All the same, after putting the new engine in I put all the wiring back. Of course, this was a lot quicker than last time as everything was cut to the right length. You can see some of the wiring in the photo on the right. Not really very interesting though, being the same as before.

On the right of the same photo is a new expansion tank. The previous one was exactly the same as this, but was a tenner, or something, from ebay. It had always annoyed me in that it was dirty and this brand new one appeared on eBay for the princely sum of £40 so I bought it. I will never understand why some racers buy expensive aluminium header tanks for 3 times this price and which mean that you can’t see the water level without taking the top off. What’s more, it has a connection for the bleed on the top of the thermostat housing which means that the system is essentially self bleeding. Mind you, as you can see, I might just have overfilled it a little.

So that’s the cooling and wiring back together. Next thing was to make the oil system whole again. Most important here was to fix the oil cooler, which was responsible for me losing the engine at the end of last year. So, I went out and bought the most expensive oil cooler I could find. In this case just a normal Mocal one, but a heavy duty one. What’s more, following some advice from Nick, who works with Andy, I put some supports between the top and bottom flanges on the cooler, as in the photo here. The cooler’s back in the car now, although one other thing I want to do is to shroud it a bit more, so that it doesn’t get hit by grot spat around by the rear wheel.

Before starting the engine again I wanted to do one final thing, which was to replace the master switch. OK, so here a photo of the new one, although that there’s a new one down there you can’t really tell. The only reason for changing this is that very occasionally these things wear and they can disconnect when you drive spiritedly over kerbing. (I don’t think the switch itself fails, it’s the little track in the plastic body that the little lug on the key follows that wears. However, rather than buying some expensive silicon like Adrian did, I just replace the things regularly. I rather like reducing the number of failure modes and having a single switch with an air gap is, to my mind, rather superior to a lump of silicon whose failure more is, of course, to go short circuit…

With all that done, I filled up the oil system, took the plugs out to check for oil pressure, put the plugs back in a pressed the started. Brrrrm, brrrrm, it said. That’s a relief.

So, it’s back to trying to make the thing go faster. One thing on my list which is still there after the delays and tribulations over the winter is to make the air box rather better. My idea this time is to replace the access panel that’s on the top of the normal airbox with a diffuser sticking up towards the top of the car. I considered making this with grp or aluminium but finally decided to use some polypropylene that I’ve got lying around. I’m planning on making a rectangular cross section duct that enlarges gradually on entry to the standard airbox, at which place I’ll try to put an air filter of some form.

The reason for using polypropylene, which the standard airbox is made of, is that it’s a thermoplastic so you can “weld” it using a hot soldering iron or an air gun. That is, you can stick the duct to the airbox inlet with ease.

As you can see, I’ve only done the top and bottom of the duct at the moment and it’s all held together with sealing wax and string. My fond hope is that when I stick the side panels on it’ll essentially make it  monocoque and make the whole thing a lot stiffer. We’ll see whether that works later this week…

In the meantime, the season’s rushing up at us. I got my medical done at the 750 do this weekend so I’m going to stop writing now and fill in the form so that I can get the race licence application in the post…

All that left me feeling invigorated. What’s more, I’ve finally managed to get a replacement engine. I still don’t know what to do with the other one (find a new crank and build it up as a spare engine or just keep it for spare parts) but at least I can get back to putting the car together. Of course, all this has cost me a lot of time. I have, though, got a few things done. First of these was to make a new rear undertray, as in the picture above. I want to change the underbody aero slightly on the car (says he implying he has a clue what’s going on) and this is part of this. The reason for this is that the way the previous undertray was getting pushed around by the air indicated that something quite different from what I intended to happen was happening. So, at the moment I’ve just make a big flat bit. Whether this has any chance of functioning as the central bit of a venturi, which is what you want, is anyone’s guess at the moment.

That isn’t really much to write home about. However, I drove along to Andy’s on Friday to pick up the new engine which appears in the next photo. As you can see, I’ve taken the sump off it here in preparation for fitting the baffled billet sump. Certainly it looks pretty clean on the inside, but time will tell about the performance.

