In fact, if I’m honest there isn’t really much to say anyway. After the Snetterton race I’d decided that I needed to sort the exhaust system out. I spent a while phoning around a few builders without any joy. I’d imagined that they’d all be twiddling their thumbs at this time of year. However, that appears to not be the case. So, after discussing it with Andy I thought I’d try something that I’ve been meaning to have an experiment with for a while. This is making my own exhaust. After all, it’s just a pipe and as Andy manages to make them out of a collection of mandrel bends, why can’t I?

So, I’ve bought a load of bends from Andy on a sale or return basis, there’s some of them at the top. I took the existing exhaust off and started looking intently at it to see if a solution emerged. The problem is,  it’s a bit like a 3 dimensional jigsaw with no picture on the box and where you have to cut your own pieces. However, after a quite stunning amount of time I got a start on things as in the next photo. This is just the primaries for cylinders 3 and 4 but, trust me, it’s a good start. As you can see, if you look hard enough, this is just tacked together. In an ideal world I’d be able to TIG these properly but, of course, I don’t have a TIG or the ability to use one. I’m working on that…

However, it’s now getting closer to the next race so I’m going to have to take this off and re-instate the old exhaust and put the car back together. Along the way I’ve had the fire extinguisher re-inspected so that’ll stop the scrutes whinging at me. I’ve also replaced the handbrake cables which, as  I mentioned, were binding slightly. I hope they’ve stopped it…

I’d left the gearing as it was which, with the new engine’s gearing being different, meant the car was supposedly geared for 141 mph. As I headed out for the first session of the Friday test day before the weekend I wondered how this was going to feel. After a couple of laps some things were really obvious. First of all, the new rev limit was going to take some getting used to. Secondly, the engine didn’t seem to pull that well, but the gearing was far too tall which wasn’t helping. In fact, I wasn’t getting out of 5th on the Bentley straight and I only made 123mph which wasn’t what I was after. For comparison that’s 2-3 mph slower than I managed with the old engine in the race here in May. (Ignoring the second race of that day where there was a huge tail wind which had a huge effect.)

2mph might not sound a lot but it makes a big difference when racing. Just that small difference can allow you to just drive past another car on the straight and then you’re in front and in, errrm, the driving seat.

So, I cut the second session short and changed the driven sprocket for a larger one. (I’m getting good at this.) The meant I was now geared for 136mph so perhaps that would make a bit of a difference? In summary, after lunch it did make a difference. My terminal speed on the straight was up to about 125mph and I was at least in 6th gear. Still didn’t feel too wonderful though.

So, I went to bed feeling a bit fed up, to be honest. However, in the morning I was feeling a bit more positive. After all, I knew that a few things weren’t really optimum as it stood.

All the same it was a race day and things were therefore good. The weather looked a bit gloomy bit with luck it would hold. After scrutineering I somehow or other won the race to get in the queue for the assembly area so headed out for qualifying in front of everyone. Problem was, everyone was zooming past me. Ho hum. the car still felt stolid, although the engine was screaming up to 13,000 rpm.

That all meant that I qualified in a rather lowly 14th place in both races (7th in class) in each race. That was depressing.

However, I was thinking. I reckoned that the engine wasn’t breathing properly, hence the thoughts about the exhaust system. Luckily, I had a stroke of luck in the the cat fell off the end of the exhaust before the first race. However, first of all, we had to race which turned out to be rather more traumatic than usual.

Getting to the grid I was thinking that I’d never done a race start with this engine and I wondered what it would be like. So, we lined up, and this is what happened:

You might need to watch that a couple of times to see what happened. In order, I think it’s:

1. I stalled on the grid.
2. As I got going again Ben, who’d taken to the grass to avoid me came back onto the tarmac.
3. Rob moved across to give Ben room.
4. Colin took fright and drove into the wall and Bob.
5. Bob took avoiding action and went left.
6. I took to the grass to avoid Bob.
7. I tried to be a bit cute round the outside at Montreal to no great effect.
8. Sam, in my old car, spun at Chapman and unfortunately came back onto the track.
9. Bob collected Sam, damaging his right front and ripping off Sam’s left front.
10. The damage to Bob’s car was such that his throttle jammed open and his feet were pushed off the pedals. (He was lucky to avoid a broken leg, )
11. Bob shot towards the wall trying desperately to hit the kill switch. (There’s a moral here about making them impossible to miss.) Unfortunately he failed and hit the barriers hard on the left of his car. So hard that the left rear upright and disc were shattered.
12. I took to the grass, again to avoid the carnage and was lucky to miss Sam’s bouncing wheel.

