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…

As you can see,  I put the fuel tank back in so that there front end of the car now looks to be aluminium as far as the eye can see.

OK, I admit it, there will still be a couple of leetle aluminium bits to do, in particular to seal off the inside of the car inside the sidepods and the central tub. However, I can’t really do those before I’m absolutely sure about the bodywork fit so I’ll leave that for a while. Next up is going to be doing the electrics. I’ve got all of this sorted out so it’s just going to be a few hours putting all the wires in place. Along the way, there’ll be lots of brackets to make to mount things like the battery and the master switch. Still, shouldn’t take too long. After that, I can start the engine!

One concern about the car’s design, to be honest, is the proximity of the poor old driver’s back to the exhaust headers. These are, of course, rather hot and it’d be nice to keep my back coolish. Being an outlandishly large chap (even if I could rid myself of all the flab) my back is rather closer to these headers than I’d like as there’s no room to fit in a nice large insulating wodge of seat foam. As a consequence I’ll probably make sure to fit some insulating gubbins to the engine side bit of the seat back before finishing the car.

It’s odd, putting these bits in, as the car suddenly looks much more complete, I think because the driving bit  is now more separate from the engine area.

For ages I’ve been fretting about how to do the panelling at the front of the car, and in particular over the pedals. However, I had a brainwave in that I thought I’d fool someone else to do it for me. So, here’s a photo of Adrian slaving over a hot panel. Even better that that one, he worked out how to do the panel over the footwell. Admittedly, he shoved off before actually making this bit, but he’s forgiven. Later on I actually made the top panel which is in the next photo on the right.

There’s a final bit of this to do, the panel at the front of the this new “tent”. However, I’ve actually made that, I just haven’t rivetted it in. Again, you can see that the top panel is held in here with rivnuts, as getting access to the pedals and master cylinders is clearly really important.

I’m just about ready to start wiring the car (at which point I’ll be able to start it!). First step here, apart from slaving over a hot diagram that is, is to make the switch panel. After seeing what Jeremy did on the prototype J15 I’ve put the panel in the same sort of place, as in the photo. And yes, you can get the bodywork on.

Of course, there aren’t actually any wires attached yet, but I’ll start that real soon now. I’ve actually decided to take a slightly different approach with the wiring in that this panel is going to become Grand Central with all the bits of the loom coming in and out here. This means that some of the wires will be slightly longer than necessary. However, it’ll mean that each bit of the loom, such as the part that goes from here to the logger, is separate which should make things a bit easier to make, and debug when necessary.

One thing I’ve been fretting about for ages in how the engine induction is going to work. Eventually, I decided to base it all, at least for now, on the standard Honda airbox, although that will have to be turned around so that it sticks back. In order to do this I had to cut and shut the airbox, as it’s designed to go the other way around and hence, for example, the mountings for the throttle bodies are the wrong way around. With some investigation I found that the ‘box is polypropylene which, being a thermoplastic, can be “welded”. You can even buy plastic “welders” to do this sort of thing. Some of these are essentially hot air guns but the one I got was rather cheaper and is essentially a soldering iron.

The next photo is the underside of the modified airbox, you can see the “welding” rather easily. When mounted on the car, it looks like the next photo. The air filters in this photo are actually upside-down as on the bike the air inlet comes into the bottom of the airbox. I haven’t actually worked out yet how to do this on the J15. I had wondered about ducting air around to the bottom of the ‘box. The other possibility it to butcher the top panel of the airbox as well, which can be seen in the next photo, and arrange air to flow into the filters from the top. This is the reason why they’re upside down in the photo, I might well run them in this position. Certainly other CBR1000s run with the filters upside-down like this and they seem to run fine.

Mind you, it’d be nice to retain the top of the engine like this as this is where the ECU mounts normally, and the engine loom has the cabling set up to work from this position. However, I can always change the wiring, as I did on the Fury. It’s quite a lot of work 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.

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.