Nearly there...

With a few more weeks in the workshop under the belt, progress has been rapido.

The car looks like it should work. The wings and wheel arches are in place, seats are in and most of the engine ancillaries are fitted.

Apologies for no pics from the front, the car is close to a wall, so I couldn't get everything in shot, so you'll have to make do with ass shots.

So lets talk about the dashboard. For simplicity and to get it complete quicker, I'm using the dash from the bike. This may change in the future, but lets get a few laps on the clock first. Those with eagle eyes will notice that the dash is mounted upside down. This was due to some advice from an someone who builds race cars for a living... Basically, if it was mounted the correct way up then the rev counter would be way over to the left rather than in the drivers eye line. Mounting it this way, puts it in the peripheral vision especially when hitting the higher revs.

Here's a shot of the engine 'bay'. The throttle bodies and airbox are now in place amongst other stuff. I thought that the airbox would be uglier and stick up more, but as it is, I can live with it. There are alternatives, but they're not cheap, so it's another thing on the list to consider later. There's still more to be done back here, with the main bits being the starter motor and the gear shifter.

This is as close to a front view as it gets. The seats are in, and fit (phew). The drivers seat does need to go back a bit once the fuel tank is moved to the passenger side. This view does give a good view of the rear wing which is a monster! Lets hope it's better than the Countach rear wing which actually created lift.

I can't finish this post without giving a special shout out to Len of Wildmoor Motorsport. Len agreed to help me finish off this project along with Callum who works with Len. Sadly, Len passed away earlier this month which is a true loss to motorsport. Len was a top bloke and had a wealth of knowledge and experience and will be sadly missed. RIP Len.

More oil

[I found this old unpublished post, I'm just going to hit 'publish' on it now, no idea why I didn't do it back in the day]

I ended a previous post on a cliff hanger, I'd just sheered a bolt when putting the sump back on. Not good.

I spent some time pondering what to do about this, can I bodge it? Do I need 14 bolts? If it's snapped far enough in, can I use a shorter bolt?

Do I drill it out? That sounds tough, especially lay on my back, drilling out a steel bolt from an aluminium engine lump. That could will go wrong. I consulted with my advisors; perhaps I could use the sump as a guide for drilling it out? Maybe use an extractor, then drill out a wider hole, tap it and fit a heli-coil.

I hadn't actually inspected the damage, so I attempted to remove the sump, I wasn't sure if it would come off as I didn't know where the bolt had snapped. It came off dead easy. Great. Even better news was that part of the bolt was sticking out, so I was able to get some purchase on it with some pliers. Turns out, I could get it out with my fingers, it was that easy. So basically, I made you read these last four paragraphs when I could just have said I unscrewed a bolt. Anyway, it was very relieving.

I took this to mean that the bolts were rubbish, so I got a new set of better ones and refitted the sump, and torqued them up without incident.

Sticking with the oil system, I purchased an oil cooler. As most things, this wasn't as easy as it sounded. The Hayabusa engine has some non-standard connections where the oil pipes connect, so I needed some way of getting off the shelf pipes to fit. Plus then when choosing an oil cooler there are four different standards for specifying the width of the inlets/outlets, of course the pipes that go on these use different terminology, so I can't just buy a size 8 cooler and size 8 pipes, that'd be way too easy.

After some hunting, I found that, the good guys at Extreme Engines do a conversion kit for the Hayabusa engine that converts the odd Suzuki format into one of these four standards (JIC/10). So it made sense to buy an oil cooler that was also JIC/10, then all I needed were some pipes to fit, oh and the pipe ends.

To help sort all this out, I contacted Speedflow who were very useful, and I send them my thanks! They can supply the cooler and the pipes, cut to length, and they'll fit the ends for me free of charge. 

At this point, as they were so helpful, I didn't bother shopping around as they deserved my business and ordered a 16 row, Mocal oil cooler. Again the size of the cooler was up for debate, and 16 rows might sound over the top for a 1.3l engine. However, the cooler does sit at the back of the car, so it's not going to get a lot of ram air, plus it's behind the hot engine. The only disadvantage that I could see for going for a larger one is that it may take longer for the engine to heat up, but that can be fixed if necessary.