Hmm, not good. So, we lined up again and waited and waited and waited. Luckily no one was seriously hurt other than in the wallet and we set off again. Here’s the complete race from my point of view. (It’s not gripping, I just didn’t have the energy to edit the video.)

You will notice that the start was again fraught. This time because Derek’s propshaft TRT section (a sort of coaxial rubber drive that I was always worried about and replaced when I rebuilt my Fury after the fire) failed completely leaving him standing still.

After that the race was not bad, as I was stuck in a battle with Tony (the silver car) most of the time. At one point you may notice Richard’s black/blue Sabre sailing past. That car’s got the same engine as mine so clearly I’m doing something wrong. However, the missing cat clearly helped, I was up to 127mph, which means that breathing is probably the thing to focus on.

That’s pretty much the story of my weekend really. The second race was rather similar, albeit without the start line carnage. Luckily on this occasion I managed to beat Tony. I wasn’t anywhere near the front of the class though… One thing I did do before the second race was to change the clutch ratio (easy with a cable) to hopefully avoid any more stalling situations. I did get a storming start (which I can’t show you because the camera failed) but everyone I’d passed made it back past me.

So, before the next race I really need to sort the exhaust system. It’d probably be good to race with the lambda wideband connected too to see how the engine’s running. (Pity I didn’t have it in for this race.) I’d also like to replace the handbrake cables which I think are binding slightly.

In the meantime, it’s back to the PhD thesis…

I took it up to Andy’s last week and he modified the old exhaust system to fit to the new engine. I think it’s ended up being a bit of a bodge, to be honest, but with luck it will work well. I do keep wondering if I should have had a complete new system built.

Still, this did mean that I could run the engine and at the weekend I did so for long enough so as to get the engine up to temperature and the fan cycling on and off. That also allowed me to work out which fan controller line to use. To make life exciting the CBR1000RR08 ECU drives two fans which come on sequentially. I worked out what order these came on in and used the higher temperature one (on account of the fact that I’m not really planning on the radiator fan coming on all that often) to drive the fan relay.

The other thing I got from Andy was the above clutch cable. This is the length that I measured it ought to be and a decent quality cable with swaged on ends. The issue is that I needed to make a device to restrain the outer at the pedal end. This I did and here it is bolted into the chassis hanging onto the clutch cable outer. You can see the inner going off to connect to the pedal.

First indications are that this works pretty well, although time will tell. I’ve made a collection of attachment points on the clutch pedal so with luck I’ll be able to adjust the pedal ratio should it be be needed. At the moment I’m quite pleased with this, I just hope it works when on circuit. As you can tell, though, I’ve had to chop a bit of a hole in some of the panelling around the pedal box. I’ll have to bung the hole up a bit, but for now it will do.

I’ve added a load of new wrapping around the new exhaust, this time using some better quality stuff, I hope, than that which I used before which just fell to bits if you touched it. First indications are that this stuff, bought from Merlin Motorsport, is rather better. If nothing else it was nothing like so uncomfortable to work with; with the previous stuff I think I ended up with millions of bits of glass fibre stabbed into my skin which took ages to come out.

I done a whole bunch of other small things and started putting panels back, and so on, so that the car looks like, err, a car again. Along the way I’ve replaced the brake fluid reservoir for one that doesn’t have the clutch outlet sticking out of it. As a consequence I’ve replaced the brake fluid and bled the brakes again. I’ve also spent ages re-aligning the suspension; you may remember that an age ago I made some new suspension parts.

In fact, pretty much all I’ve got to do before taking the car on track is to do a big bolt check and finish putting the bodywork back on. Oh, and putting some fuel in would probably be a good idea…

Phew…

Back to the car though. You will remember that I sorted out the foot rest but I remained concerned that the pedal box was flexing a bit. I became certain about that when Adrian was round here and I got him to press hard on the pedal while I was looking at the pedal box. It was clear that the front of the box was flexing a mm or so. So, I added the lump of steel angle that you can see in the photo. Luckily this hasn’t disturbed the hose connections very much; usefully I used flexible hose for the first bits of the hydraulic runs so that made things a bit easier.

