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...

Water works

A minor update today, but as a milestone has been met, I figured it was worth posting about; finally the water cooling system is complete.

I posted earlier about switching to a bespoke radiator and that meant reworking the pipework at the front and making some custom brackets. The facilities at work came in handy again for the brackets as they have a proper machine to apply the 90 degree bend that I needed rather than me just twatting it with a hammer until it fit. So many thanks to Steve for sorting that.

The pipework was fairly easy too, luckily I had enough spare bits now to do the necessary joins.

At the rear, the pipework does get awfully close to the exhaust manifold, looking at some pics I notice that others have wrapped theirs, but there's no way I'm getting that bastard off again to do that, so I'll see how it goes and maybe fashion some sort of heat shield in the future. 

I did have to move the rear pipework to make way for the fuel system, but it was only changing the angles a little so that worked out ok.

So there we have it, another milestone complete. I'd have finished the fuel system too if the place I ordered the clips from had sent the right amount, god bless eBay.

I now look forward to 4 years in the future when I can finally fire up the engine and put some heat cycles through it all and play spot the leak.

The final engine mount...

Today I'd like to talk about one of the engine mounts, which turned out to be a lot more of a struggle than it should have been. The mount in question is the one highlighted in red in the picture below. You'll notice that it's one of the larger mounts and one of the first to go in...

I know, it needs a clean...

As you may recall, getting the engine in was a bit tight, and the bolt was put in place then, but as it involved a lot of brute force and grunting at the time I just wanted them in place and I'd fit the necessary spacers afterwards. Mistake number 1.

You see once the engine had settled everything got even tighter, so when I pulled the bolt out into the position in the pic above, the engine moved just a millimeter or two. I'd taken it out to put the correct spacer in as that plastic one in the pic is clearly not the right size. This is where mistake 2 comes in. You see, due to the length of the bolt, it fouls on the chassis meaning you can't actually get it out without moving the engine which I'm never going to do again. So that meant, if I couldn't take the bolt out, I couldn't fit the spacer.

Oh well, I'll just pop it back in again and add it to the list of worrying things to fix later. No, wait, the engine moved didn't it, that means that the bolt won't go back through. Plus, because the chassis is there, no matter how mad you get, you can't hit it properly with a hammer.

So I got my Dremel out, only my Dremel isn't like the nice mains powered one I borrowed from work, mine is a wiener little crappy battery powered one that cost me about £8 from eBay. 

Sometime later, I'd shaved the paint off the chassis and just about made enough room for the mount to slip back through. I then cut some spare rubber hose, slotted it around the part where the spacer should go and tightened it all into place. It's not perfect, but the hose is squeezed so tight it'll absorb any movement, I'm sure it'll be fine.

At last, all engine mounts in place.

Not the most exciting story I know, but these are my daily struggles, one bolt can take an hour!

In my last post I mentioned that the throttle cable that I have is way to short, well after reading some useful build logs on the Tr1ke forum, I urm have to admit that the cables I have aren't exactly throttle cables. In unrelated news though, I now know how the handbrake cables attach. Now to order a throttle cable...

If anyone is reading this who isn't on the MEV forums, then I'm currently hunting for a helping hand. I'm based in Birmingham and am quickly running out of things that I can actually do myself. So if you fancy giving a hand, either just advice or mucking in, then drop me an email at mark.connop@gmail.com.

April 2015 Update

It's been some time since I last posted, but don't worry, you haven't missed much, I'm still some way away from sticking it in a gravel trap just yet...

Progress has been slow, very slow, way way too slow. The problem is that I have no clue how to do stuff, so it's been a lot of pottering around doing not a lot and then a break of a month and so on.

So what have I done? Well, the cooling system is mostly complete, I changed my stance on this pretty close to completion. I was originally going to use the bike's radiator and then realised I'd need a header tank to actually fill up the water as the rad sits quite low compared to the engine. I ordered a custom header tank and went with a slightly higher than standard pressure cap (I should refer to some science at this point as to why I did that, but really it was down to Googling and a shrug of the shoulders). This meant that the pipework involved now no longer matched how it was on the bike. I needed a diagram.

Plan A: Using the 'Busa's radiator

After checking this out with the forum lurkers, I carried on with this plan, and pretty much had it all complete, however after reading other people's experience and noticing that every car that RTR had at their place didn't use the 'Busa rad, I decided to swap the radiator out for something a little more upmarket.

I chose the Radtec alloy radiator and after a quick call to their HQ some money changed hands. At the time of writing, I don't have it yet, so that's still to be done, but the rest of the cooling system is all in place. Time for a new diagram:

Plan B: Now with less lines!

Some incomplete pipework, I've been just as lazy at taking pics
as I have been writing this blog.

