Hmm, yes, you’re right: as I thought it was going to, that roll cage looks absolutely awful. It might be slightly better if it matched the car’s colour. However, at the moment I have a strong temptation to remove the front hoop over the closed season and put something slightly more attractive in its place. I certainly don’t need it to be this high to clear my bonce. (Actually, it might looks slightly less bad with the rear struts in, I think.

By the way, the front of the car is at about the correct RGB ride-height, although more by luck than judgement. Something else you might see in the photo above, and in the rather manipulated one on the left, is that the rear wheels appear to be lost in the bodywork. Hopefully when I get the proper tyres, they will look a bit larger and more in keeping.

I still need to add some more clips and supports to the bodywork, although you can probably see some springs and things in the photo above.

As for the Fury, there’s another race coming up and I’ve been preparing it. This has really involved two things. First of all I’ve modified the clutch actuation so that the clevis connection to the clutch pedal is about 6mm lower than it was before. This should have the benefit of making the clutch lighter, and increasing the travel. Secondly, I’ve been repairing the reverser after it was scrunched up at the Cadwell race. I think I’ve managed to sort it, although I haven’t had time to adjust it yet and see if it really works or not.

However, for some mysterious reason I didn’t take any photos of all these things, so I can’t show you. Sorry…

Back to the J15 and there’s not really that much to report. To be honest I’ve been struggling with fitting the bodywork. The standard way to fit the front and rear parts of the bodywork is with some hinges, in the same sort of way that the Fury bonnet is attached. However, for the front bodywork at least, there’s a couple of problems with this. One is that the hinge frame conflicts with where I’ve got the radiator. And, I want the radiator to be here because in the long term I might want to duct it out of the top of the bodywork and that requires the radiator to sit at a particular angle. More importantly, I’m pretty sure that I’m going to need a substantial splitter in order to optimise the front end grip, especially in the faster corners. On the Fury I mounted the splitter on the bottom of the bonnet. However, that means you can’t really open the bonnet easily anyway, as the splitter bashes into the ground. So, I decided a while ago to make the front bodywork just lift off; unlike the Fury bonnet it’s relatively easy to lift because it’s rather smaller.

You may remember that I made a carbon-fibre panel for a splitter. However, originally I couldn’t make that stiff enough and I’ve been experimenting with that old thing, a sheet of ply! You can see a big lump attached to the car above. With the ply it was clear that I still wasn’t going to be able to make it stiff enough so I relented on what I’d been trying to avoid and made the frame that you can see in the photo above. This stiffens everything up nicely. So much so that I think I’ll try the CF panel again. If that does work then at least I’ll have a spare. One of the problems with splitters is that if you go off track then they tend to act like gardening implements and very rapidly get spectacularly bashed up.

That still meant, though, that I hadn’t actually got the bodywork attached. Eventually, I did it in the manner that you can nearly see in the next photo. I’m not sure you can see it very easily, but there’s a couple of stretchy rubber hooks (like these) holding the bodywork down onto the splitter. Actually, to be honest, it’s being held down onto a couple of blocks of a wood that are providing the correct spacing. (Once I’m in a woodworking mood, it seems to stay…)

I’m not totally happy with this, to be honest, because if the splitter gets damaged (see above) then the bodywork might not be too stable either. My original intention was to put a couple of “towers” above the front corners of the chassis and made some pads on the top of those for the bodywork to rest on. The more I looked at it, though, the chunkier it bacame and the less necessary it seemed. I’ll think about it though.

The rear of this bodywork is, at the moment retained just by a couple of springs. However, I’ll probably need to use a couple of bonnet pins to stop it lifting at speed.

All the same, the car does now look rather more like a car. I’d like to get the rear bodywork mounted soon, as well. Just to make it feel as if I’ve done something.

First thing was to clear all the gravel out of the tunnel, you can see what it was like above. Bear in mind that the car has a complete front and read undertray. That this much gravel got into the tunnel gives you some sort of indication how much there was in the rest of the car. In fact, I took all of the brakes off so as to make sure there weren’t any little bits sitting there waiting to jam up the brakes at an inopportune moment.

