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.

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.

To be honest, with the seat back in position the battery is going to be harder to get at than I’d like. However, it’s nice and low here. It might be worth wiring in a charging socket somewhere to make the Optimate easier to connect.

Best bit though, for a while, was that with the battery in I could connect it up and see if things started to work. After calming myself down I connected up a couple of the fuses and turned on some switches. And, some lights on the switch panel came on! Amazing…

Yes, I know the main beam warning light looks more like a search light than anything else. However, it works. The warning light for the logger (left column, penultimate row) looks a bit weedy though. I might have to change the switch.

So, flushed with enthusiasm I turned to the engine loom, easily the most complicated bit of the wiring as, like all modern bike engines, the CBR1000RR07 has lots of sensors and other gubbins associated with it. So, as last time I started with a complete bike loom and proceeded to eviscerate it on the kitchen table. Here’s the end result, having made its way as far as the top of the kitchen hob.

What I did was really to remove all the wiring that I definitely don’t need, like that for the lights, the lean angle sensor, the stop relay and so on. I haven’t change the remaining wiring at all though, as I was hopeful that I could keep a good deal of the rest of it as standard.

This was predicated, though, on where I mounted the ECU which is the eventual source of most of those wires. The standard position is on top of the airbox which might be fine on the bike but would put it up in the air in the car and open to all sorts of objections from scrutineers. However, somewhere in that vicinity did seem like a nice idea as it would enable the existing wire lengths to work.

After some thought I decided mount a little aluminium plate on the back of the airbox, between it and the engine mounts. You can see it in the photo. It’s mounted on little vibration-absorbing bobbins so hopefully the electronics won’t get shaken to pieces. This does mean, though, that I’ll have to earth the plate if I want to use it for connections.

I quite like this solution, especially because it helps to support the airbox as well, as experience has shown that scrutineers have a bad habit of leaning on the airbox and knocking it off its mounting rubbers.

The intention is to mount the ECU, the regulator/rectifier, the relays for the starter and reverser motors and the Power Commander on this plate. They should, just, fit!

One slight problem might be keeping all this clean in the onslaught of grot from the chain. I may have to make some sort of cover for it, or perhaps wrap it in a plastic bag. I’ll see how it goes.

Work is now progressing on fitting all the engine wiring. I’ve had to extend the wiring for the inlet temperature sensor and the secondary injectors. The standard ECU position is very close to those so that’s not surprising. However, I’m hopeful that most of the rest of the engine wiring can be accomplished without major modification to the remaining bits of the engine loom. There’s still a heck of a lot of wires though.

The plan is actually to make the seat backs easily removable, as are the tunnel side and tops, so that it’s easy to get access to the engine’s exhaust side and things like the oil filter.

On the subject of the engine, that was the next topic. So, I inserted some metalastic bushes in the mountings, where previously I’d use the turned adapters I showed you, and bolted the upper mountings to the engine. As a matter of interest the bosses in the CBR1000 block are tapped for M12x1.25 which is pretty hard to find as it’s something like M12 superfine. However, a quick search on eBay turned up a supplier to sells a lot of such things; very useful.

With the upper mounts on the engine I hoisted the engine up and located it in the top mountings, just letting it swing there. I then chocked up the engine (it’s easy enough to move around by hand) and bolted the rear mount to it. In fact, being a bike engine it’s always easy to move around. With the upper mounts on I picked it up and carried it across the garage. Given that that’s 180bhp and a 6-speed sequential gearbox I can never understand why other kit car builders use things like K-series and Zetec engines as they’re fantastically heavy in comparison.

Anyway, I could then bolt down the rear mount. This was a slight struggle as the powder coating seemed to have changed the shape of the mounting very slightly. Or, more likely, exposed some of the stresses in the shape due to the heat of welding it.

All the same, the engine was now in. Symbolically, I’ve threadlocked, or nyloced, all these mountings which is an indication of the fact that I’m intending this to be it. Until I realise that I’ve made some awful error, or course.

