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.

Next up was to sort the oil cooler. I arranged to attach it to the chassis in the position I talked about a while ago and plumbed it in to the sandwich plate. As usual, I’m just using push-fit hose which in my experience works quite well and is at least reasonably cheap. Mind you, it’s practically rupturing to push the hose onto the fittings.

You might be able to tell on the photo that I’ve mounted the cooler on little anti-vibration bushes. Oil coolers like this are aluminium and they tend to vibrate and crack. Hopefully it won’t be too wibbly wobbly.

As it was clearly fluids time I then filled the cooling system. I debated for a while whether to use water or proper coolant at first, the problem with the latter being that it’s expensive and if there was a leak somewhere then it’d be a waste. So, I put some water in and it didn’t, leak that is. So, I drained it all out again and put some nice garish pink coolant in it. The odd thing was I didn’t seem to get as much coolant in as I drained out water. I must have an air lock in there somewhere. I’ll have to watch out later.

Next up was to put some oil in after which it was time to turn the engine over. So, I put the right fuses in, pressed the starter and nothing happened. I worked out which connector I hadn’t re-attached and then the engine spun around. That meant, of course, that things like the starter relay and so on were working.

Then, as usual, I set out to flatten the battery by spinning the engine around. Eventually, I got some pressure in there, after adopting the old trick of cracking the filter open a bit.

Carrying on the fluid theme I put some fuel in the tank and then started up the engine ECU to see if I’d got any fault codes. There were a couple of minor issue but I cleared them and it was time to press the starter button for real:

Yikes! I particularly liked the blue flames!

I also tried running the reverse. Obviously the car’s off the ground but the rear hubs did go round, and backwards at that. So, perhaps that will work too. I’m pretty sure it’s going to flatten the battery in double quick time though.

Then it was time to turn to the hydraulic systems and here I struck a bit of a problem. I’d become concerned that the banjo bolts I’d used for the fluid takeoffs at the master cylinders weren’t as long as they could have been so I’d ordered some longer ones. And, when fitting a new one to the front braking master cylinder I managed the strip the threads in the master cylinder. In fact, I suspect this is because the banjos were indeed not long enough and that meant that there was too much load on too short a length of tapped aluminium. So, ho hum, I’ve ordered another master cylinder.

In the meantime I’ve bled, or tried to bleed, the clutch and rear braking circuits. However, I seem to be having difficulty getting them to work properly. I’m wondering if this is because the location of the master cylinders, slightly  on their side, means that there’s a bit of air inside the cylinder that isn’t being expelled, especially because I’m using a pressure bleeder which isn’t moving the piston in and out of the cylinder. I’ll have to think about that.

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…

So, here’s a nice shiny picture of the final arrangement of the master cylinders, lurking at the bottom of the footwell.

There’s doesn’t seem to be much point actually putting any fluid in the brakes at the moment though, so I’ll leave that for a while. For all I know, I’ll find something that conflicts with one of the brake pipe runs at some point, meaning I’ve got to change the lines and I hate getting brake fluid on my hands.

As I was doing the hydraulics I ran the line to the rear for the clutch slave cylinder. I haven’t fitted the slave cylinder yet though. So, for the time being, I’ll just leave the line tie-wrapped up in position, as in the photo.

I still wasn’t too sure of the steering column positioning. I seem to have moved it around a lot and never been completely happy with it. However, this time I was determined to finish the job. Luckily, I think I’ve finally managed to do this. This time I’ve ended up using a completely (Escort) standard lower column and I’ve moved up the lower bearing mountings a bit more. This was getting a bit hard to do with spacers so I machined some bushes and welded them into a couple of bits of tubing that I welded to the chassis. (I know, I know…)

You can see all of these bits in the photo on the right. I really think that this is it for the column.

Mind you, there was one final thing to check in that I’ve moved up the column a bit more and there was always a chance that it was going to bash into the underside of the front bodywork. (Just what do you call the front bit of the bodywork on a mid-engined car? “Bonnet” seems wrong somehow. The rear bit is clearly the engine cover. Hmmm.)

So, I refitted the central tub and tried the front bodywork on for size again. The first problem was that front of the tub bashed in the fluid reservoirs as it was being lowered into position. This is because the roll cage requires that the rear part of the tub is put in position first and the whole thing “hinged” about the rear of the tub. Still, that wasn’t too big a deal with the help of a jigsaw. More dust in the garage though…

I said that I’d done all of the hydraulic parts of the braking, and that I have. However, that doesn’t mean that the handbrake is done yet. So, I then spent ages fitting the handbrake lever to the chassis, as in the photo on the right.