So, that’s one thing off the to-do list. And as I’d got the suspension apart slightly—as you can see there’s no rocker arm in that photo—I thought I’d do another one by fitting the springs and dampers. This turned out to be quite tricky at the front as at first the bottoms of the dampers fouled on the mounting plates. However, that was sorted using a bit of angle grinder magic and the next photo show you the front of the car with the spring units in place.

You might wonder what the yellow blobs on the springs are; they’re a code that I use to write the spring rate on the spring. They always do have the rate written on them but it’s on the top where you can’t see it when the springs are position and I do this so I can tell what’s there easily.

Something else about that photo, you can see that the splitter is a great place to leave tools so that they fall out when the car’s on track later. I must stop doing that.

In the next photo you can see that the rocker arm is, as discussed ages ago, very close to the master cylinders. However, I reckon it’s probably OK. If not then things are flexing just too much for comfort and the chassis needs to be re-designed. I’ve often wondered about sticking a small camera inside the bodywork looking at the suspension to check on things like this. Probably quite easy to do now that video cameras have got so small. One issue about the front end of the car is how tight it all is. One issue I haven’t solved yet is how to fit a towing strap. Somehow I have to make such a thing accessible at the front of the car for when I stuff it into a gravel trap.

Next up was the rear suspension and that was pretty easy to add  the spring units to, mainly because there’s a lot more room here.

So, with the suspension units in place that means I can now remove something else from the list. Next up, I think, will be too do the ARBs. That’ll need some machining and metal work so is going to take a bit of a while.

In the meantime, I might as well update the to-do list so you can see where I am. Now I think of it, the two ARB tasks are really the only time-consuming things there:

Pre test:

1. Fit/fabricate towing straps.
2. Make seat
3. Insulate seat back. (I’m worried about getting the driver too hot!)
4. Fabricate/fit front ARB.
5. Fabricate/fit rear ARB.
6. Fit carbon fibre splitter.
7. Mount a camera somehow.
8. Do a mega bolt check.
9. Make a windscreen of some form.
10. Lubricate and re-tension the chain.
11. Setup the suspension. This’ll have to be a guess at first but it’s a start. One issue with this is that I think I’m going to have to modify the little gadgets that extend the track rod ends as I think they’re a smidge too long.
12. Pin the lower part of the sidepods to the chassis floor. I’m not totally sure that they need it, but just to be sure…
13. Adjust the bonnet pins.
14. Make rear undertray
15. Fit lamp covers

Pre race:

1. Fabricate some sort of inlet for the airbox.
2. Possibly as part of that, make a cover for the upper injectors and fuel line. As it is at the moment it’ll give a scrutineer heart failure.
3. Fit roundels and race numbers. Fit other missing decals.
4. Think about adding additional triangulation to the engine compartment.
5. Touch up rear bodywork paint.
6. Add some yellow.
7. Transfer the transponder (it’s my number) from the Fury.
8. Fabricate a chain guard
9. Fit the catch tank.
10. Get a lambda boss welded into the exhaust system. While this is being done, get the little fitting on the exhaust that I damaged re-welded.

As you can see, I’ve finished panelling the pedal box, although I’m still thinking about sturdifying it all a bit more. I’ll have to get a suitable friend along to ask for some advice while I heave on the pedal. All the same, that’s one of the jobs that I mentioned in the last post.

Another one was to make some sort of foot rest. I need my feet to be a little bit higher and I also want some sort of heel rest. So, I modified the original foot rest I made for the original pedal box as in the next photo. All I’ve done here is make a couple of little spacers on the lathe, you can see the retaining bolts sticking up, and lengthened it slightly. I’ve also put in a few more rivnuts so as to provide a collection of places to mount the heel rest. OK, I admit I haven’t actually made that yet but it’s just a piece of ally angle. You may notice that the throttle pedal is missing. I took it out to make a bit more space but it’s easy to put back.