Next thing was to mount the diff. You will remember that I had a problem with the alignment of the split sprocket and took the diff carrier apart to see what I could work out. Using the other sprocket that I have bought I offered it up to the diff and it fit perfectly; meaning that it had been machined correctly. I then split that one too and, bizarrely, when I tried the parts of that on the diff it was clear that this one was exactly like the other. This is wierd, I can only think that the material has some energy built up inside it (not impossible as it’s heat-treated aluminium) and when it’s cut in two it changes arrangement very slightly. So, in a grasping at straws manner and in a manner encouraged by Adrian, I tried just easing the hole in the sprocket that fits over the registration dowel with a rat-tailed file. That worked well and I ended up with sprockets that fitted properly. All seems a bit fishy though, and of course one of the sprocket halves now has a bit of play in it, I’ll have to bolt it in really tight…

I bolted the diff carrier back together and fixed it in place on the engine mount. The design that I did the CAD for a while ago called for a 5mm spacer on either side of the top fixing; I had decided that using shims, or similar, would make sense to be able to align things properly. As it was after much time with a straight edge between the drive and driven sprockets I ended up with a 4.5mm spacer and a 5.5mm one. That’s pretty good, I reckon.

I shortened the old chain that I’d got from Andy for alignment purposes and put it all in position. Things certainly go round and round in a pleasant sort of roundy way. Mind you, the chain makes a sort of thunk, thunk, thunk noise as the links hit the teeth on the drive sprocket. I assume that that’s what bike chains do, although not without me taking various things to bits to make sure that nothing was hitting anything.

As well as getting the triangular side plates laser cut I also got some locating plates cut, with a curved slot for the lower corner of the triangles. However, at some point while making the various mounts I must have taken leave of my senses because I never finished off working out how, and to what, I was going to locate these. I shall have to do that now, annoying because it means that I’m going to have to do at least a little bit of welding to the chassis and engine mounts, messing up the powder coating in the process. Oh well, it was bound to happen sooner or later.

I shall probably do this next, so that I can deem the engine and transmission done.

In between worrying about that, I did manage to get something done. Starting with the driveshafts I bought some skinnier tubing for sleeving the shafts and, coupled with moving the diff slightly, it does seem as though I might be alright at avoiding the chassis. Of course, the proper driveshafts should be skinnier again than these ones. So, I’ll press on at the moment.

The photo above shows the completion of this exercise, with two driveshafts in position. As I mentioned, the next step with these is to get some proper ones made. One concern here is that the shafts are of very different lengths. They’re on the rear so hopefully I won’t end up with armfuls of torque steer as a result but we’ll see. If that does happen, there are some approaches to it, such as using an additional bearing in the longer shaft, but I don’t really want to go there, at least not now.

One thing I’ve been wanting to sort for a while is the rear brakes. The rear uprights are the same configuration as those for a Fiesta, if you remember I bought some proper Fiesta ones originally so as to get the hubs. However, as I want to use 4-pot brakes on the rear I’ve got to do something to arrange that. I spent quite a long time poring over catalogues of brake discs and decided that the best thing to try was some discs from a little baby Fiesta which are 10mm thick solid discs. The problem is the depth of  the disc as I’ll need to machine some mounts to fit.

The photo here, and indeed the one above, shows one of these discs in position. The caliper mounts are nearest the camera and there’s a decent clearance between the mounts and the disc.

However, there’s a problem in that the 4 pot calipers are quite wide, so the caliper projects a few millimetres beyond the wheel mounting face of the disc. This is not a problem in most road cars because they tend to use single piston calipers where the piston is on the inside of the disc. However, the 4-pots have a couple of pistons on the outside of the disc. The problem here is that don’t know whether this would actually be a problem, as it depends on the shape of the inside of the wheel. What I do know is that tried one of the Fury wheels (they’re Compomotive CXRs) on the Fiesta disc, as shown above and it fitted fine over the brake caliper. The problem with this is that the Fury wheels are offset ET19 whereas the ones I need for the J15 are ET38. If you’re not familiar with those numbers it relates to the lateral displacement of the wheel mounting face from the centre line of the wheel. “ET” is short for a German phrase: “Einpress Tiefe” which means something like “pressed in amount”. In this case ET19 means the wheel is inset 19mm in the car from the centre position. ET38 wheels have the wheels 19mm further in. Of course, that means that the disc/caliper gubbins is, relatively, further out. Of course, if the inside of the wheel face is shaped the same way on the two wheels then it wouldn’t make any difference. However, I do know that one of the ways that wheels are made is that a single casting is used for several different offsets, with the mounting face being machined to accommodate a range of offsets.

All of that means I haven’t got a clue whether these discs will fit. In fact, the only sensible approach really is to get some ET38 wheels and actually try it. So, I shall phone around  tomorrow and see if I can find a Compomotive CXR with the right offset. What’s to bet there won’t be any available until next August?

