We’re working up now to the next race at Anglesey. As I write it’s warm and sunny outside; doubtless this presages a race weekend at Anglesey with horizontal rain. Having suffered hugely at Anglesey in the past I’m very wary about the weather there.

The big change to the car over the last couple of weeks is the appearance of various aerodynamic addons. I realised a while ago (clever, me) that with the move to class B I’m not limited to “standard” bodywork anymore. Consequently, I could experiment with additional aero devices. The RGB regs don’t allow anything having an airfoil cross-section, so means wings are out. However, there’s a large collection of other aero devices commonly used on race cars that are allowed. I’ve done a bit of reading about it, and also been talking to Tom about it. As he’s got an aerodynamics degree it’s about time he paid for his education…

So, the first thing was I made a splitter. This is a mostly horizontal ledge at the lower front of the car. The idea is that there’s a stagnation point in the airflow just above the splitter (like the streamline that stops right at the front of the airfoil above). At the stagnation point the velocity of the air is zero and hence, according to that nice Mr Bernoulli, the pressure’s highest. This pressure acts on the splitter and pushes the front of the car down. Of course, with something like the Fury the best I can hope to achieve will be to reduce the lift.

Of course, a splitter will likely also increase the drag; the aerodynamic texts, such as Katz, all talk about lift/drag ratios.

So, I made something. Tradition is that splitters are made of plywood. I mounted a small lump of this under the front of the Fury’s bonnet. It’s attached to the bonnet with various small pillars which I tried to attach to the bonnet in a manner that would mean that the splitter wouldn’t tear off as soon as the car went above 60 MPH.

Of course, if it were just as in the photo here it wouldn’t do anything as there isn’t any reason for the airflow to stagnate. Hence, I blocked up the rear of the splitter with some aluminium. Essentially making a wall up against the support pillars. I then used some red tape to cover up the ply so it didn’t look quite so naff. (Although, as you can see in the photo above, the bodywork is really starting to look rather tired. Whatever else happens to this car I’m going to have to respray it one day.)

As you can see in the photo on the right. The splitter is not actually attached to the car. That’s an odd thing to do, as you wouldn’t think it would work there. Ah well, I’ve got a cunning plan, you see…

In an ideal world the effect of the splitter would be to increase how well the front of the car worked which should tend to make the car oversteer, although along the way it might well go quicker anyway. If the car did oversteer then I’d really need something to make the rear of the car work better. As the RGB regs don’t permit a wing I’m going to have to make do with a small spoiler. So, I fabricated the aluminium beast that you see here.

This is quite a modest size, but some simple calculations say that it should have some effect. In an ideal world this will create some rear downforce (or reduce the lift) so as to counteract the oversteer induced by the splitter. Eagle-eyed readers will note that the spoiler is attached by Clekos in this photo. That’s because I wanted to take this off too, as part of the cunning plan.

So, what was the cunning plan then? Well, we were making one of our occasional forays to Spa for a trackday or two. My plan was to drive the car as it used to be and then attach the splitter. With luck I’d get barrow loads of oversteer which would go away when the spoiler was installed.

To cut a long story short, that did seem to be the case. The other obvious effect was that running the splitter seemed to decrease braking distances dramatically. My original intention had been to then take the devices off again and see if things got worse again, as it was hardly a double blind test; not even single blind come to that. However, the second of the two Spa days was wet, really wet, and the general low-quality of the organisation of the trackday (not an organiser I shall be using again) meant that I got next to no useful track time. As I’ve seen before, the circuit was filled with really expensive cars which were incredibly incompetently driven.

So, with all that done it seems worth persevering. So, I shall leave the bits and pieces on for the next race meeting which is at Anglesey. In fact, I’ve spent a while this week checking over the car in readiness for this meeting. I just hope the weather here works out well.