Since then I’ve spent a good deal of time over the weekend getting the engine in and a good deal of other things hooked up, as in the final photo. The engine’s bolted in and the transmission’s all in place. The exhaust headers are connected up, using 4 more super-expensive Honda gaskets, and the coolant system is all in place. I’ve even put some coolant in there, but I may well drain that out again as I’ve had an idea about something that I might well tell you about.

Next up is to get the electrics all back together and see what I can do about the airbox. I think I’ve decided what I want to do with this, although it depends on some measurements that I want to take with the airbox back on. I’d better check that the engine starts first, though, which means filling the lubrication system and buying a silly expensive filter…

In the meantime, things are hotting up on the run  up to the new season. The new race programme is now published and I’ve registered for the series. I’m number 50 again which is good. In a couple of weeks time we’re going to the 750 club’s awards dinner which is pretty much the start of the season really. It’d be nice to know where I’m going with various bits of the car then.

You may well think I’m completely batty but there is method in my madness. Since I got the TIG welder (see the next photo of the welder tower) I’ve wanted a tall seat that meant I could sit at the bench, with two hands able to do TIGgy things and one foot able to press the TIG foot pedal up and down. The stool is ideal for this, if a trifle ostentatious. Not, mind you, that I’ve done any TIGging recently.

To be honest, I’ve not really done that much over the holiday period.

One thing that I wanted to do over the winter period—a list of things that got rather truncated due to the blown engine—was to make a decent airbox for the engine. I’ve never been happy with the “turn the Honda airbox round and blow in the top rather than the bottom” approach and having spent a while looking at the airbox on the Radical that we shared a Birkett team with last October I think it’s worth having a go at making one completely from scratch. (Although, I might start with the flange on the bottom of the Honda airbox as that fits the throttle bodies nicely and has a couple of nice sealing gaskets in it.)

To that end, I put the engine back in the chassis (it’s a lot easier to manoeuvre without the rest of the stuff that’s on the garage floor). What I have to do now is decide how I’m going to make the airbox. The two possibilities are making a mould using expanding foam for a buck or making the whole thing out of aluminium. At the moment I’m unsure which would be better. It’s actually got a couple of tricky bits to it as I need to arrange for a filter and I also need to position the secondary injectors above the inlet trumpets somehow. Of course, whether this would actually work better than the modified standard airbox is slightly open to doubt. For example, the secondary injectors are mounted on the outside of the standard box and the air turns through 90° as it goes past them. In the idea I’ve been thinking about, the air would flow directly past the injectors on its way straight into the inlet trumpets. As such, I’d like to retain the existing airbox so I can do a back-to-back test on a rolling road.

With the engine in this position, I took the chance to do a couple of modifications that needed doing to the engine mounting frame by moving one of the mounting lugs and slightly repositioning the stay for the gearchange cable outer. Mind you, I really wish I could come up with a decent way to make a gearchange that didn’t need a push-pull cable. I think they’re really horrible things…

I’ve finished making the new suspension components, as you can see in the photo here. (Not that you can see very much, the brilliant white rather mucks up the camera’s exposure.) I did have a bit of a panic about these new rockers this morning when I convinced myself I’d assembled the spherical bearing bits wrongly, in that the braking and accelerative forces were going to be acting on the circlips retaining the bearings. However, after I was just about to start making some new ones I realised my mistake. Anthea tells me I’m always doing this and I don’t think she’s wrong.

One thing you might be able to see if you peer really hard at the photo above is that as I’ve now got an AC TIG welder I’ve been practising my aluminium welding skills. Actually, with a bit of twiddling around with the myriad of knobs on my the welder and a bit of practise it wasn’t too hard to do. Those aluminium towers are there to hold down the bonnet in the event of the splitter getting ripped off. Originally they were rivetted together but now they’re welded too.

I’ve also build up the rear suspension as in the photo here. Again, the brilliant white it just too much for the camera but you should get the idea anyway.