The biggest problem, though, looked to be this. I knew something was wrong with this suspension mounting. I’d thought I’d have to take the diff out and then I realised that I could just take the seat back off. As you can see the U-mount is partially torn away from the chassis. In fact, it doesn’t look as if my weld has penetrated too well here.

So, I took the wishbone and everything off, battered it all back into place and patched it up.

I knew that the upright was mullered and I had originally thought that I’d got a spare. However, it turned out that my spare was for the other side of the car. So, I phoned BGH and they said they had exactly one and that they’d send it to me. That it hasn’t turned up yet isn’t worrying me in the slightest…

In the meantime, I thought I’d put the wishbone and everything back in. In the process of doing this I discovered that the wishbone was twisted. It’s essentially flat but when you lay it on a flat surface one corner sticks up by about 20mm. This is probably not a Good Thing. So, swearing slightly, I dug out the jig I made a few years ago and set about making a new one. Luckily I’ve got the various bits of steel and the bushes that  I need. The photo shows it in an early stage of construction. Of course, since I made these originally, I’ve acquired a lathe; have I mentioned this at all? So, things are a bit easier now and I don’t have to traipse up to the wilds of Eloi to use Dan‘s lathe.

In fact, as I write, the upright’s arrived. Phew… So, with luck, I’ll be able to get this all back together in time for the next race. In fact, I’m considering a minor tweak in that I might fit the double-adjustable dampers that I got the other day to the Fury. As I’m doing a test day it might help to see where I can get to and will provide a bit of information to help with the J15 when I finally get the thing on track. I could easily just convert back to the single adjustables though. On that subject I phoned Protech to tell them I hadn’t paid, and they said that as I’d just bought four more dampers from them they were repairing the single adjustable for free. Super service, I’m very very impressed.

As to what caused all this grief, there’s various videos been posted so you can see where I came to grief from many points of view. What’s more, this race is going to feature in a TV programme on Motors TV in a few weeks (there will also be a copy of the programme here). You never know, you might see me in it…

Here’s Al’s video where you can see how I came to grief at Druids. Or, rather, someone else applied the grief to me at about 26 seconds in. It seems that the BTCC is having an effect…

As to the J15, well progress has stalled a bit the last few days. I did make a bit of start getting the front bodywork fitted. In particular I mounted the carbon fibre/epoxy splitter I made on the front of the car, as in the photo.

However, so far this isn’t good enough as the aluminium floor that the splitter is connected to isn’t up to the job. I did make a strap to support the splitter but it allows the rear of the panel to lift which isn’t good enough. I need to think harder how to do this, when the Fury is well again…

I’ve been thinking that I might end up doing all of this season’s RGB races in the Fury. I’ll bust a gut to get the J15 ready for the Birkett though. Especially as that’s going to be on the “Historic GP circuit” this year, which is what was the GP circuit up until this year. Of course, we’ll see the new “Arena” circuit in operation for the upcoming British GP. Pity that it cuts out Bridge though…

I’ve also been struggling with bleeding the brakes. In fact, if you look to the rear of the photo about you’ll see that one of the fluid reservoirs was empty when I took the photo. Since then I’ve changed the master cylinder, twice, and pumped about 5 litres of brake fluid through the front brake circuit to no great avail. A reader suggested that I try reverse bleeding the system which I will do as soon as I get a new oil can for squirting fluid up the system backwards. (I don’t think cleaning out my ancient oil can is really a good idea for brake use!)

So, while I’m waiting I’m pressing on. One thing I’ve done it to make a little heat shield to sit under part of the exhaust system to shield the brake and clutch lines that run under it. I hope this’ll be OK; at least it’s only the rear brakes.

As you can probably tell, I’ve POR-15ed the silencer mounting tube that Andy added. I’ve also worked my way through 8 exhaust header gaskets (at £6 each!) trying to get a decent seal to the headers. I think it’s OK now although cylinder 2 seems to be leaking very, very, very slightly. I’ll have to tweak that one up a bit. The odd think is that Mr Honda specifies the torque settings for the exhaust port studs (M7, would you believe) at 14Nm which is about enough to hold down a feather or two…

Then it was back to the red stuff; here’s the tub sitting on the chassis looking all, well, red. (Tom’s really annoyed at me for doing it red again…)

The problem with this is that there’s a socking great hole above the sidepods on both sides of the car, the sort of hole that’ll give a scrutineer heart failure. So, I needed to do a bit more, whisper it, panelling.