The only problem with all this is that the bodywork mods seem to have created a vibration. I don’t think that it’s a fundamental problem, but I do worry about things like the propshaft after the fire of a couple of years ago. I shall have to be careful at Anglesey…

The major activity over the last couple of days has been converting this thing into somthing useful. This is the entire loom from the bike, other than the tails connected directly to the lights and so on. It’s a lot more complicated than the equivalent thing for the CBR900. It’s also made doubly difficult to use by being set up to connect properly to all the sensors, and so on, when in the bike. On the bike the ECU mounts on the very top of the airbox and the loom wraps around the engine to all the sensors and so on. The problem is that the top of the airbox would be a daft place to put the ECU in the car. If I mount it, as seems sensible, on the scuttle then nothing’s going to fit any more.

So, I set about chopping all the bits I didn’t want out of the loom and lengthening and shorting various bits and pieces. I was surprised that Mr Honda has used nasty sticky loom tape on the loom and I had to clean a lot of gooey stuff off the cables. When finished, it took me a couple of days, it was a lot smaller and lighter than it had been. Of course, I have absolutely no evidence that it works. I keep wondering about buzzing the whole thing out but that seems a trifle anal, even for me. The new engine loom is shown here. I’ve still got a bit more work to do though. The wires to the secondary injectors and the AIT (air inlet temperature) sensors are far too short at the moment. They’re the connectors just below the black and grey ECU connectors at the top left of the photo. However, I need to sort the airbox before seeing what to do about them. Those unwrapped bits of wire are to connect to non-Honda sensors on the engine, such as the oil pressure sender. I am going to need one additional bit of wire in the car though. The CBR1000 ECU controls the fuel pump through a relay. Normally this is mounted in the loom but in order to connect to the supply properly I’ll mount the relay on the scuttle. That will mean I’ll need to run a new wire to the rear of the car to power the pump with. Annoying as I was quite proud of the fact that the existing loom included absolutely all the wiring needed, even things like the wire from the brake pressure switch to the logger so that I can log when I’ve got my foot on the brake pedal. The final bit of news is that Bryn Jones sent me an email to tell me that the new tank is on its way. Hmm, it really is starting to happen.

I said I’d probably have to modify the pedal box again, and I’ve now done this. As you can see from the photo I’ve cut off the top corner of the box. I have checked that my size 12 race boots don’t bash into the new corners. (And, for the reader who questioned me; yes, it was the left boot.)

The other thing I’ve done is added a new master cylinder which you can also see in the photo. This isn’t actually the final cylinder but a spare one I had lying around. Well, to be fair I knew I had it somewhere but it only took me about 2 hours to find it. I needed it in there, though, as when I made the engine mounting I was going to have to arrange to miss the additional obstruction.

As part of the pedal box issues I’ve bought a hydraulic clutch pedal for the existing OBP pedal box. This was essentially a new pedal with the bearing at the bottom and a a new bearing shaft which now extends through both brake and clutch areas. You can see the new shaft in this photo here. I’ve now ordered a new master cylinder from Rally Design so I can probably get a good deal of this all plumbed in soon. While this has been going on I’ve arranged with Bryn Jones at Allyfab to make me a new fuel tank. It’s going to be rather more expensive than the previous carb tank was, but that seems unsurprising. I need to get the fittings I need to connect it up though. I do keep wondering about running the fuel line out of the central tunnel, if only to try and keep the fuel a bit cooler. As the central tunnel is where a lot of the hot air escapes it must heat the fuel up which can’t be good for maximum power. I had a couple of occasions this season just gone where the engine was suffering from fuel vaporisation once it had stopped and I wondered at the time if the real problem was the fuel overheating.

I then made the engine mounts for the other side of the engine. This  is a rather spidery affair, as I made for the CBR900 engine. However, it does miss the clutch master  cylinder. What I’m intending to do, when I’m absolutely sure where the engine is going to end up, it to make another small mount for the rear of the right hand engine mount. This will just go onto the top of the pedal box which, as it’s made out of seam-welded steel, is actually pretty strong. I’m not sure that the engine actually needs this mount but that’s what I did for the CBR900 and that worked OK. I’m am, as always, worried about these new mounts as they have a bad habit of cracking. However, the only mount that I have cracked is one of the horrible abortions that Fisher themselves made. The one that I made for the CBR900 always worked fine. But, I kept on looking at it pretty carefully. I’ve bought some more POR-15 which I’ll use for painting these mounts when I’ve next got the engine out. For now, the engine’s actually supported in the chassis which is a new experience. I can’t really tell yet how much is going to stick out of the top of the bonnet, although it’s clear that the airbox is actually the biggest issue. I know that if I were to use the bike airbox exactly as it it I’d probably need a flag on top of the airbox to warn low flying aircraft. However, I’m hopeful that either me or Andy will come up with something suitable. The biggest single issue, though, is going to be getting a new exhaust system made. I’ll talk to Andy about that as soon as I can.