That means I’ve done what I’m going to do to the suspension. Next thing I want to do is to do a minor mod to the engine cradle. This is a bit of a problem really as I’d expected to have the new engine by now. (Did I mention that I’d eventually decided to get another engine to replace the one I knackered at the Birkett? If nothing else, it means I’ve got a lot of spare parts. Problem is, even though it’s supposedly arrived in the country I haven’t seen hide nor hair of it and I guess I’m sunk until after Christmas now.) Perhaps I’ll have to mock something up with the casings from the existing engine…

I made sure that those wishbones articulated properly, which they did after  I’d attached them with an angle grinder, and then set about the front rockers. This is a bit more tricky as I’d like some better bearings where the rockers attach to the chassis. As standard the J15 has rubber bushes here. On the Fury I replaced the equivalent bushes with needle roller bearings. However, I found that they tended to wear the housings really quickly. Not really surprising, I guess, because they don’t move much and all of the weight tends to be taken by the same small number of needles all the time.

Although, to be fair, when I recently read Tony Southgate’s autobiography he commented that he got lots of needle roller bearings into the suspension of the Le Mans cars he designed. So, perhaps I’m wrong. All the same, I’ve decided to try using some spherical bearings. I bought some housings for these but I needed to make the housing a bit bigger, so as to provide enough meat for welding the rocker components to. I turned a couple of bits of tubing into suitable housings for the housings and welded them together, as in the photo. As you can probably see the bearing is retained by a circlip. As this is the front of the car I can orient the bearings so that all the load is taken on the housings rather than the circlip. I just had to hope that I didn’t end up getting any weld spatter in the circlip groove which would have been terminal. (Note that I TIGged the housing; I’m so glad I bought a TIG as it does things like this much better. Uses prodigious quantities of argon though.)

I then used the old rocker to make another jig. As you can see this time it’s rather harder because the component is very 3D; most other suspension components are essentially planar.

So, making this rocker was rather harder than usual, and is made more difficult by not being able to just turn the component upside-down to make the part for the other side of the car. All the same, after a considerable number of hours in the trenches I ended up with a new rocker for the left hand side of the car, ready for painting and insertion of the bearings. Apart, that is, from a minor problem caused by one of the circlips going ping! around the garage. I reckon it’s somewhere around the lathe but I doubt I can be bothered trying to find it.

So, all I’ve got to do is make another one and then I can get onto something else.

But, I can hear you all asking, what about the engine. Well, I’ve spoken to Andy about it lots of times and we’ve not been able to find a suitable crank from a suitable supplier. That means I can either just wait for a while until one turns up or press on and get another complete engine. The advantage of that is that I’d end up with a bunch of spares. The disadvantage is that it’s rather expensive. However, as I’ve now decided to cut off my route back to using the ’07 engine I can sell that (for example, I’ve taken the hydraulic clutch pipework out). That should make a decent amount of money. So, if you’re interested in a good  CBR1000RR07 engine which has only done about 4 races since being refreshed by Andy, give me a shout. I’ve even got all the gubbins like the billet sump, the throttle bodies, the electronics and even a Power Commander…

It’s kind of hard to see on the photo, but there’s some quite large grooves in the journal.

So, this crank is not going to work for me. The problem is, what am I going to do about it. Buying a new crank is ridiculously expensive. However, Andy reckons he can get a short engine for a pretty reasonable price. So, I’m leaving it with him for now. Mind you, I’m not sure why short engines exist on the second hand market. Perhaps there’s a chap who goes around bashing in cam covers?

I put all the engine bits on the floor and protected them so that they didn’t get loads of rubbish in them. With that it was on to the next job. First up was to have a massive cleanup around the rear of the car where there’s a lot of general grot and quite a lot of oil that escaped from the cooler when it expired. So, after much spraying of brake cleaner I cleaned a good deal of it up. One problem, though, is that after all the modifications there’s splodges of paint all over the place. All of which is POR-15 which started out as grey but has now gone various shades of greyey green.

One of the things I want to do is to stiffen up the rear of the car somehow, which I think is important. I’ve also been concerned for some time about the way I had to modify the car to get the suspension in the right position. This ultimately required me to locate the top damper mounts above the top of the chassis at the rear. This isn’t a very good idea and in the long run I’d like to completely rebuild the rear of the chassis. However, when I did this to the chassis I included the additional diagonals you can see in the photo here. This is pretty gruesome. It hasn’t fallen apart though.

An alternative I’ve been considering is binding the engine mounting frame into the chassis rather more effectively. You can see this in the next photo where I’ve mounted the engine mounting frame in the chassis. Well, I pushed the bolts into the holes… The idea is to remove those additional diagonals and make a removable section, as a long turnbuckle so I can make it tight, between the suspension turret and the top bar of the mounting frame. Depending on what this looks like I might also add some additional triangulation in the engine bay.