An alternative approach would be to use some discs with a deeper bell. The rear of the Fury does use such discs at the rear and I temporarily robbed one of them. The photo here shows that disc and one of the Fiesta ones side by side. The right hand one has a bell that’s about 12mm deeper. It fits fine on the J15 uprights but there’s another problem in that the clearance between the disc and the caliper mount is too small to get a bolt head, for clamping the caliper mount to the upright, in the space. It’s only 2.5mm too tight so it would be easy to space the disc out with a small spacer. However, that doesn’t seem very pleasant really.

So, with the brakes returned to the back-burner, I got back to the chassis. It was, amazingly, time to take the engine out. This has gone from being perched on some thermalite blocks to being held in with a rather complex mount. I did want to know if it was possible to get the engine out with the mounts attached so I connected up the crane, took the bolts out and tried. It was possible, which was good. It wouldn’t be a huge problem if I couldn’t have done this, as it’s always possible to bolt the mounts to the engine when it’s in the right place.

With the engine out I removed the mounts and took the backstays off the cage. I then took this photo of all the bits I’ve been making. All of these have got to go away. The driveshafts need to go up to Yorkshire to be turned into proper shafts and the rest of the stuff needs to get powder coated.

I do have a few bits that need doing to the chassis though, things that I’ve been leaving until I could invert the chassis so as to get at things more easily.

So, I turned the chassis upside-down as in the photo here. By the way, note the little trolley that the welder is sitting on. I made this a while ago and it’s made getting the welder around the garage much easier, I have no idea why I didn’t do it ages ago. That gas bottle is just about empty, I shall have to get it refilled before the Christmas break as doubtless the local BOC outlet will be closed at just the vital moment.

I’ve just about finished all the upside-down welding, I’ll do the rest tomorrow probably. The final thing I do have to do to the chassis, though, is look into the seat belt positioning. As I did on the Fury I think I’m going to have to put another tube into the roll cage so as to make sure that the belt angle fits with wearing a HANS device. This was the other reason for taking the engine out, actualy, as I need to sit at about the right place in the chassis to check where my shoulders are.

While all this is going on, I’ve been slowly sourcing all the bits I need. For example, I bought this fuel pump off eBay this week. In fact, I bought two so that I’ve got a spare. In fact, I think I’m now perilously close to having all the bits I need, apart from a few vital things like the dampers.

He liked to tell other people a story about a 17-year old me disassembling the gearbox of my car. This was a Morris Minor, and the gearbox had failed in such a manner that you got 3rd gear in addition to whatever other gear you’d selected. I was performing the delicate disassembly in the middle of the back garden and Dad thought the gearbox was clearly going to be toast but was surprised to see it running fine a few days later. If you’re wondering what the problem was, a baulk ring had shattered into umpteen pieces, doubtless pulled to bits by the mighty torque from the 803cc A-series engine. (0-60 in 52.5 seconds, I’ll have you know.)

Anyway, back to the Spektre, or whatever it’s called. I’ve finally finished the fiendishly complicated rear engine mount as I’ve now modified it to hold onto the reverser as recently discussed. I turned some bushes for this to mount on and welded these into the mountings. The only problem is that I couldn’t work out a way of making them adjustable and being sufficiently robust. As such, if I’ve got them in the wrong place it could well end up being a bit of a problem. As it is, I’ve deliberately put them in such a position that I’ll need a couple of spacers to put the motor in the right place. That gives me a bit of flexibility, you see, as I could make those spacers in such a way as to tilt the motor slightly if I need to.

You will remember that I need to cut a hole in the rear chassis member so that the driven sprocket misses it. It’s time to do that now and I needed first to make sure that I knew how much space I’d got at the back of the chassis. Hence, I perched a couple of the bits of bodywork on the chassis, as in the photo.

The answer to the question is that there’s loads of room behind the rear cross member. I debated for a while how best to modify it and eventually decided to weld in a simple “patch” tube. Later on, I’ll add some additional triangulation to the rear frame as I’ve had to cut some of this out now.

You can see what it looks like now in this photo. As you can see, I did this with square tubing unlike the usual CFS tubing that I use as like this it’s easier to get things to fit onto the existing chassis properly. I’ll go to the shops tomorrow and buy some suitable flat strip to seal up those ugly holes that you can see in the sides of the modification.