There are extra bonuses to this plan, I no longer need the small pipe running the length of the car, so that frees up some tunnel space and saves me a bit of weight, plus it makes the system a little simpler to understand. No doubt I'll have fun making the brackets to get the radiator to fit, but how hard can that be, right?!

Other than the cooling system, last year I decided that I was never going to fit in the nice lightweight moulded seats that comes with the kit. Now I quite like being shoehorned into a car, but those seats were just not going to work unless I spent 40 hours a week watching exercise videos starring the cast of TOWIE and then having a double hip replacement. Instead I went to see the good people at GSM Performance near Nottingham and spent a bit of time in their showroom with the staff there. I have to say, they were very helpful, and I decided on the Cobra Monaco Pro seats that a few people have in their Tr1kes.

The front wheels are on to weigh down the front end.
At some point I'm going to have to think of a way to get the
car off the stands.

These have now arrived, I fit in them, they fit in the car, I just don't quite know how to fit them. Ideally I'd put them on the chassis, but if I do that I'd have to go without fuel tanks. If I move them forward, then I'd have to mount them on the floor, and I'm pretty sure the floor wouldn't like that. So I'm probably going to have to make some extensions to the seat bracket so that they can fit to the chassis. Just don't tell the FIA.

Now I know roughly where the seat is going, I found a place for the handbrake, that's now in place, although not cabled in because, you guessed it, no clue how that stuff works.

Fuel next. That's got to be easy, a couple of tanks and a pipe to the pump, right? Getting the tanks in wasn't too bad actually, although some of the holes I needed to drill were impossible to get my drill into, so I borrowed this rather handy right handed drill (it works in your left hand too).

More tanks than a Brad Pitt film

After a few more holes to allow pipes through, the tanks were physically in place. And this is where I'm at with the fuel as I've no idea how to pipe them all together. The schematic for the fuel system on the 'busa isn't much use as it doesn't have twin tanks, and I need breathers, and swirl pots? More research needed.

Some little things; I decided that I should put the throttle body back on the engine and then I could fit the air box. The throttle body was a little tricky at first but overall, it was ok once I'd loosened off all the fasteners. The air box could then go on, but there was no point until I'd cabled up the throttle cable, so I just tried it on, then put it back where it had been sitting for the last 18 months.

So the throttle cable, how does that work then? I received two cables in the kit, I assume one is the throttle, the other the clutch? But neither are even half the length I need? I can't see anywhere to attach the cable to the pedal or retain it even if I drilled a hole myself. Looking at some photos, I still don't have a clear idea, but could have a go at attaching it to the pedal, but what's the point as it isn't long enough, should I be attaching it to the Busa's cable to make one super cable? Plus I seem to remember there being several (3?) cables on the bike. Two for the throttle, one for the choke? Not sure there, best leave that.

I'm sure there are lots of other things, such as the removable steering wheel boss, brake calipers and so on, but that'll do for today's update. I'm hoping to have another play tomorrow (especially if that rad turns up), maybe start hacking away at the nose cone. 

Engine In

Bit of a milestone this one, but the engine is finally in. It's been mostly in for a since December, so just under six months later and job done.

Not to get too excited of course, it's just in place, it's not running yet, lots to be done before that can happen.

So why so long?

Well... there are six engine mounts, two at the bottom which go all the way through the engine block, and four at the top that just bolt into the chassis, two each side of the engine.

Back in December, Paul and I wrestled the bottom two mounts into place just to get it roughly there. This was the easiest way as it would allow us to pivot the engine then to line the others up. The two bottom mounts were VERY tight and it took a lot of careful manoeuvring (aka hitting shit with hammers) for them to fit. 

We then lined up the other four mounts with the holes and found that they didn't exactly line up, I could partly get one of the bolts in...

Can't. Quite. Fit. If only.Could. Just...

And that's where it stayed until today.

I'd decided that making the holes bigger was going to be a pain, so I'd been doing other things, but really, I need it sorting, so after various thoughts on how to do it I had a 2 min chat with Mike at work. A few mins later Mike appeared with his Dremel.

So I set about expanding the holes and boy did sparks fly. Now I don't own any safety goggles so I wore my MX helmet as that has some goggles with it (I could have just taken the googles off, but they they'd have needed adjusting to fit without the helmet, that all sounded like effort so I just wore the damn helmet).

A few minutes hours later and all four mounts were in. The spacers that were provided with the kit don't quite fit, so I'll need to mod them, and because of that the Hayabusa engine mounts aren't quite the best length, so I'll need some washers and some different length mounts, but all in all, a good job done. 

Not sure now why I put it off 6 months! Which reminds me, I know a good joke about procrastinating, but I'll tell you that later...