With that I took off a couple of bolts in the top of the engine, as the manual says, and turned it upside down. I then spent half an hour wondering where the bolts that fell on the bench had come from before I remembered that I’d left one of the starter motor bolts loose when I’d disconnected the earth connection.

With that done, I removed the sump and was immediately exposed to this collection of bits and pieces in the oil pickup. Those bits look like pieces of bearing to me, so at least I felt vindicated that I’d pulled out of the Birkett with good cause.

I pressed on and split the crankcase. (A simple few words to say, but something that involved much pushing and shoving. I’ve never actually taken an engine that used stretch bolts apart before and they feel clearly different as you undo them. Problem is, they’re about £4 each and there’s a grand total of 18 of them in the main and big end bearings.

With the crankcase split everything looks ok-ish, although all that bearing swarf must have come from somewhere. When you split the crankcase you separate the main bearing and they did look OK. The mains, though, are nearer the oil pump than the big ends which are fed via the mains by drillings in the crank.

So, I had to get the big ends off. And, indeed, when I started looking it was obvious that there was something odd here. In fact, even before I’d undone the big end bolts it was clear that there was a huge amount of play in the number 3 bearing, which was where I started. There seemed to be about 1mm of play which is very slightly more than the 0.03mm specified in the manual.

I took off all the big end bearings and it looks as though #2 and #3 have suffered badly. Those bearings have clearly been picked up and spun around by the crank. The photo here shows the big end bearings from cylinders 4 (on the left) and 3 (on the right). You can see that the little locating lugs on the #4 bearings have been flattened in the #3 bearings and, if you look hard, you can see that the #3 bearings are actually wider than the #4 ones. I guess this is because as the crank battered them they spread out sideways. It’s hard to see how they can have grown as much as they have, but obviously they managed it somehow.

So, with the source of the problem identified I can now buy some new bits, although I could do with finding a larger micrometer to check the ovality of the big end journals. (My micrometer only goes to 25mm which isn’t big enough.) In the meantime, I stripped the oil pump to check it was OK and, happily, it all looks fine. So, hopefully, it hasn’t whizzed bits all round the engine.

But, what concerns me is whether the crank has survived. It looks OK, but I can’t be sure. I’ll get Andy to have a look at it and tell me. Not sure what I’ll do if it is no good though, a new crank is £1337 + VAT!, be cheaper to find a new engine… Hopefully, I need to get a pile of new bits, have a mammoth cleaning session, and put everything back together. It could be worse though…

That engine hoist is one of the most useful things I ever bought. Back when I started this kit car malarkey I hired a hoist to put the engine in the original Westfield that I bought. If I’d hired a hoist on every occasion that I’ve used one I’d have to have sold a corner of the house to pay for it. I use it quite a lot for just lifting the car up onto stands, that is not just for moving an engine. Of course, a bike engine is quite light anyway, but it’s a little bit too heavy for one person to easily lift it in and out of the chassis.

So, having put the engine on the bench I’ve started taking it to pieces. There’s lots and lots of them. As you can see, I’ve taken the cams off. I thought that while I was looking at the bottom end, I might as well check the top end as well. (And, Andy reckoned that I ought to look for signs of oil starvation in and around the cam followers.) I’m actually trying to avoid taking the head off. For one reason there’s a couple of expensive gaskets that I’d have to replace, and some expensive stretch bolts to buy.

The top end turned out to be in what looks like good condition. It even looks shiny in the photo! I’ve measured all the current valve shim thicknesses (it is written on them but is fantastically difficult to see) and now I’ve measured the valve clearances. I need to adjust a couple of them but all the rest of them are within tolerance. Of course, this means I need to buy some of the world’s most expensive shims.