Unfortunately, that leaves me with only 1 job taken off the list, because I forgot one in the list I posted before. So, here’s the current list, except that I’ve split it into two parts: one that must be done before testing and one that must be done before racing:

Pre test:

1. Fit dampers and springs.
2. Fit/fabricate towing straps.
3. Make seat
4. Insulate seat back. (I’m worried about getting the driver too hot!)
5. Fabricate/fit front ARB.
6. Fabricate/fit rear ARB.
7. Fit carbon fibre splitter.
8. Mount a camera somehow.
9. Do a mega bolt check.
10. Make a windscreen of some form.
11. Lubricate and re-tension the chain.
12. Setup the suspension. This’ll have to be a guess at first but it’s a start. One issue with this is that I think I’m going to have to modify the little gadgets that extend the track rod ends as I think they’re a smidge too long.
13. I’m still not too sure that the pedal box is as sturdy as I want it to be, so check that.
14. Pin the lower part of the sidepods to the chassis floor. I’m not totally sure that they need it, but just to be sure…
15. Adjust the bonnet pins.
16. Make rear undertray
17. Fit lamp covers

Pre race:

1. Fabricate some sort of inlet for the airbox.
2. Possibly as part of that, make a cover for the upper injectors and fuel line. As it is at the moment it’ll give a scrutineer heart failure.
3. Fit roundels and race numbers. Fit other missing decals.
4. Think about adding additional triangulation to the engine compartment.
5. Touch up rear bodywork paint.
6. Add some yellow.
7. Transfer the transponder (it’s my number) from the Fury.
8. Fabricate a chain guard
9. Fit the catch tank.
10. Get a lambda boss welded into the exhaust system. While this is being done, get the little fitting on the exhaust that I damaged re-welded.

For some reason it looks less daunting as two lists…

It was out here a while ago now because I was chasing a minor problem in the Fury about the engine oil pressure. (Eventually resolved by changing the oil. I suspect that I had a can of oil with the wrong viscosity marked on it.) All the same at one point I decided to swap the pressure relief valves between the two engines. Of course, when you do this all the oil falls out of the main pressure gallery and you have to make sure that oil is pumping around properly before actually starting the engine.

I still don’t know why but it took ages to get the J15′s engine back to working properly. In the meantime I’ve take the sump off twice, disconnected the cooler, and so on. Still, it’s all done now so I can press on.

I need to do some minor changes to how the bodywork fits. The initial reason for this is that I decided, after much though and loin-girding to cut off the return that was at the rear of the central tub which went over the seat belt mounting holes. You can see the absence of this part in the photo above. You can also see that there’s some rivets which are attaching a bit of aluminium which is under the GRP because it all went a bit wibbly-wobbly after I’d done this.

I’ve not got a socking great hole at the back of the seats! The plan is to make a small ally panel that will fit in here. I’ll do this is some way that permits easy access to the plugs in the engine which was another of the reasons why I cut up the original item.

The photo above shows the rear bodywork hinged backwards. I’ve decided to remove the hinge as it makes accessing the engine pretty tricky, even when it’s hinged right  back. For example, it’d make changing the sprockets quite a pain. So, I’m aiming to change this with a couple of locating supports. In fact, I want to construct a support at the back of the chassis that reaches up and sits under the rear bodywork to provide some support there.

I think I’ve finally finished faffing around with the pedal box. I did discover that if I pushed really hard on the brake pedal then the top ofthe box flexed slightly so I’ve added another bit of square tube to the top of it. The photo above shows some of the genesis of this. I do have to do a bit of panelling here but as it’s all flat(ish) stuff that should be too hard.

OK, I am, right now. Going back to the garage with a laptop to watch the GP third practice. Wish me luck…

The reservoir is shown here in my vice. There are two outlets, one of which is seen at the bottom with the cap on the end of it. However, as the ’07 CBR1000RR has a hydraulic clutch I need an additional outlet. Hence, I drilled a hole in the reservoir, half way up so that the clutch is sacrificed rather before the brakes, and fitted a spigot sealed with a fibre washer. However, I wanted to be sure that it wasn’t going to leak so I stuck a bit of hose on the spigot, filled it with fluid and left it overnight here in the vice.

In the morning, the clutch outlet was fine, although a few drips had got past the brake outlet caps…

So, I needed to get the pedals all working. Of course, one of them is the throttle pedal. Because the pedals are in a new position I need to redo the throttle cable. Unfortunately, I need to fit the cable into the front of the pedal box. That means that the cable I’ve got isn’t long enough! So, I arranged for a chunk of the cable to run outside the cable outer and connected two cables together at this place with a couple of solderless nipples. Here’s the connection between the two cables, along the side of the car inside the sidepod.