I’m actually starting to feel a bit pressured about the upcoming season, believe it or not. As you can see in the last photo I’ve still got the Fury as I can’t quite convince myself that I’ll get the Spektre together in time. However, I’m planning on a real blitz to see where I can get to. Mind you, the skiing season is upcoming…

First of all, I’ve changed my mind how to do the diff mounting, as I realised that the original idea wasn’t going to work very well when it came to changing the sprockets and chain. I also realised that I hadn’t shown you a photo of the diff itself which I bought a considerable time ago. Here it is, along with the bearings that it runs in (which are just pressed onto the outside of the diff outputs).

This all has to be mounted in the chassis somehow in such a way that:

1. You can get at things to connect the chain links together, and disconnect them.
2. You can get at the diff to dismount and mount the sprockets.
3. The tension in the chain can be adjusted.
4. The driveshafts are pretty much straight(ish)
5. The chain is as long as possible so as to keep it coolish.
6. Nothing bashes into the chassis.

This little CAD model here is where I’ve ended up, differently from the previous version. Essentially the diff is retained in a couple of triangular plates, that I’ll have to get laser/water jet cut. These swing off a top mounting that’s connected to the engine mounts, the two horizontal blue round things are parts of the engine mounts. At the bottom there’s another couple of laser cut plates with a curved slot that will do for clamping the diff in position. What I’ll probably do is use a turnbuckle for initial adjustment and then just use these things for clamping the diff.

To be honest, all of this is pretty much a copy of what appears on the back of several other cars. This is the back of another car, I think it was a Radical, that I photographed at Silverstone. There’s lots of bits here but you can see the driven sprocket and the aluminium plates that the diff bearings are mounting in. In this design the plates are oval shaped and are swinging from a top mounting point. Underneath there’s a couple of turnbuckles for tensioning the chain. To be honest I could replace those places with the curved slot in with two turnbuckles, one for each side. For some reason, though, I like the plates. I could well change my mind though.

Eagle eyed readers will have noted, though, that the CAD model above singularly fails to address requirement 6 above in that the driven sprocket goes straight through the upper rear cross member of the chassis. As I think I’ve said (I’m getting old, my memory’s failing) I will have to cut this weld in some extra supports.

Actually, I noted today that the new bottle of welding gas I bought a while ago is down to about half full. I’ve obviously been doing a lot more welding that I usually do because the last bottle lasted about three years; I paid far more to BOC for the bottle rental than I did for the gas itself.

So, after using that gas for a while longer I’ve ended up with the mountings looking like this photo. Notice that sitting on top of the engine are those two tools essential to people welding chassis: a wire brush and side cutters.

I spent some considerable time wondering whether the mountings should connect to the rear of the chassis; you could argue that all the diff/chain loadings are best handled by just hanging things off the engine. However, I decided that if nothing else the engine bay on the car is a socking great empty hole and it really needs some additional members to stop the whole thing flexing all the time. In fact, I may well add a bit more triangulation to these rearwards facing members. I ought to also see if I can get the mountings off, I’m always worried that as I’m fabricating all this in situ I might get to a state where I can’t actually take it to bits.

Next thing is to cut the mountings apart again so as to mount the reverser! I also want to mock up some diff mountings, perhaps using some plywood plates, to check that the chain run is acceptable. It’d be very annoying to get some nice aluminium plates cut only to discover that nothing fits properly!

The final story, though, is that the engine is now just siting in the chassis. I know you can still see a jack under it but it isn’t doing anything, honest.

With that it was time to move onto other things, intimately related to all of this. The first thing was about the reverser which I picked up from Andy today. Essentially, it’s a motor, a reduction gearbox with a pre-engaged starter pinion, and a gear to mount on the end of the gearbox output shaft. Having fiddled with it a bit I must admit that I’m slightly concerned that a weeny bike battery won’t have the urge to drive this, because the solenoid for the pinion engagement seems to be taking a huge amount of power. (I tested that it worked with a battery I had lying around.) However, perhaps it’ll be better once in the car.

First thing, though was to check that the drive gear mounted on the engine properly. I cut away the normal drive sprocket surround until I ended up with it looking like this. You can see the reverse drive gear mounted on top of the normal drive sprocket. As you can see, I’ve got an old chain in here that I’m using for alignment purposes.

You might wonder what stops the reverser pinion just rotating. It’s actually threaded onto the bolt that you can see. The one problem that occurs to me with all of this is that changing the drive sprocket could be a right royal pain in the bum as lots of bits would have to come off.

