Parking brake

Brakes are an essential park of any vehicle (apart from unicycles) so I thought it time to fix up the parking brake.

I'd already run the cables, and physically mounted the brake, so it was just a case of putting it all together and adjusting it, should take 10 mins.

Several weeks later, I've now mostly finished it. I'm sure there's an easy way of getting the cables tight, but I didn't find it. 

I very much dislike these cables.

The handbrake has a short cable coming from it which goes into a joiner which in turn attaches to the cables from the brakes. The joiner doesn't attach to anything and just floats. This is fine, but getting the cables tight and then holding everything in place took a few attempts. 

While playing with the handbrake, I realised that I hadn't bolted it down with big enough bolts, so I decided to use M10s and took everything apart.

Now, I'd used rivnuts, so I had to drill those out, but when you do that, they just spin so I ended up hack-sawing them whilst trying to hold on to them so that they didn't drop into the chassis and spend the rest of eternity rattling around annoying me. This took a while but finally they were out and the handbrake was now bolted in a lot more firmly with the M10s.

I connected the cables back up, and this is when I discovered the adjuster on the handbrake itself. I wound this all the way down, did everything again and then adjusted back up and as far as handbrakes go, it works. You pull it up and it applies the brakes, sweet. It's just not quite good enough and all needs tightening up a bit more. I did pin the cables down in the end with some p-clips which isn't shown in the above pic. This was a pain as there was no room to work and the p-clips kept wanting to spring around the garage. Lots of deep breaths were taken during this process.

All cuts made

The next stage was getting the tunnel to fit over the handbrake. This also meant cutting slots out for the chassis cross bars as I wanted the tunnel flush with the floor. Some people built the tunnel up which means you don't need to cut it but I didn't like that so much.

The slots were measured about 15 times before I cut them, and by gods were kind to me as everything lined up nicely. I could test fit the tunnel, albeit without the slot cut out of the top for the handbrake itself. So far, so good.

The final part of the puzzle was cutting the top hole, so I put this off for a bit, then one lazy cold Sunday, decided that I'd brave the weather and sort it out.

Armed with some masking tape and a red sharpie, I marked it up, and it was a little easier than expected, in fact, I'd measured too well and hadn't quite given myself enough slack, so recut the hole a little bigger.

The end result is a working handbrake and a tunnel that fits! I do have a leather shroud thing for the handbrake to make it look nicer, but there's no point putting that on yet. Now I can put the second fuel tank back in again and move on.

Practially on the road...

Progress

Progress has been made in various areas these last few weeks...

There are about a million steps missing still, good
job you can zoom out a lot!

Firstly the organisation of the build has changed, in that as well as my spreadsheet, I'm using RealTimeBoards to whiteboard things out which is a good graphical way of seeing what needs to be done next (I'm in no way affiliated with those guys, I just think it's a great tool!)

As well as planning, I've got some help now in the form of Martin, who will try and figure out WTF I'm meant to be doing.

In terms of actual progress on the car, well focus has been on the rear corners. You see, I want to get the braking system done next, but before I could do that really, I knew I had to finalise the rear corners as they'd have to be dismantled in order to get the rear cycle wing stays in place.

The front wing stays (the bits that hold the cycle wings in place), were easy, in that both stays were jointed together to form a single piece of metal and the holes where they connect to the front upright were pre-

drilled and set. The rear stays however were in two parts and there were no holes.

This meant that they could go at any angle and distance which gives a high probability of me stuffing it up. The rear uprights are also made of mild steel and quite thick, so I wasn't looking forward to drilling them.

So we put our minds to it, and sketched it all out to scale on some A0 diagram (it was actually the back of the wiring diagram, but I won't be needing that for some time!). We came up with a plan that looked like it would work, so we reassembled the corner to test and it looked about right.

Rusty disks

The next step was doing the drilling, so I once more made use of the facilities at work and Steve made the holes.

The assembly was then fairly simple and everything is back on the car. The only two worries I have is that I'm not sure what to torque the axle bolt up to and the brake calipers pinch the disks a little...

