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...

DIFFicult

A long, long time ago in a garage far far away, I started building my car. Well, after a very slow going winter I finally have some progress. If you thought I was going to say that it was finished, have you learned nothing from my previous posts?

Tonight I did some work on the diff, the clue was in the title, I did a play on words thing and changed 'diff' into 'difficult'! You've missed these posts haven't you... I'll get my coat.

Where did I leave off? Oh, I haven't even talked about the engine have I yet... well that was fun.

The car looked very pitiful when thrown on the floor.

Tim and I had great fun getting the engine in place, you see the engine has to come in from under the car, so I took the opportunity to turn the car 180 degrees (not that way! I mean so that it was facing the other way!).

The engine was then hoisted in which was interesting trying to keep it level. We got a couple of mounts in place and called it a night as we hit a slight snag.

Check and check again. Did it your side slip? No, did your
side? No. Up a bit more? Urm... let me check again first.

You may remember that one of the engine mounts was screwed and needed re-tapping. This was a fairly simple affair with thanks to Steve for lending me the taps and Paul for showing me what to do during an hours *ahem* lunch break.

It looks tiny. Hopefully it'll be underestminated ;)

So with the mount sorted, Paul and I decided to get the engine in place. Tip of the day: If you're reading this before you've done it, do the two bottom/rear mounts first, you can then pivot the engine much easier to get it at the right angle for the top/front four.

Millimetres make a big difference in this game. Typical,
the mount that is furthest out is the one I had to re-tap.

Oh if only it were that easy, you see the chassis doesn't exactly line up with the engine mounts. It was a real pig getting the bottom two in as things were so tight, but with the force of some Icelandic strong men, we made it work. The top four don't exactly line up though and I'm going to have to get creative with the holes in the chassis to make it fit.

Never-the-less, with the engine in place, I could crack on. I did some other bits which I'll make separate posts about and fast forward to tonight's work, and the title of tonight's post; the diff.

The diff comes in three parts, two mounts and the diff itself. It's a fairly heavy piece of kit, holdable in one hand but really two's needed to lift it. When all three bits are together it looks a bit like a Tie Fighter.

I originally put the mounts in place and then tried to slide the diff in, but the gap was too tight as part of the diff inserts into the mounts. Fair enough, so I assembled the three parts and then tried to slide it in, but it didn't fit, the gap was still too narrow. Hmm.

So I got out the ol' measuring stick (aka a ruler), and found that the diff with the mounts was 17.7cm wide (that's 177mm for you engineers). The gap however was only 17.0cm, so if my maths can be trusted, the gap is 7mm shy of what it needs to be. Just for completion's sake I measured the gap at the bottom, this was bang on 17.7mm, so it looks like the top is definitely out. As it's part of the chassis this was already assembled by Road Track Race so it wasn't anything I could have done wrong. I was going to drop them an email (they've proven very helpful and responsive in the after sales department, so don't let me lead you into thinking that they're a bunch of cowboys who just sit in the factory counting my money).

Anyway, before emailing them I sat and had a little think and decided I'd try and push the diff in from the bottom rather than slide it in from the top. I knew the bottom was wide enough, so maybe once it was mostly in, I could flex the 5mm aluminium mounts or something.

It probably would have been a long easier with a second pair of hands, but it was still light outside so I wasn't giving up, besides, yesterday's F1 race kicked ass so I was dreaming of getting the damn thing on the track.

It went half way in ok with some jiggery-pokery and the three parts were assembled at this half way stage. After that I tried getting into the gap at the top and it wasn't playing ball, 7mm was too much to flex.

So, so tight. (Stop sniggering)

The chassis is powder coated though which is a couple of mil, so I sanded that back, which still left about 5mm to make up.

Luckily I own a hammer. So doing my best Jeremy Clarkson impression I did some light taps and just about got both sides inside the gap. From there, I could gently tap it further into place until it actually fit. Hurrah!

With a certain sense of accomplishment, I unboxed the drive shafts and temporarily slid those in and everything seems to turn like it's meant to turn and is decidedly more car like now.

Excuse the wonkyness of this picture, I was stood on a chair
with the camera above my head. Believe it or not, this was the
best of three photos.

Tunnel Vision

It's been about a million years since I've posted an update. To be fair, I've started a few posts (like this one), but not finished that section so held off posting. As a general update, progress has been very slow. I've been waiting for bits and generally stumped. There was soooo much I wanted to get done over the Xmas break, but in reality pretty much nothing happened. As a way to get things moving again, I visited the Road Track Race factory to check out a 99% complete Mevabusa that they had there. It was a very useful trip, and as always the staff there were very helpful (thanks Harry and Pete), who patiently answered my raft of imbecilic questions and let me take about a petabyte of photos. Anyway, work has started again...

__________________________

I thought I'd start work on the tunnel/centre console today while I was waiting for other bits. As per most things, I hadn't really a clue about what to do or where to start so I started with listing everything that I thought needed to go in the tunnel, so far I've come up with.

• Hot and cold water pipes
• Small pipe (don't know what this is for yet)
• Wiring loom
• Handbrake & cables
• Rear brake cables
• Clutch cable
• Throttle cable

That's quite a bit of stuff to cram in. There were a couple of pieces of criteria that I wanted to adhere to also. Firstly I wanted the tunnel to be easily removable, so nothing should be attached to the outer tunnel shell. Secondly, I wanted the tunnel to be flush with the floor. This might sound obvious but looking at pictures of other people's builds and some have it raised off the floor sitting on top the chassis. Having it raised is easier, you don't have to cut it around the chassis and you get 2.5cm more space in there.

