Spectroscopy

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.