As a couple of people suggested to me, I made a support for the standard-sump equipped engine as in the photo here. This allowed me to support the engine in position to see what I was going to have to do to make some engine mounts.

Note that I’m using a motor sport magazine to get the support at the right height.

My original plan was to modify the engine support cradle I’d made for the ’07 engine but eyeing things up on the floor of the garage (quite difficult because the engines won’t sit horizontally) I’d come to the conclusion that that wouldn’t be possible. So, I’d taken some fairly careful measurements of the location of the diff, as I didn’t want to move that at all as otherwise I’d be back in driveshaft hell again.

That was a bit tedious, but I suppose that’s the way it was going to be. So, I hoisted the engine into position and spent ages shuffling it about to get it in just the right place.

Finally, when it was just about right and not teetering too much I stepped back and thought that perhaps the cradle would fit after all. Of course, it wasn’t just going to fit, that would be too easy and the world doesn’t work like that. However, it looked as though if I just moved the mounting lugs on the cradle then I had a fighting chance. What’s more, I could probably move them and mount the engine using some small spacers meaning that the ’07 engine would fit back in, albeit with some different spacers. Here it is in position with the new mounting lugs being postioned. (The G-cramp is there to hold the engine at the right place while the new lug is tacked in position.)

After all that, it looked great and I stepped back to admire my peerless handywork. Then, I noticed that the engine was about 12mm too far to the right. So, I cut off another of the mounting lugs and made some different spacers; I think I’ve mentioned how useful the lathe is for making things like this.

After much faffing about it was finally in the right place. As you can see in the next photo there’s a spacer now on all the mounting points on the rear of the engine. However, that’s not really a bad thing as it means I can shift the engine laterally without too much trouble.

As you can also tell, the cradle is now suffering from repeated modification. At some point towards the end of this process I’ll take it off again, clean it all up and paint it one single colour. Or, perhaps I’ll get it powdercoated?

Finally, I made some supports for the front of the engine using some bucket bushes that I made up. I’m still wondering about whether I need to triangulate these a little more though. As I mentioned there’s only one support on the engine at the front now. However, the ’07 engine, although mounted on two points on the engine, only had a single mounting point to the chassis so perhaps it’s OK. I think most of the scope for engine movement is taken up with the cradle. To be honest, the front mounts don’t really do that much, the engine is quite stable without them. So, for now I’ll stick with it as it is, apart from getting the front mounts painted/coated as well.

The engine was now in the chassis and I could move onto the less dirty aspects. The first thing was the airbox.

On the ’07 engine I’d turned the airbox around so that it fitted pointing backwards. I’d then made some holes in the top for the air inlet and routed that into the air filters turned upside down. (Trust me, it makes sense.)

Something similarish was going to be needed with the ’08 airbox. In the next photo you can see the lower half of the standard airbox in the standard positi0n. However, it’s only just missing the roll cage which the top half wouldn’t and it’s probably too close to the long-suffering driver.

So, the same sort of surgery would be needed. I spent ages working up to taking it to bits as it was just such a nicely made part. However, eventually I set about it. As before it’s made of polypropylene and therefore cuttable and weldable as it’s a thermoplastic. I did the welding by turning up the temperature on my soldering iron and buying a spare bit for it.

After much messing about, an inhalation of doubtless very dubious polypropylene smoke I ended up with something that fitted onto the throttle bodies without too much trouble. You can see that I’ve blocked up the air inlet at the bottom, using some stock polypropylene sheet, and I’ll have to arrange for inlet, and a filter, at the top. However, this looks OK at the moment. What’s more, I can get at the gubbins under the airbox OK, which includes things like the primary injectors and the knock sensor.

One minor problem is that I’m going to have to route the fuel supply to the secondary injectors up through the airbox, you can see the feed pipe slap bang in the middle of the airbox. There isn’t the room for manoeuvre on the fuel lines to do anything different. Haven’t quite worked out how to do it yet though.