Next thing is to get at the bottom end of the engine. I’m hoping that if I remove the cam drive chain, which I’ve currently reinstated so that I can turn the engine over to measure the valve clearances, but leave the head and cam cover in place, that I’ll be able to split the crankcase, and therefore get at the mains and big ends, without having to take the head off. This isn’t strictly what it says in the manual but as it’s rather deficient on other topics then perhaps it’s OK to bodge things around a bit. The manual, and I’m using the kosher Honda manual, doesn’t tell you, for example, which way round to fit the cams. They’re located by two bolts in the drive sprockets, you can see them in the photo, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t fit the cam 180° around from where it should be. This is OK if you get both cams like that but getting one of the them out of phase with the other would be seriously bad news. Luckily the Haynes manual I’ve got for the ’07 engine tells you this vital bit of information. Perhaps the Honda manual just assumes that you’ll be awake enough to check what phase the cam lobes are in, and what makes sense for which stroke you think the engine’s on…

So, next trip into the garage will replace the cam cover and start taking the bottom end off. One thing I did do, when I drained the oil, was to filter it all looking for any bits. (“Panning for gold”, as Andy describes it.) Everything looked fine then, but there’s always a chance that the sump is full of bits that didn’t make it out of the drain hole…

I’d got myself all ready well in advance, here’s the car sitting on the trailer and, after a morning lecturing to students. I jumped on the train, zoomed down to Cambridge and drove to Silverstone. There, miracles of miracles (they must have got some new security guards) we got in easily and parked up for the night.

What’s more, the weather forecast was looking good so perhaps we’d even have a dry race. So, first thing on the Friday I got the car sorted, signed on, and I was ready to go. However, looking at the track it was clear that it was still pretty wet from the overnight rain and the dew. So, I took a short detour to put the wets on (there they are in the photo above) and hence got on track a bit late.

And, spun hugely at Becketts on the out lap… Sigh. The session was really slippy and I’d neglected to remove the ARBs which I know is necessary. However, it wasn’t too big a problem, as there was the rest of the day.

So, come the second session, I went out again and was starting to press on a bit, especially as it was now properly dry. One problem was that I’d clearly got the gearing calculations wrong as I was on the limiter from about half way down the Hangar straight. I don’t think that precipitated the awful thing that was to come, but you never know… All the same, the first lap of the second session was aout 30 seconds faster than the fastest from the first and it got quicker every lap after that.

Until lap 6.

At which point, while going around Brooklands, the oil lights (there’s two of them, arranged to be dazzling) came on. Ooops. TBH, I’m not sure I killed the engine as quickly as I should have done but here’s a snapshot of the logged oil pressure. The top trace is lap 4 and the lower one is lap 5, that is the lap before the oil light came on.  The cursor is positioned about 80% of the way around Luffield and, as you can see on lap 4 the pressure was fine, on lap 5 it wasn’t very clever as it was about 50% of what it was the previous lap. Problem is, this wasn’t low enough to put the light on and at this point of the circuit I’m not looking at the gauge. (The reason it drops right down at the end is that on this lap I came in to adjust the tyre pressures.

So, after the light came on I killed the engine and coasted into the pitlane. Luckily there were some helpers there to put me back to the garage. Once there I took the engine cover off and there was oil everywhere inside the engine compartment. at first I wondered about a rod sticking out through the block but inspection showed that wasn’t the case. After much cleaning it transpired that the cooler had sprung a leak. (These things seem to be too fragile…) As a temporary measure I took off the cooler and cleaned everything up. (And, while doing this, Damon Hill came over for a chat; his son was testing from the adjacent garage. Damon was whinging about the cost of motor racing which I thought was slightly rich going by the amount of stuff they had in that garage for one chap.)

With that done, we added some more oil. (Not a huge amount, it doesn’t take much oil to make a quite spectacular mess.) And then I started the engine. The pressure seemed OK but I must admit I wasn’t too happy as the engine didn’t sound right.

All the same, we retired for the night, and set up everything for the race the next day. It dawned cold and damp but, again, the forecast was to clear up which looked right. I was in the second qualifying session, and trundled over to the rather unusually sited assembly area. On the way over, with the engine essentially ticking over the oil light came on again. Now, as the light comes one at 10psi this isn’t unknown when the oil’s really hot. Problem is, it wasn’t. In the queue I fretted and tried a few things but it was clear that something was up. Bugger…

So, I pulled out and that was the end of my Birkett. My team ended up coming 10th on the road which is pretty good seeing as we were down to 4 cars and we had a couple of mishaps. What’s to bet that it rains, again, next year.