This might look a bit confusing as there’s a loop of cable. This is because the Wilwood calipers are a bit lacking in mechanical advantage for the handbrake so this arrangment gives a 2:1 mechanical advantage to the handbrake, at the cost of double the lever travel which means that you have to be a bit careful to adjust the cables so that there’s only a little slack in them. Experience from the Fury shows that that isn’t a problem though. As you might be able to tell from the photo, the cable comes out of the lever heading straight down. So, I machined a bit round lump of Delrin to run the cable around and bolted that in below the lever.

At the right side you can see the compensator that will be attached to the two cables to the rear brakes. I haven’t actually made those cables yet because I’m not completely sure how the cables will attach to the calipers. On the ones on the Fury I had to modify the levers on the calipers so that they didn’t bash into the inside of the wheels. However, I don’t know yet whether that’s going to happen on this car as I don’t yet have the wheels. I have ordered them though, Compomotive CXRs like the ones I’ve got on the Fury and as in the photo on the left. They haven’t arrived yet though. Until they do, I’ll hang fire on finishing the handbrake.

That’s all the J15 stuff. It may have escaped your notice, as you’re probably not as obsessive as I am, that the racing season is coming up full tilt on us. As it’s clear that the J15 isn’t going to be ready for the first race[s] of the season, I spent a while at the end of today just checking that the Fury still worked. I’ve got some more to do to it though before actually racing it. I wonder how you do it?

However, here’s a picture of a few alps as taken last week. The only problem is, I want to go skiing again; although I smashed myself up skiing a few years ago it’s still fantastic when it works right.

However, I’m back now and starting to think about it again. In fact, I’m also thinking about the new season and I think that next weekend I’m going to have to exhume the Fury and do some work on that in preparation for the upcoming first meeting of the season. I probably ought to do at least a bit of testing too.

Before doing that, though, I’ve been trying to press on with the J15. I think I’m in that part of a build where things appear to go slowly but, duck like, I’m paddling like mad behind the scenes.

Following Adrian‘s principle of doing a system at a time, I’ve been trying to get the brake system all working. This involves a lot of pipework and much fiddling about with pipe flarers and the like. I’ve decided to use separate reservoirs for each hydraulic system this time and here they are, for the two brake circuits and the clutch.

Another change this time is that I’ve decided to use an electrical brake light switch, rather than a hydraulic one which seems to produce lots of silly little problems. You can see the switch just sticking onto the back of the pedal in this photo here. I bought the switch from Rally Design; it’s yet another of the long list of Escort Mk II parts that are still available.

As usual I’m trying to do most of the lines with hard Cunifer piping, as in the bit snaking around the front of the chassis here. This is tedious, but probably the right solution in the end due to the reduced flex in the lines when under pressure.

However, the master cylinders are rather tricky to get at, because of their positioning, and I’m probably going to have to make at least some of the lines flexible hoses from the master cylinders themselves as making hard lines there is just too tricky. Come to think of it, I’ll probably run the entire clutch line as a single flexible hose. Of course, in the process of doing all this pipework I’ve run out of just the vital fittings that I need; although I’ve got loads of fittings that I don’t need.

I’ve decided to relocate the steering column slightly and I’ve remade the lower steering column as a consequence. Although I might change  this again, if I’m honest. What I’ve done is to raise  the front of the column slightly to make sure that there’s a bit more clearance above my size 12s. The thought of a brake/steering/foot conflict at some moment is slightly worrying!

While looking at the pedals, I’ve been wondering about how to attach a throttle cable, which of course is going to have to be really long, to the throttle pedal which is shown here. Obviously, i could attach a cable by just drilling the lower part of the pedal and using a nipple over the end of the cable but I don’t really want to do that as it doesn’t allow me to change the pedal ratio at all. Ideally, I’d make something that would be able to move along the pedal a bit. Problem is, I can’t quite work out how to do it. Suggestions gratefully received…

I added another two of the little b*******s to the car today, the first being the “shoulder” panel in the photo. By the way, in the background you can see the Fury sitting there all unloved and neglected. However, I’m going to have to start re-invigorating it soon. I’m hoping to get the J15 to a rolling chassis versi0n fairly soon so as to facilitate that.

I also added the panel at the front of the passenger side of the car, as in the photo.

The next thing I want to do is to add the side panel along the passenger side of the central tunnel. As on the Fury, I want to attach this with rivnuts so as to facilitate access to this area of the car. It’s rather less important than on the Fury, as there isn’t a propshaft in there, but nonetheless it would seem daft to make the top panel the only access.