Next, as on the ’07 engine, I made a panel to both support the airbox and make a mounting place for the ECU and so on. In retrospect I think I might have made this a bit tall and perhaps I’ll have to cut it down.

With that done, I set about doing what I’ve now done several times, that of taking a complete bike loom and chucking away everything i don’t need. As you can see at a partial point in the process I’m surrounded by a mountain of wires. The ’08 engine, inevitably, includes loads of bits and pieces that the ’07 didn’t so the wiring loom is consequently more complicated. I’m getting there though.

One thing I have done, though, is that I’ve pulled out of the next race at Donington. My original plan had been to re-fit the ’07 engine but I decided that I couldn’t face doing that, or the problems that might be caused should I bend the car in the race. What’s more, it’s only a single race. That should meant that I’ve got plenty of time to get the new install finished before the next race at Snetterton.

This is another Schroth harness, as I really like them. It’s a bit different, though, as it’s a HANS specific harness. This means that the bit of the shoulder straps that goes over the HANS is actually only 50mm wide rather than the 75mm of the old harness. What’s more, the lap straps are also 50mm; Schroth now say that this are safer because they tend to sit in the right place across your pelvis. Dunno about that, but I do know that  the new belts are much easier to adjust than the old ones, because they’ve got this natty gadget that makes pulling on things easier.

But, as you can see, they’re a bit long. So, I’ve had to fold up the excess. If I was brave I’d cut it off, but perhaps I shouldn’t.

Next up was something I’d been putting off for ages, which was making a rear undertray. Here’s one shot of it, where you can see that it just clears the bottom of the engine.

I attached the undertrays on the Fury with Dzus fasteners. This wasn’t as clever as I’d thought as it turned out they didn’t really support the trays sufficiently; I ended up using some tiewraps as well. So, this time I’ve just used some little M5 bolts. Time will tell if this is just too tedious. What I might do is put a hatch in the undertray, just where the oil drainplug is. Haven’t done it yet though.

For a while I’ve been meaning to add a couple more springs to the front of the car, to make sure the splitter is properly supported. Although, to be honest, the CF splitter is much better than the plywood one was so hopefully this is unnecessary. I really must make another splitter for when I munge this one…

I realised just as I was selling the Fury that I’d forgotten to get a new Power Commander for the J15. So, I ordered one from those nice people at Demon Tweeks (not as outlandishly expensive as many people say, especially with the discount that I get). I then set about fitting it to the car. While I was there I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a while which is the bung up the superfluous vacuum ports on the engine. I think this might have made the engine run rather sweeter although it hasn’t helped the maze of pipes and wires one bit.

While looking at the engine I also fitted the catch tank that I’ve had in my “fit these to the car” box for ages. This is down on the floor, just about, behind the passenger seat. I know from past experience though that nothing will ever go in here. Unless, of course, the engine dies horribly in which case it will be nothing like big enough. Still, the scrutes like them.

After that I wanted to look at the dash. If you remember I’d had some problems fitting the dash in with the screen and various other bits and I said I’d been thinking about moving the Palm to the side slightly. (Although, as last year, I’ve also been thinking about buying a Dash-3, although many people still seem to be having problems with them.)

In the meantime, though, I decided to do what I’d said so I cut down the existing dash. This meant, as it was narrower that I could move it towards me slightly which meant it wasn’t so close to the screen.

The only fly in this particular ointment is that the LEDs I chose to use for the oil pressure warning are pretty brights ones. The dash now seems to positioned in such a way that they’re pointing straight at my eyes and are incredibly dazzling. It could be different in the sunlight, of course. But, after an hour with spots dancing in front of my vision I might put some tape over them.

As you can see in the photo I’ve also made a little mounting place for the Palm. This is quite neat actually and does make a number of things easier to work with, especially the buttons which I do occasionally have to prod.