Sod it… How had I managed to forget this.

Oh well, I got stuck in with aluminium, cardboard and rivets and finally did the driver’s side panelling, as in the next photo. What you can see here is that there’s a vertical “wall” at either end of this horizontal bit which at least approaches sealing to the tub. When I’ve got a moment I may make some little extra trim pieces to make this fit snugger than it is at the moment.

However, at the moment I’ve got the other side to do. Sigh…

Most importantly, I got stuck in on the bodywork while there was a bit of space in the garage. So, there’s been rather a paroxysm of filling, rubbing down, priming, flatting and spraying going on. And, of course, the house smells of cellulose.

However, all of the bodywork is now painted. This, of course, means I’m now going to have to be much more careful with it while fitting it to the chassis. And, of course, there’s no room in the house to contain it all which is why some of it is now outside getting rained on, as in the photo above.

The bit in the photo, which is part of the engine cover, makes it look as though my spraying is quite good. Trust me, though, I’ve chosen the photograph quite carefully. Still, it’s a race car, and as Adrian keeps saying it only needs to look good from 100 metres away at 100mph.

The next big event is that I’ve got the car back now, complete with an exhaust system as in the photo. As you can see, I made the decision to fit the silencer in the sidepod, pointing forwards from the engine. This has the advantage that it keeps a lot of the gubbins out of the engine bay. It also pushes the weight forwards a bit which I think I’m going to need. The problem with this, though, is that the Blue Book says that the exhaust exit from the bodywork has to be no further forward than the centre line of the wheelbase. Heaven knows why that’s the regulation but it is. As such it makes the packaging a bit tricky.

Mind you, on trying the engine the exhaust blowing like a blowfish on a very blowey day. This appears to be coming from the header gaskets which, as usual on the CBR1000RR, are a pain in the bum as it’s absurdly easy to get the header to tighten up out of line, meaning it leaks. Consequently, I’ve just bought some more gaskets (at £7 a go, no less!) to have another go at sealing it up.

You can see on the photo that in order to fit the silencer in one of the support members had to be removed. Andy replaced this with a bent strut that’s also used as the place to mount the silencer which is quite neat. And, since I took the photo above, I’ve POR15-ed the new strut.

I’ve also re-routed a couple of the water lines which were a bit close to the headers. I also intend putting a small heatshield above the brake lines you can see at the bottom of the engine bay. I don’t think it’s really needed but better safe than sorry.

Next up is going to be fitting the bodywork. I’m going to need at least a couple of aero bits for this and in particular a splitter. I looked at what it would cost to buy a large carbon-fibre sheet for this and had to sit down for a rest when I saw the price. Hence, I’ve made one as I had some carbon fibre and some epoxy sitting around. The resin, was nearly two years beyond its sell-by date so it seems sensible to use it up.

So, I’ve made a big flat lump of carbon fibre. It’s not the most briliant moulding in the world, in particular it’s got a couple of creases in the surface as the film I was using managed to crinkle up somehow. However, it should do fine. I may well make another one of these, in case it gets nerfed at some point. That will have to be made out of glass and polyester, though, as I’ve run out of carbon and I hate laminating with epoxy resin. I can see why the professionals use pre-preg for everything as they don’t end up sloshing litres of nasty sticky resin all over the place.

However, that gave me a chance to tidy the place up a bit and then set about messing it up again.

The first such tactic was to modify the airbox so that I could get air into the top, rather than the bottom, of it. First up I drilled a couple of holes in the top of the airbox and then (plastic) welded the inlet ducts that are attached to the (normal) bottom of the air filters into the top of the airbox, as in the photo.

Yeah, it looks a bit messy in the photo, but that’s because of the melted polypropylene. I think it’ll work OK. The problem now is how to get the air into the filters. I’ve been wondering how to do this for a while now. One possibility is just to run air from a couple of ducts, and I’ve got these rather nice spun aluminium air inlets (as in the photo), down a tube directly into each air filter. The alternative is to make a diffusing inlet, sticking up from the airbox in the usual fashion.