One problem I had with the new pedal box is that I needed to use a banjo and bolt to connect the input side of the master cylinders, due to proximity to the inside of the front bodywork. The only problem was that I couldn’t find any banjos that would connect to the sort of flexible hose that connects to the reservoir.

So, I made some.

Essentially, I got the inside of a banjo, removed the olive and nut and welded that to another push-fit spigot. Again, I wanted to be sure that it wasn’t going to piss fluid out all the time. So, I filled one up with fluid and, again, left it over night to see if the fluid leaked out. Again, it didn’t. As before, here it is sitting in the vice waiting to leak.

Of course, it’s a tough life in Tim’s garage. I have to keep going without a rest. Luckily, these days I can use a laptop to watch the GP practice as you can see. Note that you can see both the Beeb’s video feed but the timing screens provided by the FIA. All home comforts, you see!

So, with an idea how to actually connect it all up I installed the reservoir, making sure that I got it as far up as I could without bashing into the bodywork. I then installed the reservoir to master cylinder pipework and also connected up the outlets.

This left it looking like this. Then I bled all the systems again. If I’m honest I’m left with brake systems that don’t feel as good as I’d like, in particular because there seems to be a bit too much travel at the top of the pedal movement before it firms up. Hopefully this is just because there’s a bit of air still in the hoses which will collect somewhere so that I can bleed it out.

So, I’m pretty much back to where I started this latest escapade. Hopefully in the next couple of days I can do something new! That’d be nice!

So, I’ve decided to do something rather radical, and perhaps foolhardy, and replace the pedal box. In particular for one that’s based on pendulum pedals rather than floor mounted ones. I’m not sure how I’m going to get on with that, time will tell. Of course, this is how Jeremy does the standard pedals but my problem with those is that they’re not far enough forward in the chassis to fit my legs in. However, as I’ve since discovered, thereby hangs another problem.

So, I’ve bought another pedal box, one that looks like this photo. Supposedly this is a superior product but I have to admit that I’m not too convinced, in particular because the throttle pedal tends to move sideways rather a lot. As a consequence I’m not sure  how easy heeling and toeing will be. However, time will tell.

So, I’ve taken out the existing pedal box and hydraulics in their entireity; including the snazzy lid that Adrian made for it.

I’ve then constructed a housing for this new box, the final-ish version of which is shown in the next photo. As you can see this is essentially a steel box to which the pedal box and the master cylinders will bolt. (And also the throttle cable. I’ve worked out how to do that but not effected it yet.)

As you might well be able to tell from the photo this is pretty much as far forward as I can get it. So much so that I’m going to have to get some shorter master cylinders. These are supposedly a superior product to the “standard” Girling format ones that I’ve got; although I got mine from Wilwood. Of course, they’re also twice the price. However, I need to use them as otherwise the front suspension bashes into the master cylinders.

I have to admit that I’m not sure that I’ve done any of this right and I can see me cutting it all off again over the winter. There’s two reasons for this. The first is that ideally the master cylinders would point backwards (I did think about making a new box using the components from the previous one albeit inverted) which would keep them out of the way of the suspension.

The other is that it’s a real pain getting the position of the box right so that it misses the steering column and so on. I have, I think, got it about 10mm too far to the left. The issue here, which is exacerbated by getting the pedals as far forwards as possible, is that they’re positioned askew in the car. That means that I should have skewed the pedal box slightly so that it “points” to me more directly. As it is the pedals appear to be a bit to the left. I don’t really know what this is going to feel like when driving it. At the moment I just really want to get the car going so I’m going to leave it as it is and perhaps go back to plan D, or is it F?, later on…

In the meantime I’ll see whether this actually works, at least I will when Parcelfarce deliver the master cylinders. You might note a certain frustration with this particular delivery agent; you’d be right…

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…

In this position, I managed to get a lot more air out of the two circuits left. However, this doesn’t seem like a sensible approach in the long term. The only sensible thing would be to tilt the car at a stupid angle, but that doesn’t really seem feasible.

I did wonder, though, whether I’m supposed to have a different sort of master cylinder, one with the exit port 45° around the bore. I’ll see what I can find out tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’ve booked the car in with Andy to have an exhaust system made. I’ll take it up there later this week.