While thinking about this, it dawned on me that as the handbrake lever was attached to the outside of that chunky upright, just near where the handbrake lever is loitering, then it’d make sense to make this panel in two pieces, one for the front of the space and one for the rear. As I’m using the same rear calipers as on the Fury I’m going to have to do the same sort of thing to increase the mechanical advantage of the lever as I did there. (Essentially a pulley giving a 2:1 advantage.)

I’m also going to have to arrange for the cable from the lever to turn around a corner, due to the geometry of the lever. Looking at Jeremy’s photos, a detail of which is shown here, he seems to have done this with a block of some plastic, and I could probably use a lump of Delrin for the same job, as used for the suspension bearings.

Now I’ve got the footwell panel in place, I can see the space that Jeremy uses for the fuel tank, as shown here. I did some preliminary calculations a while ago and the volume here was suitable. I did wonder about mounting the tank further rearwards, at  the back of the passenger compartment, but this is probably the easiest place just at the moment.

Now I can see the space properly, I’ll measure up and draw out a tank. I can then get it made, as I’ve done before.

Here’s something though, in that I’ve finally finished the rear brakes. The new taps I ordered arrived and I was able to properly  cut the threads. I did have an experiment using helicoils but, for some reason, I didn’t feel confident about it. All the same, I’ll keep the helicoiled part as a spare.

That photo above is unique in that the bolts holding the ally block to the upright are actually locktited in position. That is, they’re the first bolts that I’ve done up intending them to remain where they are. Up to now I’ve been assembling and disassembling. Hopefully from now on I’ll be able to concentrate a bit more on the former.

One thing I did manage to do on Friday was to call into the lasercutting place and pick up the parts for my diff mountings, having decided that perhaps the hardboard versions weren’t going to work properly. These ones are made from 6082/T6 aluminium which is rather beefier. Actually, they were amazingly cheap really in that this lot cost me about £70 which is pretty good considering that 6082 is of the most expensive aluminium alloys.

Obviously, I need something to hold the diff bearings in those plates and some time ago I designed a couple of plates to do the job. This picture is exported from the CAD system so as to expose things to your withering gaze. I’ve rendered the mounting plate itself as a wireframe so that you can see the two bearing support plates and the bearing itself.

So, I went to Mackays and bought some big slices of a socking great 5″ diameter aluminium bar and set about them with the lathe. After a goodly while, and a lot of swarf I’d exposed the parts in the next photo. As you can see I’ve yet to drill the holes through the plates that will bolt them and the mounting plate all together but that shouldn’t be too difficult, especially as I’ve got the laser cut plate as a template. The only problem is that I’ve become a bit sensitive about the quality of taps and I don’t have a particularly super-duper set of M8 taps so I’ll order those before bolting this together.

One minor issue is going to be getting the bearings onto the diff itself. They appear to be pretty tight interference fit and I’m going to have to make some sort of press-arrangement to fit them together. In fact, I should probably put some thought into how I’d take them apart as well, although a pair of large screwdrivers might well suffice.

By the way, those two 20mm holes in the mounting plates are for access to the bolts that retain the sprocket on the diff, many thanks to Adrian for pointing out that I’d need these before I actually ordered the laser-cut plates.

And, it’s boring; did  I say it was?

The photo on the right is of the footwell area. The reason for the odd arrangement of two panels is that I need to provide enough space for the pedals to go into at maximum angle of dangle. As you can see, I’m using lots of Klekos too. If you’re planning on doing anything with aluminium panels, then go and buy a bunch, they’re fantastically useful. What’s more, they’re cheap enough these days, they used to wallet-bursting. As you can perhaps tell, I bought a load of new ones, in readiness for this build, a while ago.

I make these panels, by the way, by first making cardboard templates, as in the second photo. It’s much easier to make a template as you can extend it when you cut it a bit small, and shove it past obstacles. Once made it’s relatively easy to cut a bit of aluminium to size.

Up to now I’ve made most of the panels around the driver, although I need to do the seat back and the bit on top of the footwell. The former is a bit tricky because I really need to make that panel removable so that I can get access to the exhaust side of the engine. The top of the footwell is also a bit tricky because I’ll need to make some sort of frame that sticks up above the chassis for my toes to protrude into. (And, as I write that, I’m wondering if some of this should be in steel…) What’s more, the steering column needs to thread its way through some how.

As I got so bored, I decided on a bit of light relief and to press on with the rear brakes. As I discussed a while ago I bought some of the same discs as I use on the rear of the Fury from Rally Design. I also bought some aluminium blocks to make some mountings for the radial mounting calipers. The photo here shows one of the calipers and one of the blocks. This is just a lump of aluminium of a size that’s in the right region for making a mounting.