So, the idea is to make the same sort of thing work in the car. In order to do that I need to get this device in the bottom of a tank. It’s upside down here but it provides the proper mounting for the Honda fuel pump.

So, what I’ve done is to modify the design for the tank that I did last year in order to incorporate this flange. I’ve arranged to get the new tank made by Allyfab, who made the tank I made last year. With that done, attention returned to fitting the engine. The previous attempt at fitting it really didn’t get it in the right place. Looking hard at it, it was clear that the main problem was the pedal box, especially the top corner which, to be honest, isn’t really needed by my size 12s. So, I cut the corner back a bit (clearly,I’ll have to fix it later) and after a few more attempts lifting the engine in and out got it in a much more satisfactory place. In the photo here you can see that I’ve got a fake foot, in the shape of one of my race boots, sitting on the clutch pedal to check things for size. You might also be able to see that I’ve cut the corner off the pedal box. The engine fits in this position much better. Before doing all this I took off the oil intercooler. However, the intercooler doesn’t foul the chassis  in this position so I could put it back on, It might, though, all work rather better with an external cooler so I made well get an  adapter place made up. Whether I have the time is another issue.

At which point I ran slap into the next problem. While checking the engine’s fit I connected up, or tried to connect up, the prop. After a while it was clear that the prop was fouling on the water pump. In retrospect Andy told me this might be a problem. I’d just forgotten. So, I took the pump off to proceed with the engine fit. This is the pump here. I’m not sure yet what I’ll do about this. The two solutions are to use an electrical pump, apparently Andy’s found a dead good Bosch one, or to modify this pump by cutting off that pipe at the top and getting it welded back on at a janunty angle. I’ll have to see which of those works out better. For now, I can proceed with the pump off the engine.

With the pump off I managed to get the mountings made up for the front and rear of the engine, With luck you can see them in these photos. That means that the engine is now pretty stable. What I now need to do is to take it out again, sigh, fix the pedal box and made a cradle, like I made last year for the CBR900, for the gearbox side. Once the engine is in I can look at the other issues, such as sorting out the wiring. I’ve started looking at this, and have worked out everything that’s in the existing loom. I got the complete bike loom with the engine so that’s a good start. What I want to do, though, is to strip out everything that I don’t need (such as the lighting and the lean angle sensor). I think I should then be able to splice it into the current loom. Or, more accurately, to connect the important bits up to some new connectors which will connect into the car’s loom at the same place as that used for the CBR900 engine. I will need to run some extra wires though, for example it’d be nice to replicate the ECU warning lights on the dash. Luckily, after a couple of days poring over connectors and the loom it’s now looking a lot simpler.

First thing, though, was to take the CBR900 engine out, as seen in the picture here. This should, I hope, be the last time I take this engine out.

The engine’s now languishing in the corner of the garage. I need to work out what to do with it as it’s a completely fine engine really, although the gearbox probably needs a little work. Here it is looking all forlorn. Note, though, that it’s got my snazzy clutch actuating lever on the front of it.

That leaves me with a big hole to fill with an engine. However, I’m sure there are going to be all sorts of problems fitting the engine so I’m probably going to end up doing several trial fits. While I’m here, it’ll be a good idea to clean the engine compartment up totally. I did notice that the POR-15 on the top chassis rail by the exhaust headers has suffered rather; I suspect it isn’t meant to be fried. I’ll have to think of some way  of making it a bit more robust.

