Hood and doors

The hood posed an interesting challenge. It was a very tight fit and definitely required two people just to get it loosely in place. We managed to get it in place "good enough" to fit the doors. A piece of advice for the doors is to ensure the hinge that you fit to the door is drilled through the metal piece which runs around the edge of the window. This metal is very hard and is a bit of a pain to drill.

Hood and doors in place

I have left the hood to try and stretch it into shape. and the doors still need the retaining poppers fitting.

Door follows the counter of the rear arch nicely

It was while we were waiting for the hood to stretch in place that the car was lowered onto its wheels for the first time. This made it look very small; it's so low!

On the wheels. 

There are still a few issues to tackle; like the remaining tasks on the hood and doors and an issue I have with the engine idling. It seems to be unstable at idle. It had this issue at 900RPM, so I adjusted the throttle and it still has the same problem at 1100RPM. It seems to phase up and down in revs, like their is an inconsistency in fuel flow. To me it seems like and ECU issue - the controller gains not setup properly?

Interior bits and pieces

With the car mechanically running, it was time to make it look good inside! I started with the interior carpets, which turned out not to be my forte. I managed to confuse the two transmission tunnel carpets - not a good idea once you have started cutting. With replacement carpet delivered the job was finished neatly. Unfortunately that's not where my carpet issues ended - I also had an error of judgment when cutting the boot floor carpet to fit around the fuel filler cover - replacement on the way! I had more success with the rubber footwell mats - drilling and fitting poppers to secure. 

Transmission tunnel carpet

Rubber footwell mats - with poppers to hold them in place

Back to the interior of the cabin and the transmission tunnel top was fitted - it is important to get the handbrake vertical for this bit. Following this installation I was able to adjust the handbrake such that three clicks were the extent of travel and locked the rear wheels. 

Transmission tunnel top - looks nice!

Then came fitting the harnesses. The lap belts in the car are easy enough to fit, but they do have a right way up! For the harnesses through the top chassis rail carefully cut holes through the carpet and then the boot cover. When fitting the harness bolts, I greased the interface with the boot cover to prevent twisting on the surface; this worked pretty well. 

Harness bolts sitting nicely through the boot cover

Harnesses looking nice!

Then it was time for seats. I have gone for the leather option and they look pretty sweet nestled in the car. 

Fitting the boot cover is an interesting job. Using masking tape to mark up the locations of the popper bases on the car you can determine where to drill through the boot cover and fit the poppers. The dot fastener type tool is a bit useless really and I tried a few experimental alternatives, with more success. 

Boot cover all poppered in place

It Runs!

I had been tentatively avoiding this challenge, just in the fear that it may not actually work...

Filling the coolant was pretty straightforward, some of the pipes were squeezed to try and get as much air out as possible during this process - and it's a great colour red/pink!

Filling the engine oil was as simple as filling engine oil can be, but attention must be paid to the start up process. In this process first fill the oil to a sensible level then crank the engine for oil pressure (I'll get to how to do this in a minute) and then start it briefly before re-checking the oil level and filling to the appropriate level.

Filling and bleeding the clutch was done quite easily; I thoroughly enjoyed sitting in the car pressing the pedals!

Filling and bleeding the brakes was more of a challenge; a couple of leaks were caught and careful attention must be paid to the process in the AG for best results. In the end we had a good feel to the brake pedal and no more air coming out.

With the fluids filled the battery was connected - which was momentarily quite frightening. It would appear that as soon as the battery is connected the fuel pump primes (takes about 2s) and we had no idea what it was at first! With the battery connected all the electrics were checked, with all the lights working, the heater and wipers working and (somewhat amusingly) the horn.

Picture following the start - having put the nose cone in place

As described above the process for starting consists of the following steps:

• Fill all fluids
• Cranking for oil pressure. The AG tells you to disconnect the inertia switch, but fails to explain what this looks like or where exactly it may be. I could not locate this mystery switch, but I could see a connector to where the pins went in for the spark plugs. I could not remove this connector, so I just removed the four connectors to each spark plug. Then crank the engine until oil pressure registers. 
• Re-connect spark plugs 
• Briefly start it, then check oil levels and top up appropriately. 
• Now you can start it for real - leave until temperature rises and the radiator etc start to get warm such that the cooling fan kicks in. 

Following these steps, remarkably it started straight away! It had a suitable idle speed just under 1000RPM and the ECU seemed to "learn" as it continued to idle and it became more stable - it also sounded great! Following the start the coolant needed to be topped up again.

Unfortunately the nose cone seems about 2" too wide for the car

Fibreglass cntd.

