ourselves on Sunday we realised later that evening that we had put the fan on the wrong side of the radiator (doh!). Thanks to Nick Clark for pointing it out!

Took it all off this evening while we also riveted loom saddles on chassis to mount the battery positive cable and took off the steering rack off to mount the battery negative cable. Had to stop as we took off too much of the chassis powder coating off to get a good electrical connection to the steering rack mounting brackets, and have had to fix up with hammerite now need to wait to dry before putting all back together.

Wish we'd have put loom saddles on for battery positive before we put engine in as drilling the chassis where we wanted was hard to impossible.

Total Man Woman hours this week so far 3.

p.s. thanks to Tony for comments about routing ECU loom through scuttle

Two Steps Forward No steps backwards

2006-02-05T21:42:00.000Z

Only had time to spend on the car Sunday, though we did put in a total of 7 hours between us today. (Chrissy has mock A/S exams to revise for, Tim and Chris managed to see Arsenal on Wednesday pm - the less said the better - and Tim went to see the Gunners at Birmingham yesterday).

Anyway the car -

We finished off fitting the radiator, one of the problems here was that M6 bolts were required, but the holes in the two welded on chassis mounting brackets were much bigger ca. 10mm. Mark from Westfield said to use some big washers on each side of the hole, but this still seemed a poor mounting, so we improvised a rubber collar around the relevant part of the set screw by cutting about 5mm of the tubing supplied for fuel tank breather (which was overlong anyway).

You have to bend the welded steel chassis brackets fairly enthusiatically to get pointing in the right direction and with the bent end sections in something like the right plane.

The finished article is here....

We were also able to finish off the rear fuel system, as Westfield had sent us the missing breather tap that goes in the top of it and fixes to a breather tube that needs to be fixed on the chassis. Therefore we finished securing all of the fuel pipes and putting convoluted plastic tubing around them.

We have trial fitted the battery as we have also started on fixing the main battery cables (as Westfield have also supplied us with the loom saddles ....little plastic things with holes in that can be riveted into the chassis (which then allows you to fix cable ties onto pipes, wires etc.)

We also now think we have worked out all of the wiring for the engine and the ECU by asking Westfield some further questions this week, we now have three separate loom diagrams, which almost, but not quite, tie up with what we have.

They have also at our request sent us a replacement temperature sensor which is specific to our (as yet undelivered) dashboard dials... [this is punishment from the Gods for our vanity for ordering white dials, which has meant a number of sensors need changing as they are specific to them] ...

Current worries...

1. How to secure the ECU loom in the transmission tunnel, give gearbox is already in it.
2. How to mount the ECU mounting plate onto the circular tube at the front
3. Can't find an M8 x 70 bolt to use as an accelerator pedal stop
4. oh too many to list...

Bye for now

As fast as we solve one problem we find another..

2006-01-29T16:55:00.000Z

Some people say they have a love hate thing with the build manual, our feelings have slowly matured into a solid 'hate-hate' thing. It's connection with kit of parts supplied starts off a vague and loose thing, moves through tenuous into the territory of 'no connection whatsoever and frankly you'd have been better off without it'.

Anyway, some progress has been made - the washer bottle has been fitted, not in itself such a big achievement, but any step forward is appreciated!

The manual describes the wrong type of fan fitting, what we did (for other builders) was to put a 6mm thread in the 4 outer plastic holes (those facing forward to the front of the car) - picture of tap with masking tape around it to stop the tap going through the plastic into the body of the radiator, the fitted the mounting plate shown in the picture which will also take M6 bolts.

Note we could find no suitable length M6 bolts and had to cut them down, file and put a die down them, we have had to do this for 14 bolts this weekend, 4 to hold the fan to the plate, 4 to hold the plate to the rad, 4 to hold the rad on, 2 to hold the washer bottle on. What a bore.

We have also found the parts to make up a connector for the lambda sensor (I have no idea what lambda is being referred to here), and we have by use of brute force, ignorance and a file connected the throttle cable into the top of the engine, and filed out the hole in the bodywork to accept the plastic fitting of the lower end of the cable. Confused as to how to adjust the cable though as can find no adjuster?

Still puzzled how all the loom connections are made, but slowly putting a picture together, will have to ask Westfield more questions next week.

Total man/woman time spent this weekend 7 hours.

continuing to plumb

2006-01-22T18:21:00.000Z

A total of around 8 man/woman hours on Saturday, and Sunday, combined with some questions on the wscc website (thanks to Paul and others for their help) has allowed us to make some progress. It all seems rather slow at the moment, but we are at least moving in the right direction. We have now fitted the hydraulic clutch cable, a 2 minute job if you know what you are doing, otherwise an hour and a question to Mark at Westfield.

We spent most of the time on two things this weekend: -

Firstly we (well Chrissy actually) relabelled all of the wiring loom from the new diagrams we now have (one found in the kit, one emailed from Mark at Westfield) this means identifying each connector and there are lots and lots of them.

Though we are still short of diagrams for the bit of the harness that runs to the starter motor.

Secondly, we have been continuing to plumb in all of the fuel cables. This afternoon that meant around three hours for three riveted P-clips into the chassis! We had to take one side of the rear suspension apart to get drill access and put it back together again, also there is lots of fiddling with the convoluted plastic pipe protector and lots of time spent complaining that knee joints don't work very well any more (Tim)