The problem with the former is that I need to make some way of attaching some 65mm ducting, which is essentially the diameter of the air filter and the duct, to the end of the filter. Perhaps I could make some sort of adapter from some polypropylene sheet, suitably heated so it softens? I’ll give that a go, I think.

One advantage of having an empty garage is that I can sort out the bodywork. The first thing to do with this is to fill all the holes created by the aluminium I used to stretch it a while ago. Here’s one of the sidepods which is just about done now. Unfortunately, the other sidepod is with Andy as he needs it to see where the silencer can go.

As you can see, I didn’t make the gelcoat here thick enough as I’ve ground all the way through it while rubbing it down. Doooh. It’s still pretty smooth though so, hopefully, with the addition of some hi-build primer, it’ll be OK.

However, with luck I can get the tub done as well, and I might even get around to splashing some paint around. After a huge amount of thought I’ve decided to stick to the Tim standard colours of red and, perhaps, yellow. If only because I’ve still got a decent supply of these. Problem is, I hate how much dust you create by painting things, it gets everywhere.

First up, though, is a bit more progress on the electrics. In fact, I’ve just about got it all finished now. For example, I’ve now got all the sensors on the engine such as the oil pressure/switch in the photo here.

As usual (it’s good having done this before, at least I don’t have to work everything out) the sender is attached by some hose to the engine; I’ve found out the hard way that things like this are just shaken to bits by then engine if hard-mounted.

Of course, in order to check that the wiring to the senders works properly I need to have at least some sort of instrumentation. So, I’ve (probably temporarily) taken the data logger out of the Fury and installed it in the J15. I’ve left the internals of this lunch box exactly how it was on the Fury and have now wired up the connector to the lunch box in the same way as it’s wired on the Fury.

That meant that I could check, by plugging a Palm display in, that things like the temperature and pressure sensors were reading correctly and that I can start  and stop the logger from the driver’s seat. That’s all easy to say, but it takes a lot of wires…

I’ve also installed, and wired up, a lot of other bits and pieces, such as the radiator fan, the rain light and the fuel pump. One thing I haven’t done, though, is actually try to start the engine. The main reason for this is being a wimp. However, the secondary reason is that I haven’t got any oil, fuel or coolant in the car. I’ve actually held off putting oil in the engine because I hadn’t sorted out how to fit an oil cooler because I couldn’t find a sandwich plate to take the oil off the engine. However, Neil (another RGBer) found somewhere that sold them and I’ve bought that and installed it on the engine and here it is for your delight and delectation.

OK, as you can see if I were to spin the engine round then all the oil would come shooting out of these empy ports. In order to bung them up I’m going to have to install the oil cooler.

The long term plan for this has been to put it somewhere low and on the right hand side of the engine bay. I can easily add a submerged duct to the sidepod and arrange for air to blow on the cooler. Or, possibly, enough air will come down the sidepod in any case.

The photo on the right shows, very roughly, the sort of position where I’m planning on putting the cooler. It’s a bit tricky finding exactly the right place as I don’t want to make the battery too hard to get at, and the suspension has to be free to bounce up and down.

Obviously, though, I’ll need to make some sort of bracketry to make this work.

You will remember that I was talking about the gearchange bashing into the bodywork. Well, I sorted that by cutting a chunk of the tub away, as in the photo.

I’ve then starting working out how to mount some sort of dash here to attach the minimal dash that I use.

However, I’m getting less and less enamoured of this gearchange. In addition to the problems I’ve already mentioned of ergonomics and leverage, then there are other issues. Worst of all is that my legs bash into the lower side of the gearchange arms. Obviously I can chop those off as they’ll never get used anyway.  However, there are a couple of other issues. For one thing the structure above the column actually gets in the way of where I’d like to put instrumentation (I use a pretty small wheel and that makes the hole in the wheel rather small). Also, the bearings for the pivots are really rather naff in that they use oilite bushes which aren’t as freely operating as I’d wish.

With all that I’m actually considering junking this and making something rather like, if not exactly like, the gearchange on the Fury.