The lower shelf

Part 1
I had a good think about how to approach it, what brackets to make and so forth. I decided to cut out a shelf which sits on the centre part of the chassis, this would allow me to fix other brackets and also attach the pipes to it directly.

The mock tunnel. I was careful to watch out for X-Wings

I had some off cuts of aluminium from the floor, so I made a 100cm long strip. I had some P-clips to fasten the pipes but I was wary that when the tunnel cover was in place that it wouldn't fit over the pipes so I made a mock up.

This showed that even without flexing the tunnel the pipes and P-clips would fit, held by a single bolt in the centre. Now it was time to put it in place.

The hot and cold pipes in place (sort of, they need to
move forward a little bit, but good enough for now)

It was easier than expected, I thought that I'd need octopus fingers to get the P-clips and the pipes together via a single screw but it wasn't too bad. This way I could use the same screws that I used to hold the shelf in place to hold the P-clips also (I don't know why I'm insisting on capitalising P-clips, the P is the same shape whether it's caps or not!).

Part 2
I held off doing any more work until I had the handbrake as depending on how that fitted, things might have to change. It's a good job I did as things need to change.

The problem was that the handbrake is about 2mm too wide to fit between the pipes. I thought about modifying the handbrake but it wasn't ideal and there was great scope for me needing to buy a new handbrake if I did that. I can't really move the pipes a little bit either way either because the frame is quite narrow, so a rethink was on the cards.

The solution was to mount the pipes vertically rather than horizontally, so I needed a bracket to do this. I settled on some 70mm right-angled brackets and then boggled on how best to fit the 3 P-clips together to fit in the space without crossing the centre line.

The mock bracket showing the P-Clip layout. The middle
hole on the bottom of the bracket is what attaches to the
middle of the shelf.

The solution was to attach one large P-clip and the smaller one to the bracket and the third would be attached to the shelf, but at different intervals so that the bits of rubber weren't fighting for space against each other.

This worked well when it was assembled and there was just enough room. The only adjustment I need to make is to get smaller bolts as the 15mm ones I was using stick out too far and foul the tunnel housing, so I'll get some 5mm ones which should do the trick.

The three pipes in place with the handbrake.

I tried the handbrake in place and it fits along the centreline also which is ideal, although it's not in it's final resting place, it proves that it'll fit there.

So that's one side of the tunnel done, the other side will use the same angle brackets but as it's 'softer' cables running there, it'll cope with going around the handbrake a bit easier.

Bulk head and engine movement

It's been a while, even though, don't expect a picture of the car on the road just yet!

Progress has been split between three different stages; stripping the 'busa, engine work and assembling the car.

One wheel on my wagon

I'll start with the 'busa strip. It's probably as stripped right now as it's going to get. With the engine out, I salvaged a few other parts that I needed like the dash, rectifier and the brake/clutch pots.

No dramas here really, the excellent Suzuki manual tells you everything you need to know with good diagrams and lots of arrows. I still don't have a manual for the Mevabusa that I'm building, but hopefully it'll be of the same ilk when it shows up.

The rear subframe and wheel are off now and the bike is as light as a feather. I don't have a socket to fit the front axle yet, but it's practically at the stage where I can just throw the remainder into a corner now and dust off my eBay account.

Not quite a one man job it turns out

On to the engine work, if you remember one of the exhaust bolts sheered off when I was taking apart, so I opted to take it to work so that Steve could work his magic and voodoo it out. I'd been lent an engine hoist so when Tim and Tommo came over to plan next year's bike trip I got them to lend a hand and hooked the engine up (also cheers to the Moss man for lending me his hoist gear).

Once it was hoisted up I could winch it into the boot (americans: This means trunk) of my Focus, although in reality I couldn't get the hoist close enough, so I gathered some troops and came home one lunch hour to man handle it in. Paul and Sam were the unlucky helpers but it was fairly easy, the engine isn't that heavy, so even when it came to getting it out the other end it was fairly easy.

The replacement stud is just under the rightmost port.

I left it in Steve's capable hands who drilled the bolt out and replaced it with a stud that was glued into place with some atomic glue or something! Sam and Paul once again gave me a hand getting the engine back to base and I gave it a clean once the rain held out. From the engine side, it's now ready to go in I think...

Which brings me onto the car assembly. There's been some discussion and work on the corners getting the bearings and brakes sorted, but I'll put that in a separate post once they're done.

So in preparation for the engine going in, I've put the rear bulkhead in place. Although mostly cut to size by RTR it did need some remaining cuts to get it around the diagonal engine braces on the chassis. They're also sided so I had to be very careful with the measurements. After the cutting I tried it for size and found I'd been too accurate (check me out), where the diagonals meet the main chassis there are blobs of weld so I had to adjust my slots to take those into account.

I wanted to fit the bulkhead with rivnuts now that they're my favourite thing, plus I wanted to get good return on investment on my rivnut gun. It also has the side effect of making it removable which I'm pretty sure I'm going to need for some reason that I don't know about yet.

Those holes in the floor are meant to be there!

Three quarters of the chassis that the bulkhead connects to is curved which makes life difficult so extra care was taken to hit the centre of the curve (I completely missed on one side, but made it work). With that done, I vinyled up the cabin side of the bulkhead and put it in place only to realise that I'd applied the vinyl to the wrong side. Doh.

The chair in shot isn't part of the final build, I opted
for bucket seats instead.

Not a problem, the nice people where I'd got the vinyl from had given me way more than I'd asked for, so it means that both sides of the bulkhead are carbonified.

I'm quite pleased with the results. It took a lot longer than I imagined, but then everything seems to! I'm also two bolts short of being able to attach it properly, so I'll pick a couple of those up tomorrow to finish it off.