The next job, and possibly the last one that actually involves making something, is to fabricate some sort of inlet for the engine. I’ve been musing about how to do this for ages now. In an ideal world I’d make some sort of airscoop using a carefully crafted mould which I’d lovingly rubbed down over days of work to a super glossy finish. However, that isn’t going to happen in the short term. So, what I’m looking at at the moment is just ducting some snazzy turned aluminium ducts that I’ve got into the intakes on the top of the airbox. I’ve even got some ducting of the right size. However, what I haven’t got, at the moment, is any way of easily attaching the ducts to the airbox. And, of course, making the air whizz down a 65mm duct may not help the amount that gets into the engine. So, I’ll probably have to do some experimenting. I did wonder if I could use a spare MAP sensor to log the pressure inside the airbox…

One thought is that two separate ducts into the airbox isn’t that dissimilar to the arrangement on the ‘bike itself. So, perhaps that isn’t such a daft idea.

My current thoughts centre on getting some sort of flange in the airbox that I can clamp/bond an inlet duct to. I might have an idea or two. So, some thought needed. In the meantime, I constructed a small experiment to see if I could bond the ducting to a lump of polypropylene, of which the airbox is made, as in the photo. That’s one of the inlet ducts that I’ve got that’s included for added artistic impression…

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.

Everything was all going so well too. I assembled the left rear suspension, using all those bearings I made a while ago, and assembled the upright using the nice shiny new driveshaft.

Rats!

Bugger!

If you remember, a while ago I was concerned that the driveshaft was going to bash into the chassis. I had just about convinced myself that with the diff in the real location and the proper driveshafts, rather than the cut and shut ones, then it would be OK. However, that wasn’t the case, at least for half of the movement of the diff. The problem with the Riot/J15 chassis is that the space for the rear chain is quite limited (hence the longer chassis that I’ve got) and the shorter a chain run is then the hotter it runs. As such, I didn’t want to lose the rearward half of the diff adjustment. Clearly, the chassis was going to have to change but it wasn’t clear how.

I spent most of the night musing about it, and ended up doing what’s in this photo here. The photo’s of the right hand side of the chassis, as the photo was a bit better. Essentially, I’ve cut that diagonal tube in two and added in two additional support tubes, one along the side of the chassis and one to the rear bulkhead. Hopefully, that makes a sufficient number of triangles. As you can see there’s yet more POR-15 here, not applied particularly well because I was getting pretty cheesed off.

With all that done, of course it took a considerable amount of time, I could get back to re-assembling the rear suspension and transmission. This time it all went pretty well and in a while the whole rear end was assembled, bar a few nylocs and a missing bolt. If you look hard, you can see a long bit of thread sticking out of the upper right wishbone. This is a lump of studding I had lying around and is there in place of the bolt that ought to be there, but which seems to have gone walkabout in my hopelessly disorganised garage. I’ve probably put them somewhere safe. (The left hand side does have a bolt, as I managed to find and old M12 bolt of the right length but I couldn’t find another one.

Still, the tranmission and rear suspension is together now, barring a few bits and the still unmanufactured dampers.

Now I have to work out what to do next. I wonder what’s going to go wrong this time?

As you can see in the photo I’ve done what I said I’d do in the last post and added some tabs to which to bolt the diff support plates. Of course, that’s messed up the powder coating and I’ve had to resort to POR-15 to cover up the bare metal.

I’ve also added a couple of additional diagonals to the rear engine mount which you can also see in the photo. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while now, after noticing when the mount came back from the powder coaters that the lower tube of the engine mounts was bent. At first I thought that this was due to the heat from the powder coating but as the mount still fitted the engine perfectly I’ve come to the conclusion that it was like this before, and is just much more noticeable due to the colour.

I’ve been drawing force vector diagrams in my head for some time working out whether I needed to add these tubes but as I had to mess up the coating anyway for the diff supports I thought I’d just as well do it anyway. At least that means I can stop fretting about it.

Just imagine what it’s like inside my head, if you can. All this worry is mixed up with tons of useless knowledge including the bit of set theory mentioned at the start of this post. The post, by the way, is the 100th of the new WordPress era.