In an ideal world, one would use a milling machine to do the right thing to this block, but I don’t have one of those.

However, I do have a lathe and I thought I’d worked out how I could use that to do a suitable job. And, after a goodly portion of time hunched over the lathe collecting aluminium chips in my hair I ended up with this.

This bolts onto the upright using the mechanism I discussed a while ago in that I tapped the upright to M12x1.5 (that’s normal wheel stud size) in the manner shown in the next photo.

The one obvious thing missing here, apart from the caliper, is a couple of h0les drilled and tapped from the top of the block, as shown here, for mounting the calipers. I’ll probably sort that after I get back on the panelling grind…

The conclusion of this is that I needn’t have worried. I had assumed that I was going to have tp weld a bar into the cage for the belts to go over, but it isn’t necessary, as you might be able to tell from the photo.

That’s good, so I could get on with the next thing. To be honest, I had intended the next thing to be getting the chassis off to the powder coaters as it’s essentially done now. However, Christmas has got in the way so I’ll have to leave that for a while. It’s no big deal really, as I can carry on doing lots of stuff, I just won’t be able to finally attach things to the chassis. However, I can do things in such a way that they’re a simple assembly job when I get everything back together.

One thing I did want to to before that, though, was to weld a couple of earthing points to the chassis. I ground all the nasty zinc off a couple of M8 bolt heads and welded them, in what I hope will be sensible locations, to the chassis. The one in the photo is in the engine compartment.

As I’m really thinking about the seat and controls here, the next thing was to attach the pedal box to the floor of the chassis, and make a cover for the master cylinders that I can park my size 12s on top of. The one in the photo is made out of some 2mm NS4 aluminium, as I wanted to be sure that it was fairly robust. Seems to do the job OK, at least at the moment.

Another thing that I’ve been thinking about for a while is whether I need to modify the pedals to make them a little further away from me. At first sight this isn’t absolutely necessary so I’ll leave well alone for the moment. I want to make sure that I do all the front end of the car in such a way that I can get access to all these things rather more easily than I can in the Fury. The complication on that car is that as the front of the car is the engine compartment it’s important that the pedal area is in a “fireproof” compartment, something that’s been useful in my car in the past, as you may remember. I did wonder, on the J15, about just leaving everything at the front open. However, if nothing else, it makes sense to insulate the passenger compartment just a a bit so that when it rains I don’t end up sitting in the backwash from the front tyres.

With the pedals done as far as I can at the moment, thoughts turned to the steering column. I’m planning on making this, as I did before, using 22mm CFS tubing running in 25mm Igus self-aligning bearings. To do that I made a couple of little sleeves to fit over the column tubing and fit snugly in the bearings. They’ve also got little  shoulders on them so that the thrust loads are transferred to the bearing balls. In the photo, the sleeve isn’t actually inside the bearing yet. I’ll clamp the sleeve to the column with a couple of grub screws.

I also added a spline to the bottom of the column that will connect to a standard Escort style universal joint, and I’ll also use a standard Escort lower column section. It’s amazing, the MkII Escort passed into history years ago but vast quantities of bits are still available for them because of all the use they still get as rally cars.

I then needed to work out where the column was going to go in the car. This is still subject to a bit of change but the photo shows where I ended up on this frosty Christmas Eve. As you can see I’m using tie-wraps and an advanced lignin/cellulose composite spacer to mount the bearings.

The one problem with this is that on full depression the brake pedal bashes into the lower steering column. This isn’t in a way that my foot also hits the column as at that point my foot can’t reach that far up with pedal. I can’t just raise the lower bearing as the angle of the UJ at the bottom of the upper column gets too acute and it starts binding up. I had been a bit concerned that the lower column was too close to the suspension rocker, hence that rocker being in the photo, but I needed have worried on that score.

So, I could:

1. Just leave it as it is as the brake pedal will probably never go that far anyway.
2. Grind a little bit off the corner of the brake pedal as I’ll never touch that bit anyway.
3. Think harder about a better position to get everything into.

Right now, I’ll think I’ll sleep on it. One thing I do want to do though, is to trial fit the front bodywork as that I can see where the steering wheel goes with respect to the bodywork.

Finally, an interesting observation is that the upper steering column is  much shorter than the equivalent one on the Fury, which also uses the same Escort lower column. This is clearly because the  driver is rather closer to the front of the car than in the Fury, hence the pedals being so close to the front suspension. No problem, just interesting…