Progress was also made in that I had a massive amount of play in the steering rack, so I took my wheel and quick release boss off... no wait, I didn't do that, because one of the bleeding bolts had rounded. Instead I spent an hour hack sawing away at it before removing it.

Once in pieces, it was obvious what was wrong, the bolt inside wasn't done up properly and when that was sorted all of the play disappeared. So that was put back together after and all was good.

Now with the rear corners sorted, it was time to run the parking brake cables (I'd call it a handbrake, but I'm trying to use the same lingo as in the IVA manual!).

The basic run for the parking brake cable

It seems most people use little clips or struts on the brake & parking brake cables to keep them off the frame, I'm not sure why, so I just cable tied mine to the chassis for now. I haven't connected them to the actual handbrake yet, because that looks like it's going to be fun job*, so I'll save that until next time.


* Read: no fun at all

Exhaust Wrapping

I've mentioned several times that I wished that I'd heat treated the exhaust manifold before I fitted it because (a) it's very close to lots of other stuff like fuel and brake lines, and (b) it's a bitch to get on and off.

Well, because of the work I did on the sump, I had to get it off anyway, so I figured while it was off I'd sort it out and get it insulated.

After some research, there were a couple of ways to proceed. I could wrap it in heat absorbent fibre cloth or I could get it ceramic sprayed. 

The ceramic spray is a better solution, the cloth can have gaps which means you could get a build up of heat in a spot and that could damage the exhaust. The ceramic spray also looks much better. However, the spray, if done professionally, costs £lots.

There was a hybrid solution available too. Wrap it, and then get some cheapo spray and spray it as well. Sounds like a plan to me, so after some all too familiar eBay/PayPal action, I soon had the necessary bits required.

Wrapping was fairly easy, I used two rolls in total. I'd watched some videos on how to do this, and everyone started at the top and worked their way down as you'd expect. Now, I'm not stupid, I didn't start in the middle, but it seemed more sensible to me to start at the bottom and work my way up. This way, the overlaps were layered the correct way, so if I was caught in the rain, the water wouldn't collect. Time will tell!

High Tech Spray Booth

After wrapping, I applied the spray using my custom made spray booth (cardboard box) and applied a few coats. It looked nice and I'm debating spraying the other bits of the exhaust, but that decision can be made later.

All too easy right? Well now it was time for the bit which I pondered a while over, you see, with both the wrap and the spray, you have to cure it. And that means heating it to 400C somewhere. So even if it would fit in my oven, that ain't gonna cut it.
I could cure it on the engine, run it at idle for 20mins or so is what some people suggest, but as the engine isn't running yet, that isn't an option.

Luckily there's a workshop at work, and Andy showed me the facilities. They do have a large oven, but even that won't accommodate the manifold, so was going to opt for plan B and use the hand held gas torch that's good for 800C!

Miraculously the building didn't burn down.

I took the exhaust in to work to  find that they'd built an electric kiln for a project. Some research team wants to simulate ageing of rocks or something so they'd made this booth which my exhaust would fit in.

We fired this up, it was untested, so they had no idea what temperatures it would reach. The extractors were switched on and the room started getting warm and after about a minute it was up to 130C. At this point I left because I didn't want to be in the workshop when the fire alarms went off as that could take some explaining.

Later in the morning Andy from the workshop came to see me and said that it was all done, the home made kiln had reached 480C which was well above the 400C that I needed. Sweet.

I went back down to the workshop to take a look, and we couldn't resist getting the torch on it just in case we'd missed some bits :)

Sump

I'm alive! It seems like a long time since I've done any work on my car, in fact, I'm pretty sure that the Spiderman movies have been rebooted 3 times since I last tightened a bolt, but now I'm back.

I do have a bunch of half written articles, so although it's been forever since a post, it's only been eons since I worked on the car.