On then to the engine mountings. The engine itself has some bushes cast into the block which are threaded at M12 fine. I’ve got some cap head bolts to go into these so I need to make something that the bolts will engage in. The original Fisher approach to this was to forcibly tap the block to a coarse (and therefore more common) thread and to fit a flat plate to the block mounting bushes using a collection of small bits of tubing. Pretty poor approach, I always thought. So, I’ve been meaning to sort this for a while. So, I made some of the things here, referred to as “bucket bushes”. This is just a bit of tubing with a plate welded across the end and a hole drilled through that plate. I have to say, having the lathe makes doing this sort of things spectacularly easier than it was before. For example, it’s easy to face the end of the tubing so that it’s exactly square and trivially easy to drill a hole dead centre of the end of the bush.

So, with a couple of those each side of the engine I made mountings for the front and back of the end that looked like this. Of course, I now need to connect these up to the chassis somehow. That needs to wait, though, until I’m sure where the engine is going to go.

In order to know that, I need to attach all the various bits of gubbins to the outside of the engine. The first thing was the sump. So, I took off the original sump, and this is what it looks like inside. First impressions are that it’s pretty clean, which is good. The engine is only supposed to have done a few miles, and that certainly looks to be the case. Looking down the inlet ports and it looks new. In fact, the only sign of any sort of usage that I can see is that there’s a bit of grease around where the output sprocket is, and I suspect that appears pretty quickly once the bike’s ridden at all.

I wanted to get some sort of indication of what the oil temperature was, so I drilled and tapped the sump to take the same oil temperature sender as I used on the CBR900. The only problem with this sump is that it isn’t possible to get the sender right at the bottom as there isn’t a suitable flat location. Hence, I’m not sure that this position will actually work that well. Still, time will tell.

So, I put the sump on and put the engine the right way up again. That was a relief as the residual oil in the engine had run out and gone all over the floor. It’s going to take a while to clear it up. In this photo I’ve also attached the adapter that moves the clutch slave cylinder out of the way of the propshaft adapter, and I’ve attached the adapter to the output shaft.

With that done I could start a trial fit of the engine. I’m sure that I’m going to have to put the engine in and out several times until I know where it needs to be. At the first attempt it’s clear that the engine is really a small amount larger than the CBR900. As such it’s bound to be difficult.

And so it is. The first observation is that I can’t get the engine down as low as I’d like because the oil/water intercooler bashes in the chassis, as in the photo here. I want to mount the engine as low as I can. The main reason for this is so that the size of the bonnet bulge is reduced. The other reason is that it’s pretty easy to space the engine upwards slightly, but it’s close to impossible to lower it. So, by mounting it a bit low I’ll have a little room for manoeuvre. But, that clearly means chopping this chassis rail out. I’ll need to take the engine out again and work out how to do that.

There’s a similar problem at the top of the engine, where the gearbox-side mounts are pretty close to the top of my (specially widened) pedal box. I think I’m going to have to try reducing the width of the top of the pedal box slightly. I think that should be reasonably easy to do.

Most important is the oil cooler. I took this off before Oulton as it became apparent that something was leaking from somewhere. However, the oil temperatures at Oulton were back to being alarmingly high (as in the output from the logger just on the right.) As you can see, the oil temperature was up to nearly 160°C before the end of the race.

So, I dug the cooler back out and cleaned it up carefully to see if I could see what the problem was. To be honest, I was hoping that the unions were just loose but that didn’t appear to be the case. So, I carried on and changed the oil anyway, something I thought I had to do after molesting it as in the graph above. With it back together and the engine running again it became clear where the oil was coming from, as in the photo where you can see the oil leaking out of the connection between the hose union and the body of the cooler.

I did wonder about trying to weld this up but I’d probably ruin something so I’ve just ordered a new one from Rally Design.