I’ve decided to strip the engine myself rather than taking it to Andy, mainly for interest. I’m assuming that I’m going to find some run shells in there. I hope so as something more than that could be expensive. It’s not going to be cheap though, I looked up the prices of new shells and fell off my chair. A complete new set of big end and main shells will be about £250 which is horrible. Cheaper than a new engine though. I’ll just have to hope there isn’t more damage in there when I get in there…

So, I’ve started putting the car in position to strip things over the winter. I’ve taken all the bodywork, and have even secreted a bit of it in the garage roof as seen here. (A long time ago I screwed some hooks up here to hand the Westfield bodywork here. They’re still there…)

Anyway, that’s the absolute end of the racing season. Watch this space for the tale of the winter fixes and upgrades…

Hmm, probably not. If nothing else I’ve got to decide what to do with the rest of my life, again with the significant caveat that I get through my PhD viva with my reproductive organs mostly intact. (They never just accept these things, they always want some changes.) The choices are really about the academic/industry dichotomy…

All the same, I’m going to want to do some things to the car, so I thought I’d tell you what’s on my over winter to-do list. I’m good at making lists, but not so good at actually doing them…

Anti roll bars

I’d really like to re-engineer the bars, or at least the front one. What I’d like is to be able to adjust them from inside the car; if only because that would make it easier to see what the effects were. I’ve got an idea for how to make the front ARB, but I have a suspicion that I’d need to get hold of some spring steel and I’m not totally sure how to do that, or how to weld it to something come to that.

Covered trailer

For a long time I’ve been lusting after a covered trailer, just so that I don’t have to get to a race circuit and faff around making the car weather tight. This isn’t too hard, it just involves making a frame and getting a company to make a cover for it. Not sure what it’d look like in front of the house though…

Redesigned rear end

You will remember (I’m sure!) that I spent a lot of time faffing around with the suspension at the rear of the car. The end result of this is a collection of bits welded to the chassis that I don’t really like. So, I’d like to sort all that out and do it properly this time. However, if I was to really do it properly I’d cut the entire rear of the chassis off and completely re-engineer the engine mounting, the transmission and the suspension. For example I could easily get some much longer wishbones in there. Not sure I’ve got the time to do this though (see above about sorting out my life).

Rear aero

It’s clear that I need to move the aero balance of the car rearwards. I need to do something, probably on top and underneath the car, to promote that. Not entirely sure what at the moment though. I’m not sure I want to make a Spire like whale-tail (this phrase included for Paul Nightingale’s delectation!) but it might come to that.

Reduce weight

Inevitably I could do with taking about 20kg off the car. Obviously the driver’s a target here but I’ve got a bunch of other ideas, including persuading Jeremy Philips to make some lightweight bodywork for me. He’s gone all quiet on my at the moment  though. I do have a few other ideas about weight savings though including:

Remodelled roll cage

You will have noticed that the front of my cage is too high. As such I’m strongly tempted to cut off the front hoop and “roof” rails and remodel it slightly. That would have the effect of reducing the weight by a small amount but could also make the car look a lot  nicer.

An appointment with a rolling road

..is well overdue. At some point I’ll do that over the winter.

Improve mirrors

This is probably part of the same issue as sorting the roll cage, but I’d like to make the mirrors work rather better. If nothing else, getting the main mirror in the aero shadow of the roll cage would reduce the car’s drag and might also make it a but clearer to look out of.

Remove clutch hydraulics

After I changed the engine I didn’t completely remove the hydraulics for the clutch on the ’07 engine. With a bit of time I could take off various panels and finish this off properly.

Remake rockers

I’d like to remake the rockers in the front suspension so that I remove the Delrin bearings and replace them with something like some spherical bearings. Given that I had to lengthen one end of the rockers, perhaps I should make completely new rockers that would be swappable, and therefore give me some spares.

Sort out trim pieces in rear bodywork

These, which blank off the slots through which the rear roll cage struts go, have always annoyed me. They need doing properly.

Remake seat

After a season, I think I know where I really want to sit…

Redo pedal box

You will remember that I’ve faffed around an awful lot with the pedal box. Well, I think I want to do it some more, especially to get rid of those horrible OBP pedals…

There, that shouldn’t take too long, should it?