The other problem is that the vertical(ish) member of the rear engine mounting that you can see on the left hand side of the engine in the photo at the beginning of this post conflicts with the reverser drive motor. So, I’m going to have to cut that part of the mount out and move it. Obviously, I’m also going to have to arrange for something to support the reverser motor itself. I’ll probably do this with a bit of steelwork welded to the rear engine mounting. I might well make it slightly adjustable with a slotted hole so as to allow the motor to move in and out slightly. The biggest concern about this is that the motor is quite chunky and the only mounts are at the business end, on the right of the photo above. It’d be nice for there to be some way of supporting it at the other end slightly.]

The biggest issue I’ve got left is mounting the diff and drive sprocket. I’ve been mocking it up as in the photo here. This is using a 15 tooth drive sprocket and a 52 tooth driven one, both the largest of the sizes that I’ve got.

As you can see, I’m planning on using tie-wraps for locating the sprocket. I just haven’t figured out yet how to make a bearing.

The biggest problem, though, is that I really need to make the drive chain as long as I can so as to avoid over-heating. From all the examples I’ve looked at this is rather short, but probably OK as long as I commit to buying a couple of chains a season. The big problem is that the sprocket here is at the position in the longitudinal direction that it really needs to be in. However, it needs to be about 40mm higher than this so as to line up with the wheels and also so that the chain doesn’t bash into the lower part of the chain guard around the driven sprocket.

I’ve thought about this and the only way I can see how to do it is to modify the rear upper cross member on the chassis, cutting a section out of it. Obviously, I’d also have to join it back up again. I’ll check with Jeremy that he thinks that’s a sensible idea; I’ll also check that there enough room under the bodywork. I’m pretty sure that there is though.

So, here’s the engine with the top left one done as well. This means that the engine is now happy to swing, it’s easily pleased, from these two top mounts. Consequently, I’ve now taken away the arrangement of blocks, aluminium shims and lumps of wood that as balancing the engine in exactly the right (ish) place and replaced it with a scissor jack as in the next photo.

By the way, if you look closely at the photos, you can see that the mountings appear to be made using metalastic bushes. The intention is that this will eventually be the case. However, while I’m welding to the sleeves into which I’ll press the bushes I’ve made up some little “top hat” mountings as in the photo here.

These fit either side of that large tube and locate it properly for the 1/2″ bolt that will eventually go through the bush but locate is so that I can weld to the housing without messily melting the rubber in the metalastic bush.

The next part of the mounting is to do something similar for the rear mountings of the engine. Jeremy uses a sort of large cradle that goes under the engine but I’d prefer to get the engine as low as possible in the chassis. Hence, I’ll just have a mounting at the rear of the engine, although I’ll need to use both the top and bottom rear mountings so as to control the torque reaction of the engine as I plant my foot firmly on the loud pedal and spin off into the scenery.

The first part of such a rear mounting is a tube going widthways across the chassis and bolted to the lower engine mounts. Here’s the start of it in this photo.

This is made from a lump of 1″ tubing and to which I’ve welded (quite neatly, I think!) a couple of tabs made from 5mm steel  which locate on the engine rearmost mountings. It’s all retained with a long 12mm bolt.

The intention is to connect this tubing to get more metalastic bushes mounted to the lower side members of the chassis. I’ll then make more of a frame up the back of the engine to stop it rotating about this initial tube.

At that point, I’d hope to have the steel for the roll cage which is still “in the process of arriving” so I’ll be able to make the cage and then, finally, I’ll be able to get the chassis powder coated.

Apart, that is, from the diff mounting which I’m still thinking about. As part of refining this I’ve bought some sprockets  from B&C Express. The photo here is of two drive sprockets with 14 and 15 teeth and two driven sprockets with 50 and 52 teeth. This will allow me to make effective diff ratios. This compares with the 3.21 that the Fury has. The difference, though, is that I’m intending to use 205 section rear tyres with the Spektre now I don’t have to worry about having a fixed diff ratio.