Suspension again

Back to the suspension, which I’ve been wittering about. Since I last wrote I’ve re-measured the car to check that I wasn’t missing something, and it appears that I wasn’t. The upshot is that if I’m going to get anywhere with this I’m probably going to have to remake the upper wishbones for both the front and rear suspension. As a knock-on effect that’s going to need to modifications to the chassis itself to change the pickup points. I’ll look into doing this after I get the car back into the garage for the winter which should be, assuming I don’t break it again, after the Birkett which should be the last race of the year. I’ve got to take the engine out anyway so I’ll probably strip a good deal of the bodywork and suspension off which will make getting at things to modify the chassis rather easier. In fact, thinking about it, I’ll probably want to turn the chassis upside-down at some point.

The biggest problem with remaking the suspension is probably the front rocker arms. Firstly I need to find out how to fabricate the bearings that are inside the rocker mounting tube. Secondly, I can’t find anywhere to make the tapered adapter that goes onto the top ball joint. I might have to smile nicely at a man with a lathe… Or, perhaps this is the time to purchase one of my own? Problem is I don’t really have anywhere to put one…

CBR 1000RR

I’ve been reading about the new engine a lot, having purchased a couple of workshop manuals. One obvious issue is that it’s much more complicated than the CBR900RR with all sorts of injection/electronic things. Clearly, I’m going to have to look into this carefully. Luckily both Andy and Adrian know what’s needed to be done so I’m going to be using them a lot I suspect.

What follows is a bit pernickety. If you don’t know what any of the terms means then feel free to ask, although I might bottle out of coming up with a succinct answer. Mind you, I’m on pretty thin ice here as I’ve only spent 2 years trying to understand this sort of stuff. If you’ve got a lot of time on your hands then feel free to buy a copy of Milliken and Milliken and read it. I managed to get Anthea to buy me a copy of this for Christmas 2006. I’ve nearly finished it… It would be even better if I understood it all. A cheaper alternative, and recommended by the Susprog chaps, is Herb Adams’ book. The problem with both these books is they use Imperial units which really does my head in.

Front suspension

After much fiddling, I’ve got all the numbers in for the front suspension. Susprog calculates the static roll centre as being at 22mm which is commendably low. Thankfully, Susprog can be set to work in metric units. However, on closer examination there are two problems. First of all the roll centre whizzes sideways as the car rolls which is not the point. Rather worse, or so I’m told, is that the suspension appears to have essentially no camber recovery built into it. If a wheel starts at, say, -2.5° camber and then the car rolls 1° you’d hope that the suspension system would reduce some of that camber change at the wheel. However, the Fury front suspension actually rolls the front wheel by more than 1° which is not really the point.

I’ve done quite a lot of fiddling around with Susprog and I think I’ve come up with a way of changing the pickup points that is both feasible to effect and ameliorates these effects somewhat. Once I’ve got the engine out I shall see if I can work up the courage to do the changes indicated. The problem is, it’d be nice to be able to do them in a manner than meant I could revert the suspension if it turns out that I don’t know what I’m talking about, which is perfectly feasible.

Rear suspension

The rear suspension is rather different. In many ways it seems to be predicated on where the frame is around the diff, as that’s where the pickup points are attached, rather than them being in the place where you want them to be.

The end result is that the static roll centre is at a lofty 180mm. This means that the suspension won’t roll that much but it’ll suffer from jacking which means that lateral loads, such as those which occur in cornering will tend to lift the car up in the air. I’m pretty sure, now, that this is the source of some problems I had at Anglesey when the car had a very odd attitude round one of the corners.

Working out how to change the rear suspension actually seems to be a bit harder, mainly because of that diff carrier mentioned earlier. However, I think I’ve come up with something. What’s more, I’m pretty sure that I can do this in such a manner that I could revert the suspension if needed. The “only” problem is whether the wishbones will bash into the chassis as the suspension articulates. I shall have to do some careful measuring and mocking up before I actually cut or weld anything.

Adjuster ladders

If I do have to change any of the wishbones to effect the changes I’m talking about, then I will incorporate adjuster ladders into them. That would mean that I could adjust things (that is for camber and toe) without continually taking the thing to bits which would be a great relief.

Engine

A final note on the new engine. Andy rang me up today and said that he’d probably be able to get the new engine package together for the final RGB race of the season at Mallory in a couple of weeks. That’d be nice. Mind you, it’ll just sit on the floor of the garage until after the Birkett…