Anyway, today I fitted a new sump. I didn't need to do this, but it's advisable, and it still may not be enough, you see, as the engine is designed to be in a bike, when a bike corners, it leans, centrifugal forces and gravity kick in and everything is good. However, when the engine is in a car, the car doesn't get the same sort of lean angles through a corner (unless you're doing something very wrong) so the oil surges and things blow up. I don't want my engine to blow up. 

On a normal trip to the shops, it'd probably be fine, on a track, maybe not so much, and this is where I may not have gone far enough, as the ultimate mod would be to have a dry sump, but they cost a lot and it's probably complicated.

So I decided to buy a kit to sort all this out, and after some research the Extreme Engines Low Line Wet Sump with Baffle Plate was the one I opted for.
I explained to the guys at Extreme Engines my level of competency and they assured me that it was easy and that instructions were included. Great.

The kit comes with a clutch baffle kit too, so I decided to start there. Step one of the instructions read Remove clutch assy. Now for a start, I'm pretty sure using the entire word assembly could have been used, but I cracked the code.

After removing the clutch housing, I was staring at something that reminded me of the Giant Hadron Collidor:

The Giant Hadron Collider on the left, my clutch on the right.

Now, just six simple bolts to undo to get the clutch assy removed, simples. Hmm, it turns out that those six screws hold each clutch plates in place, and those things look quite fiddly and need to be in exactly the right order and rotation. It was at this point I thought I'd put the six bolts back in and do the sump instead, surely the clutch baffle isn't that important anyway.

Oh but those six bolts are sprung, and add in the fact that the chassis hampers my leverage, what a bitch they are to put back in. I'd read that it's a good idea to swap out clutch springs for heavy duty ones. The logic being that when fitted on a bike, the clutch is hand opperated, but on the car it's your foot so a bit more resistance is nice. I did this and despite having lots of spinach, when writing this up the day afterwards, my hand still aches now.

So the clutch baffle was thwarted at the first bullet point of remove clutch assy, so I wasn't too optimistic about the sump side of things.

This is where my lack of enthusiasm crept in, and had a slight hiatus on the project that I mentioned at the top of this post. So today, I cracked on, and removed the sump. I was worried that the bolts holding the sump on would shear, there are 14 of them and it would only have taken one to be a bugger, but no, they were ok in the end.

The rubber mallet was needed to get the sump off even with the bolts out as the grime on the engine was holding it together. I managed to avoid getting covered in oil, I know that was what you were all waiting for, but no, I'd thought about that. 

Yes, that is a rip, and a footprint.

Proper engine stuff now. There was one slight problem in that the instructions had been left out in my garage during my hiatus, and they had faded so much that I'd seen better looking treasure maps.

The arrows on the drawings were very very faint, and any text in red had faded completely. But surely nothing important would be written in red so I was probably ok.

"Remove three main bearing bolts". Which are the beari...oh got it. Those boys were in pretty tight. 

I was a little concerned as I'd read ahead a little and it mentioned to make sure the o-ring was in a certain position. I didn't have an o-ring, and o-rings sound important, I should probably have one, why wouldn't I have one? Maybe things will make sense if I carry on.

Removing the rest of the bits was fairly simple and came off easily. Everything was out now and it was time to fit the new parts. The kit contained smaller bits of what I'd taken out so that they'd fit in the new shallower sump. No problem. 

Still no o-ring, so I double checked all of the packaging and then noticed that there was one still sat neatly in the neck of the oil pickup that I'd removed. Phew. 

Putting the new parts in was pain free, although tightening to the adequate torque felt like I was going to do some serious damage.

I threw caution to the wind and fitted a new gasket, and hey presto, job done.

Before & after

Spoke too soon. A bad thing happened.

Ooops.

Whilst tightening up the bolts that hold the sump in place, I set the torque wrench to the specified 7ftlbs and on the first bolt; tighten, tighten, tighten, snap.

That's right, the first bolt sheered which is annoying as the wrench certainly hadn't pinged to say that it was up to torque and it was set right. I can only guess that the various adapters that I had on it to fit the 8mm socket had thrown the calibration.

Not quite sure how to fix that, just when I was getting somewhere...