With all this done, I can hopefully get the diff mounted for a final time this coming weekend. That’ll be a relief. The problem is that the race season is approaching train-like at the moment. I just got my licence for the new year through and the first race is really only 6 weeks away, and I’m going away skiing for a week in there too. It’s increasingly clear that I have no chance getting the J15 ready for the start of the season and at some point I’m going to have to check the Fury over, which is been languishing at the side of the garage for ages now.

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.

The only difference between this and the previous ones, is that I’ve made one of the spacers that hold the plates in the right position. Of the other two apices of the triangle, one will bolt to the rear engine mounting and the other will have another spacer, but one with a connection to one (or two, I haven’t decided yet) turnbuckles for getting tension in the chain.

Many thanks to everybody for their suggestions about the sprocket conundrum. The more I look at it, the more I think the sprocket was just not machined properly. Or, perhaps the diff wasn’t. Really, I should have tried the sprocket on the diff before splitting it, and I’ll try the other sprocket I have soon like that.

One thing though, is that I was talking to Andy about it yesterday at the 750 Motor Club awards do. He reckons that it wouldn’t actually have an effect and, oddly, I tried running a chain around the sprocket today and it seemed to run just fine. In fact I now understand all this even less!

By the way, with respect to the comments, you may notice that some people, like me, have a pretty little picture by their comments and other people have a rather bizarre symmetrical bitmap. If you’re commenting on this blog, and others, you might like to whizz off to the Gravatar site, where you can set up a “Globally Recognised Avatar”. That isn’t something to do with the ruler of the 3D blue cat people (I haven’t seen it, I’d rather poke my eyes out with a blunt stick) but a little picture that applies on lots of sites.

Anyway, I put the sprocket issue to one side and moved on. One aspect of this is that I picked up the driveshafts at the 750MC party. They’re the shiny ones here, next to my fabricated dummies. They’re made out of some special Swedish unobtanium steel and should work well.  Yes, I know the new ones look as if they’re shorter, but that’s just parallax.

Unfortunately, it was time to get back to the panelling. Oh joy. First thing was to turn the chassis upside down and put the floor panel on. The plan is to completely cover the front part of the chassis, back to the front of the engine compartment, with a single piece of aluminium. I don’t actually know yet how big I want to make this at the front, so currently it’s the full width of the aluminium sheet. I’m planning on a lot of attention to the aerodynamics on this car and just throwing away plan area without using it seems daft. So, I just rivetted on like this. As you can see, there’s a lot of rivets here, this just wouldn’t work without an air riveter.

With the chassis back the other way up, I got stuck into refitting all the panels I made a couple of weeks ago. Only this time they were rivetted and bonded in, not just held in with clekos. As you can see, I’ve also bolted in the pedal box, this time using nylocs.

Next thing to do is to make the panels for the other side of the car. Although all of the panels shown here are rivetted in, I’m planning on using rivnuts for some of the other panels, so as to facilitate better access. In particular, I want to do that for the seat backs as I’ll need to get access to the exhaust side of the engine.

Here’s another photo. The hole in the panel at the side of the pedal box is there so as to get access to the pedal box’s bearing shaft.

First, though, the forward bits. Most importantly, the chassis is now back home again. As you can see, I took the trailer off back up to Soham and collected it. To be honest it isn’t a fantastic job, but it’s good enough. It’s not quite the shade of grey that I was after either, but that’s no big deal. Mind you, I wonder if I want to make the roll cage a different colour from this? In which case, I wonder if it’s possible to paint on top of powder coating? Seems possible that it’s not.

In addition to the chassis itself, I got this big pile of suspension and engine mounting bits. The coaters were not as good as they said about keeping the coating out of the threads, and in one case they’ve got it in the threads and not on the housing around the threads. But, it’ll do. I’ll soon get along to fitting all these parts to the car.

