January 14th

It's a New Year and I haven't done anything to the car for ages. This is due, as I've said, to:

  • It's too cold
  • There's too much work to do
  • I need to spend lots of time skiing

Anyway, I thought I would document a sort of status report, so all you people who come and look at the web page are not going away in disgust. I have been spending a fair amount of time sorting things out, but precious little time actually building anything. One additional problem is that William and Richard, both local cam7ers, have both bought Rush kits and are now coming up on the rails...

The current major issues are:

Richard's dashDashboard
I've always intended to go slightly my own way on the dashboard. One reason is that Dax produce two dashes, a plain GRP one and a "sculptured" one. Previous examples that I've seen of the first one have been just too flimsy, whereas I think the latter is just horrid. However, Richard bought one for his Rush and he's lent it to me. It's an altogether more robust thing than the version I've seen before and I think I'll get one of those at least as somewhere to start.
Alternator
This is a bit of a tricky one. The alternator bracket that I have, which came from the old SD1 engine, will not be of any use as the alternator is held in a position that's much too low. There are other arrangements around that hold the alternator up higher, including the one that I think was used on the P6. Unfortunately, using a P6 one would, I am sure entail using a new water pump and crank pulley too. I'll need to talk to someone about this, I wonder if RPI is the right place?
HydraulicsClutch hydraulic pipework
Essentially I just need this! There are really two ways of doing it. The first would be to make up some copper fixed pipe, like the ones in the photo, and arrange a bracket to go into a flexible pipe further down before the clutch itself. The alternative is to use a flexible pipe all the way. The advantage of the former is that it might look neater so I'm intending to do that. However, I'm having trouble working out what sort of flexible pipe to get as the connection to the clutch slave cylinder is a rather odd size.
Oil filter
I think I've mentioned this before, but I still need to find out if there is a fixed oil filter that will fit, as I will otherwise have to buy a remoting kit.
Heater
This is clearly for wimps, but as that's what I am I have decided that I need one. (It's certainly true that driving the Westfield in cold weather is made much easier by having a heater that works fairly well. The only issue is what heater to get. The one from Dax costs £189, or I could get the one from Westfield or one of the several that are in the Europa catalogue. I'm wondering about using the Westfield one as it has some rather nice footwell vents on it.

Rear brake pipes
I'm worrying that I've put the rear brake pipes in incorrectly. I mounted mine like the first photo, but in the second you can see a factory produced car. You can see that my flexible pipe goes forward whereas the other one goes backwards. One of the main reason that I didn't do the second is that getting a brake pipe clip in seemed to need the roll bard tube to be drilled, which didn't seem to clever.

They will both work but I'm concerned that mine will make the flexible hose get in the way of the wheel. I suppose if I actually got some wheels I would know for certain, but as I can't decide whether to get expensive three part alloys or cheap(er) one part alloys I can't make any progress.

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