Since I provided no pictures last week of the rear arches I thought I should put some up. As I said before fitting the rubber piping around the edge of the carbon fibre plates was quite fiddly. fitting the piping around the edge of the rear wing once it was partially installed was much easier. I had pre-cut the required notches which helped make things smoother.

LHS looking good

The RHS took ages to go on, not because of any issue with the arches, but resolving the outstanding issues with the rear wheel hub. After the third bearing and second driveshaft, there was a combination of components that would actually go together! Once that was all fitted with the speed sensor the rear arch was put on.

RHS finally on

Lights and all!

I also installed the other carbon fibre bits (the sill protectors). These really helped to set the car off, but riveting all the interior panels by hand was a bit of a pain.

Carbon fibre trim starting to look really neat!

Fibreglass

During some odd hours this week progress was made on the boot carpet and drilling holes of the fuel filler cover (which is not mentioned anywhere in the assembly guide). If you read the last post, Caterham did send a replacement bearing, but it was just as sloppy as the first one. Their response? "There should be some movement". I have responded to this (quite frankly ridiculous) statement with a video showing the magnitude of the motion (that for some unknown reason will not display properly on this blog). 

The main objective of the weekend was to get cracking with the cycle wings and the rear wheel arches.

Cycle wings

Installing these turned out to be a bit of a pain in the neck. Drilling holes in the cycle wings knackered many a drill bit and the Caterham suggested method of installation was not ideal. On the LHS the Caterham method of drilling the fibreglass for the front holes first and then marking the wing-stays before transferring to the wheel for the rear attachment, was followed. An alternative to this was what we did on the RHS, where the wing-stays were marked up with a hole 1.2cm from the end and a spacing of 8.5cm between the centres; this was drilled both front and back. Once drilled these could be transferred to the cycle wing directly by lining it up where you wanted it and then marking though the holes; this was a quicker method overall.

LHS cycle wing on

Feeding the indicator wire through the wing-stays was a fiddly task; I resorted to toothpicks to try and guide the wire out of the narrow opening - which eventually worked. With the cycle wings on and the lights wired up it's starting to look more like the finished article.

Probably should apologise for using the bonnet as a tool storage area!

Rear Arches

The rear arches needed to have the carbon fibre plates installed prior to fitment to the car. Feeding the rubber piping around the edge of the plate was a time consuming, fiddly task. Once stuck in place with tape they were drilled and riveted to the arches themselves. They did start to the look pretty cool with carbon fibre panels on! Material stillness to be removed in the area of the radius arm to allow it to A fit through the arch and B allow for motion as it absorbs the bumpy english roads. When that is done I shall add the arches to the car and put the lights on.

Rear Suspension

With the focus on the rear suspension, I was hoping to get all four wheels on the car. Seeing as the roll bar was already installed, first the damper units went in each side. Great care was taken with the lower bolts of each of these units to ensure that the holes were not cross threaded. Next the radius arms were installed. The bolt into the side of the car were fine, but the flanges on the de-dion required bending to create an opening big enough to receive the bush at the end of the radius arm.

LH damper installed

Radius arm being installed

Bearing slop

Bearing in nominal position

The A-frame was a bit more of a pain; the attachment to the de-dion required some slender sockets to get on the nut and bolt, but that was the easy part! Getting the alignment at the front moutings correct was more challenging. As the AG suggested I did end up with 3 spacers one side and four on the other to achieve perfect spacing, but it was an effort to get the 3 spacers in and the bolt through - two man job for sure.

Putting the ears back on the de-dion (with Loctite) was fine as was installing the hubs. Installing the disc was also no problem, but when adding the caliper great care was taken with the brake line threading. Unfortunately when I got the the RHS of the car the installed bearing had some serious play in it - completely unsuitable, hopefully this will be replaced. Nevertheless, I now have a yellow, three wheeled car - remind you of anyone...?

Yellow with three wheels!

One thing I would mention is the threads on the brake lines have been notoriously ropey, there has been multiple instances where the unions etc. needed to be re-thread.

With the rear suspension stuck a couple of other jobs were completed:

Throttle cable
Installing the throttle cable it appeared as though there should be a clip on the front of the engine to help guide the cable - apparently this is no more... To get the cable to be the right length for the pedal, you really do have to bend the pedal with a screwdriver inserted into its axis - despite the fact that this feels barbaric. Using this technique in combination with the adjustment on the other end of the cable it was possible to get a perfect match of pedal and cable travel, which had me sat in the car pressing the throttle pedal and grinning from ear to ear!

Carpets
Looking briefly at this jigsaw puzzle, I went for the easy option of installing the seat back carpet. It required some trimming around the transmission tunnel, but otherwise went on pretty nicely - I used Everbuild Stick 2 spray which was nice and tacky and so far has done the job well.