In the meantime, I wanted to finish off the diff carrier. Last time, I said I was a bit concerned about getting the bearings on to the diff journals. After much discussion and thought, I decided to actually have a go at pulling a bearing onto one of the journals. So, using a long M10 stud righ through the middle of the diff and a little dolly I made on the lathe, I had a go. To my delight it pulled in without any great drama. I stopped after a few millimetres because I didn’t want to make getting it off too difficult, which is the state it’s in the photo. However, it was clear that this wasn’t going to be too big a problem.

So, I finished off the various bits for the diff carrier plates. Here’s the first of them here. This is the outer side of the plate and you can see the bearing in situ and the holes that allow access to the bolts that retain the sprocket on the diff.

That looked as though it was going to work so I took the plates apart and pulled the bearings onto the diff with the inner bearing carriers in place. I could then bolt the plates and the outer bearing carriers in over the top of the bearings and I ended up with the whole lot as one piece. As I started drawing this months and months ago, before I got the chassis from Jeremy, this is rather a relief.

At that point I went into a bit of a decline.

I thought I’d try fitting one of the sprockets I bought ages ago to this lot. The plan, if you’ve been paying attention, was to split these sprockets so that I could bolt them to  the diff without taking the whole lot apart. In fact, putting the complete diff carrier together was a deliberate experiment on my part to see if this whole process was going to work.

First, though, I needed to cut one of the sprockets in two. So, with a new blade in the hacksaw frame I did this carefully and then proceeded to bolt it to the diff.

And then I noticed this.

On one side of the diff the gap between the two halves of the sprocket is considerably larger than on the other side, as you can see in the two photos above. Clearly, this can’t happen, as the sprocket should be registered on the mounting points on the diff flange. There’s something screwy about this that I don’t understand at the moment. One possible problem is that the mounting  holes in the diff are specified at 27/64″ with a 14mm registration dowel in two of them. (I’m not making this up…) I’ve got an M10 screw (not even a bolt at the moment) in the 27/64″ holes. That means that there’s 0.7mm of a gap at the side of the bolt. All the same, I thought that the whole thing was put into registration by running up against the body of the diff itself. In fact, there seemed precious little slop when I put it together. The hole size is very strange though. The largest imperial size that’s going to go through it is 3/8″ which leaves even more clearance than the M10 one.

Hmm, I’ll need to think about this. What I’ve got at the moment is clearly unacceptable.

While the rear bodywork was on, I took a few photos of the space under the rear engine cover, just to remind me what it was going to be like at some point. Here’s one of them. It’s interesting to see how much space there is behind the chassis.

Also, there’s that odd central “tunnel” in the rear bodywork, almost like the exit from a diffuser. Jeremy uses this for the place to put the silencer on his car-engined cars, as in the photo of his red car. However, I’m not sure how it’s going to be for me. I am going to have to be a little careful about the RGB regulations for underfloor shape.

After the experience stretching the central tub, which went fairly well, I’ve put my mind to it and stretched the two sidepods. The end results are seen here disporting themselves against the garage door. Long term readers will remember that I have a habit of using the inside of the garage door as a place to test, and clear out, spray guns. Hence the rather fetching collection of redness there.

Like the tub the two sidepods are 60mm longer than they were originally. This means that I’ve now got a collection of bodywork that will actually fit the chassis, although I’m still intending to lay up some GRP on the inside of those bits of aluminium, even though that would probably be slightly heavier than the aluminium. I’ve long thought how nice it would be to have a complete aluminium body. However, that would involve learning to use things like a wheeling machine, something that I suspect would require about 25 years to perfect.

Eagle-thoughted readers might well wonder how I managed to take that last photo, as surely the chassis was in the way? Well, it isn’t because I took it, and all the various parts I’ve made over the last months, off to GKL Coatings to have them powder coat the whole lot. Well, hopefully excluding things like screw threads and circlip grooves. Hopefully, I’ll get it all back, in a fetching shade of grey, in a week or so. In the meantime I’ve got loads of things that I can carry on with.

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…