This doesn’t look too smart but it actually works rather well. What’s more, it pivots on a proper sealed ball bearing which make the movement rather slick. Admittedly, though, I’m never going to make a cable operated change work as well as the bearings and rods on the Fury. However, at the moment I’m really not happy with it. Unfortunately, of course, that just slows me down even more.

Sigh…

There seems to be an errant bit of wire in the middle of this photo, no idea what that is, as it certainly isn’t in the loom itself.  Just to the right of the middle of this photo is a multi-pin connector which connects this loom to the cable that goes to the switch panel.

Here’s the loom on the car, although I’ve taken the airbox off so that I could get the central tub on. I don’t think it’s a huge problem that I have to take the airbox off to get the bodywork on. I hope it isn’t, anyway.

The reason I put the bodywork on is that I’m trying to arrange to get someone to make an exhaust system for me. Although, I’m hoping to get the engine running soon even before that. That’s bound to upset the neighbours! The reason I need the bodywork on for fitting the exhaust is that my plan is to run the silencer in the left hand sidepod, that is running forward from the engine. This is advantageous because it keeps it out of the engine compartment so improving access and keeping the heat out. It could also have an effect on the weight distribution. Obviously, though, when someone makes me an exhaust they’re going to need to have the bodywork that the exhaust is inside. One minor wrinkle with this, though, is that the Blue Book says that the exhaust must exit no further forward than halfway between the front and rear axles. That might mean a slightly odd U-turn in the exit pipe.

The other reason for putting the bodywork on is that I wanted to check for clearance to the gearchange, which I was pretty sure was going to be a problem. And, so it turns out to be.

The first issue can be seen in the photo on the right, where you can see I’ve had to open up a slot for the gearchange cable at the side of the steering column. That’s not a big deal.

A larger issue, and the one that I was wondering about, can be seen in the next photo. As it stands, there’s no way I could actually change gear as the paddles will bash into the bodywork. This is, of course, a consequence of my ludicrously long arms. Obviously, I’ll have to cut the bodywork away, which is a shame as there’s a nice binnacle-y bit there. However, I’ll probably stick a polycarbonate “screen” in front of this bit anyway, so it shouldn’t look too bad. The intention is to mount something on that flange that just in front of the binnacle.

Here’s a small bit of progress in that I’ve got the new fuel tank. As usual, I drew it out and ordered it from Bryn Jones at Allyfab who did his usual superb job. At the top is the tank sitting in the chassis. That was a bit of a relief as I’d tried to get the tank as big as I could, but was worried that it’d come out just a little bit too big.

You might well be able to see that the tank isn’t on the bottom of the chassis in the photo above. That’s because the fuel pump sticks out of the bottom of the tank, here’s the bottom view for you to see. Hopefully, this little bulge on the bottom of the tank is enough of a swirl pot, together with the foam in the tank, to avoid any fuel surge problems. One thing I am intending to do this time, which I didn’t do on the Fury, is to wire up the low fuel warning light from the pump. I don’t really know that it’ll be enough useful warning, but it seems as though it could be useful come Birkett time, assuming that it isn’t held in a monsoon again as it was last year.

Having finished sticking the bodywork back together, I’ve mounted the central parts properly on the chassis. However, I’ve got to fill in all those rivet holes and flat it all down properly yet. After being prompted by Al (another RGBer), I’ve bought one of those new orbital sanders that you see advertised on the TV. I’d always assumed that they were useless but that appears not to be the case. Hopefully, that’ll mean that getting a decent finish on the bodywork, and flatting off all the flash lines that are on it, won’t be too hard this time.

One thing I’ve wanted to do for a while was to mount the radiator. In fact, this was really why I started consolidating the bodywork as I need to know where the front cover is going to be and in order to do that, I need to know where the central bits of the bodywork are positioned. So, with the central tub in place I positioned the front cover, using some lumps of wood G-cramped to the chassis, as in the photo. Of course, I’ve got to work out exactly how this is all going to be held in place, I’m not intending to hinge it, but for now this is good enough to work out where the radiator is going.