The intention is to saw these driven sprockets in two so as to make them easy to change, I’m assured by B&C Express that it’s OK to just use a hacksaw! The one thing that I’m concerned about with this is that the sprockets are mounted to the diff using 8 mounting holes. Two of these are fitted with 14mm retaining dowels which fit exactly which is nice. The other holes, in the diff anyway, are 27/64″. (I’m not making this up.) This means that a 10mm bolt fits with a clearance of about 0.75mm which seems rather a lot to me, especially once you remember that once the sprocket is cut in two it’ll only have one alignment dowel per half. I might have to make some little sleeves for 10mm bolts that’ll fit exactly. Problem is, the wall thickness will be a mere 0.35mm which might be a mite tricky to machine. I suppose I’ll just have to go dead slowly…

As well as buying these sprockets, I also bought a chain and the world’s most expensive tool for splitting/making the chain links. (Think £100 for a sort of hand-held press.) It’d better work well…

You know, Tim, you do come up with some ridiculous names for posts.

Well, so I do. However, in this case it’s a sort of sideways reference to the fact that Jeremy is going to have to change the name of this car due to a clash with another trademarked “Spectre” name.

Of course, that car isn’t produced any more and it is clearly nothing whatsoever to do with Jeremy’s car but the lawyers are having their way with it all. Clearly the owners of the other Spectres are more accomodating; a recent message on their users’ forum gleefully links to yet another Spectre, which in this case is a land speed record car. I wonder if the owners of that car have also received lawyers’ letters?

This doesn’t seem to me to be a good week for the law, especially after this week’s super-injunction fiasco which must rank as one of the world’s best own goals. I fail to understand even the rationale for the Spectre naming malarkey. As far as I can see the only possible consequence for this other company of Jeremy’s car name choice is that someone searching for Jeremy’s car might stumble on the owners forum for the original car. Then, if they were really lucky the stumbler, in a bout of automotive lust, might part with vast quantities of loot in order to prise one of the vehicles from the grubby mits of its current owner.

But then, I’m not a lawyer; you can probably tell…

Back to the now-unnamed car in my garage there’s been at least a bit of progress. I’ve finally managed to talk to the people who are supplying the tubing for the roll cage and that should be cut and bent for me soon.

Next up is fitting the engine and diff. So, to that end, and having retrieved my spare engine from Andy, I fitted the billet sump to it as seen above. The problem with this sump is that the engine doesn’t sit very happily with the sump on and falls over all the time. Hence, checking its position is always a bit of a pain.

However, I struggled through and spent ages and ages trying to decide where to put the engine with respect to the chassis. Unfortunately, there’s a bit of an issue about how far forward the engine can be mounted (which is advantageous for increasing the chain length and therefore letting it run cooler). The problem is that if the engine is moved as far forward as possible then it’d be impossible to take the plugs out of the engine because the chassis is in the way. I tried to convince myself that that wasn’t a huge problem as, after all, you don’t change the plugs very often. But I failed.

I finally balanced the engine, precariously located with various wooden blocks and bits of aluminium, in the position I want it to have in the chassis, as shown here. All I need to do now is to stick it in place.

Yeeeesss.

The idea is that I’m going to mount the side mountings on the engine to the top chassis rail, in a similar manner really to how it’s mounted in the Fury, albeit sideways on. The rear of the engine will then be mounted to the lower part of the chassis, and of course to some assembly that carries the diff and drive chain.

You might well wonder what I’m going to do about a reverse. Well, we seem to have discovered a neat solution to this in that Lynx Automotive Engineering, who make bike engined cars and bits, have a neat looking reverser that connects to the engine output sprocket which it drives “backwards”. Andy’s been talking to them and they’re making a variant for the CBR1000RR which will probably not look too unlike this natty picture that I’ve borrowed from their website. Of course, it might foul on the chassis or something horrible so at the moment I’m just ignoring this issue.

Back on the engine mounts I made the first of the mounts to the chassis at the top right of the engine. In order to do this I made a couple of top-hat spacers so that the sleeve, that I’ll eventually use a metalastic bush with, is located accurately and can be welded to without melting the rubber. Of course, I used the lathe for that. How did I ever manage without one?

After much faffing about with the tube notcher and making inaccurate measurements I ended up with this triangle, although I haven’t decided yet whether to put any sort of web between the arms of the triangle. You might wonder why the leg of the triangle closest to the camera appears to have a splint on it. That’s because when I’d welded it up every thing moved a bit because of the heat of the welding, always a problem with MIG welding. (Yes, Dan, I know…) So, I had to adapt the leg slightly with the addition of this sleeve. Guess what I used to machine the sleeve so it fitted the leg exactly?

Next up is the top left mounting. I should then be able to liberate the building blocks and various other contrivances under the engine as it’ll just swing on the top mounts.