So with the cooler delivered, I set about making the brackets, I know what you're thinking, I must be a dab hand at making brackets by now, but as always, everything is a challenge. With these brackets, the challenge was not having enough hands, and I ended up having to hold the cooler and the brackets in place and mark out the cuts using a Sharpie in my mouth.

The brackets holding the cooler in place.

I knocked up some prototype brackets in aluminium and then Steve at work created me a pair in stainless steel. I'd not worked with stainless before, and it's certainly more of a challenge than allooooominum!

So with the brackets made, I opted to paint them in the same colour as the chassis, MEV Exo cars had provided me with the RAL code of the paint colour, so I had some spray paint made up matching that and then went through the rigmarole of prime, paint and then lacquering.

Progress

Finally, some progress.

After another lengthy hiatus, work has started again, only possible as I now have help and the car is in a proper workshop.

Lots of decisions to be made, firstly I was never happy with the fuelling setup. Twin tanks complicates things and everything I read about them leads to problems. So the one behind the driver (me) can go. The tanks are 2.5 galleons each, so will be fine for a track day session. By losing the driver one, it also helps balance the weight if there is no passenger (even with a passenger, my COVID ballast will take some balancing!). 

Without that tank it also means that the driver seat can go backwards a little to give my lanky legs a little more room. However, there is also another use for that space which I'll get to later.

Next decision was around the gear changes. I wanted an electronic paddle shift, but that costs £££. From talking to the experts, they're also trouble, they need too much power and you risk losing spark and stalling which is something I'd rather avoid. An alternative is to go with hydraulics, but that costs £££££ and again is complex with either a compressor needed or having to top up a tank.

So the decision is to go with a stick shift, mechanical. It's not ideal, and will cost lap time, but not as much time as breaking down. Plus it will still be fun and I can always change when I save enough pennies.

The big progress has been the wiring, the loom is now extended and mostly in place. A lithium battery is on order, none of this old school acid or gel malarkey! This does beg the question of where to put the power commander, rectifier and all that gubbins. I wanted it under the nose cone on the passenger side, but that meant lengthening a load more cables, so it can go in the handy position which has just been made available behind the driver where the 2nd tank was going to be.

One more expenditure, a water pump. The pump on the 'busa lump isn't enough to circulate the now bigger system with the upgraded radiator that I fitted, so an additional pump is on it's way.

In the final picture here, you can also just make out the clutch slave is mounted on a custom bracket. Not sure how it's meant to go according to the kit, but as I never got a manual...

Brakes

It’s fair to say that it’s been a while since I last worked on the car, over a year in fact! The problem has been that I keep getting stuck, find out I’m missing parts or just haven’t had time. Since then though, I’ve brown the engine in my track bike, crashed my KTM (and fixed it), and had a baby.

Who needs instructions with skills like these

I figured the brake system couldn’t be that difficult but despite having a sealed pack labelled “Mevabusa brake kit”, it didn’t actually contain everything I needed. I was missing a T-piece, some banjo bolts and the cables that connected the master cylinders to the reservoir. All of this should have been in the "kit in the box", but then I was also promised instructions, and they never materialised either.

The supplied reservoir

Speaking of the reservoir, it was a second hand pot with duel outlets with scanky ripped hoses attached. I opted to buy 2 new reservoirs, this way I’d know the exact sizes of the outlets for the hoses I needed to buy and I could have separate systems for the front and rear brakes giving some kind of hope in the event of a failure (it’s me building this thing remember!). Also if I need to work on it, I only need to bleed 2 corners at a time.

Look at the pair on that...

Plumbed

When I had all of the right parts, plumbing it all together was pretty easy, and everything is now tightened up. I’m not putting fluid in yet as the car is still up in the air on blocks so it’s not exactly going anywhere plus it’s highly likely I’ll need to disconnect things as I do more work around each corner. It is very tempting to whack the fluid in though, it would mean something on the car actually worked!

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 :)