On the Fury I started off using a cheap VW style radiator. They’ve become pretty much de rigeur in the kit car world as they’re amazingly cheap from one of the pattern suppliers. However, on the Fury it never really cooled the car properly and I eventually bought an expensive aluminium radiator which did the job really well. However, I’ve always thought that the VW radiator would have worked well if there had been anywhere for the hot air to go after it had been through the radiator. Hence the position in which I’m holding the radiator in the photo. This radiator, by the way, cost me the grand sum of £26-88 from Advanced Radiators. Compared to roughly £200 for the aluminium one you can probably see why it seems a good idea to use this one.

So, the idea is to mount the radiator at this jaunty angle, and the arrange for a diffuser on the inlet and a nozzle on the outlet so as to manage the air flow. I’m intending to exit the nozzle out of the top of the bonnet. I think there’s enough room there to make something that will work without bashing into the front suspension.

First up, as I promised, are some turnbuckles to adjust the tension in the chain. Here’s one of them, although admittedly it’s hiding behind a bit of chassis. Essentially it’s a right hand threaded rod end, a left hand one, and a length of hex bar with a right hand threaded hole in one end and a left hand threaded hole in the other. You can just twiddle this around to change the distance between the two rod ends, thereby moving the diff carrier and tensioning the chain. There’s another one of these, exactly like this, on the other side of the diff.The idea is that I can easily make some bits of bar of different lengths, should I need to adjust the diff beyond the adjustment range of the turnbuckle. What’s more, I can swap it around to that it articulates onto the mounting at the other end, when the diff is positioned right to the rear of the slot in the mounting plate.

Something else that’s arrived is a quantity of expensive wheels from Compomotive. Here’s one of them bolted up to the rear hub.

The main reason for doing this is to check whether the handbrake levers fit properly and they do indeed seem to do so. I’ll need to make sure that the cables don’t go too slack as in that case the levers can move over and touch the inside of the rim. However, I’d probably hear the horrible noise so that would be OK.

So, with that checked out I could go ahead and finish off the handbrake. As planned a while ago I ran a cable to each of the rear calipers, attaching the cable to the lever by just looping it around the lever, and to the compensator I made a while ago. The lever then pulls on the compensator by a pulley arrangement to get a bit of mechanical advantage.

Hauling on the lever at least showed that the rear wheels were stopping to some extent. I’m not at all sure that it’d pass a proper MOT, but it’s fine for a race car where the handbrake is really only used for stopping the car moving on the grid and holding it on the trailer while putting the wheel straps on.

While banging on about cables, I thought I’d try and fit the throttle cable. I’ve always been a bit worried that it was rather a long way to the throttle bodies and so it seemed. In the past I’ve used ATB brake cable for throttle cables as it’s rather high quality stuff. However, it seems as though I’m going to have to find something else for the throttle cable as the longest ATB brake cable I can find is 2.5 metres long which isn’t quite long enough. At least that’s correct if I’m trying to avoid sharp corners. Now, if only they made larger tandem ATBs I’d be OK.

It’s getting close to the time when I’m going to have to fit the bodywork properly so that I can know where everything else, such as the wiring, has to go. So, it’s time to consolidate the body panels that I cut up a while ago to stretch them. It seemed sensible that I could use the aluminium that I used to stretch the panels as a mould, of sorts, for laying up some GRP in the gap between the two bits. So, I spent a while putting some mould release wax on the aluminium, then putting some gel on the inside of the ally and laying up some CSM on top of that. I used some pre-coloured white gel as that’s not that far from the body’s colour and it’s easily available as it’s used for boat building. I even topped it all off with a bit of tissue so that the nasty sharp bits on the inside were not there. Mind you, it’s a while since I did any GRPing and I think I got a bit too much resin on it. I’ll work harder at consolidating the next bit.

As always in these things you wonder whether the mould is actually going to release, although resin doesn’t still particularly well to aluminium in any case, but it was quite nice that when I drilled out the retaining rivets the aluminium just popped off leaving me with this rather odd white stripe. However, it should be pretty easy to fill the holes, either with filler or a bit more gel, and rub it down smoothish. Oh joy, rubbing down bodywork, my favourite pastime. There’s been at least one occasion in the past where I wondered why the thing I was rubbing down was going red, only to realise that my fingertips were bleeding…