3rd June 2002
First job after returning from a weekend in Halesowen, was to sort the wiring which I had realised I had done wrong. I decided that I could re-use the loom saddles which I had fitted by using a tie-wrap all the way around the chassis tube. The loom was easily re-routed at the cost of a few tie wraps, so no great drama there. No the neatest, but does the job just fine, and I'd rather do this than fix more saddles and have some redundant.

Once this was sorted it was time to start on fitting the diff. I located all the parts required, and mounted the diff brackets onto the diff on the bench, before man handling it into the chassis. Once into the chassis, it was a fairly simple job to get all the mountings in and torqued up. Although I was lacking an appropriate socket to use the torque wrench on the hex head bolts.
The fitting of the diff had gone easier and quicker than I had thought it would - given that I was working on my own, I expected the diff to be a bit of a struggle with only two hands. So the next job is to fit the driveshafts. I figure this will be easier done now than when the suspension has been fitted.
The manual says to simply encourage the shafts into the diff with a dead-blow hammer. I try this on both sides and am soon getting nowhere. The circlip on the shaft is quite large, and clearly has to click into a slot in the diff which will then hold the shafts in position. They certainly don't want to go in, and it's quite tricky to balance everything on my own.
I decide to get on with something more contructive by fitting the rear wishbones. Again, this is fairly straight forward once I've identified all the correct parts. The first thing which I do is to create a half inch tap to run down the rose joint threads in the wishbones. This is done by taking a half inch bolt and cutting two slots down it's length, which is then screwed down the thread to clear any excess powder coating which may have got into the threads.
Once this was done, the left hand side wishbones went on, closely followed by the right hand side. Then time had elapsed, and that was the end of work for this afternoon. I was quite pleased with what I had done, and was left to ponder an appropriate method of getting the driveshafts to fit.

4th June 2002
Had a helper with me most of the day today, as Greg paid me a visit.
The first job to try and crack was to fit the driveshafts. It was a bit easier to try this with an extra pair of hands to help orientate everything. We continued to struggle until Greg had the genius idea of putting a small smear of grease onto the bit of the circlip which we could see was causing the problem. Then I held the driveshafts inline and compressed, and relatively gentle encouragement with the dead-blow hammer and they were in.
The next task is to continue building up the rear suspension by fitting the uprights. These are bolted to the rear wishbones through the rose joints. Also the driveshafts should be passed through them, and the rear hubs then attached to the splines on the outboard end of the shafts.
The lower mount for the rear shock absorbers is at the top of the rear uprights. The upper mounts are brackets in the top of the rear chassis. These are the next components to be added, and complete the rear suspension arrangement for now (anti-roll bars are still to be added later)
Having completed the rear suspension, we turn our attention to the front. Similar to the rear it is advisable to run a tap down the threads in the upper wishbones to clear any residual powder coating. Fortunately, these are clear enough on the front to allow the upper ball joints to just screw straight in - this is good since we had failed dismally to find a sacrificial M18 bolt earlier in the day, due to it being a bank holiday.
Before too long - thanks to previous experience - the front wishbones are fitted.
Once the front wishbones are fitted, the front ball joints can be fitted to them. The upper ball joints screws into the previously tapped thread in the upper wishbone. The lower ball joint is bolted onto the plate at the outboard end of the lower wishbones.
The next job after this is to fit the front shocks. The upper mounts are on the top chassis rails between the upper wishbones mounts. The lower mount for the shock is just inboard of the lower ball joint, into a mount attached to the plate on the lower wishbones.
Next job is to attach the front uprights. These are supplied pre assembled from Westfield, with the upright, hub, brake disc and caliper all as a single assembled unit. As such it is a simple enough task to attach them, but I am again glad of the extra pair of hands. The lower upright is attached to the lower wishbone and ball joint, and the upper to the upper. For now the upper ball joint nut it not torque tightened since they will have to come off again for the cycle wing bracket mounts.
The steering rack can now be mounted onto the two mounts which are attached to the chassis at the front of the car. At each end of the steering rack, a track rod end is attached which will allow the track of the steering to be adjusted. The track rod ends are then attached to the steering arms on each of the front uprights.
Another fairly quick task was to fit the rear brakes. Once the discs had been cleaned off with white spirit to remove the anti-rust oil which they are coated in, they can be put onto the hubs. They will be held on by the road wheels, but for now it allows the rear calipers to be fitted, and these will hold the discs in place. The calipers are held by two bolts through the rear of the upright.
The final quick task of the day is to put the rear prop shaft into the tunnel and attach it to the input flange of the diff. There are four bolts to hold this, and it is quite tricky to get them to fit. Torqueing them appropriately is going to be a test of my tool ingenuity!
We've had a really good day and got lots of bits put onto the car without too much problem. The extra pair of hands has certainly been helpful with the tasks we have been doing today, and the car is starting to look more like a car now, with four corners ready for wheels.

5th June 2002
After some indecision yesterday, the first job I decided to do was to paint the rear brakes. So after a short trip out to obtain some high temperature paint, I have painted the rear calipers and the centres of the rear discs black. The idea here is to try to save them from looking nasty when they start to get surface rust, and to get rid of the horrid gold colour the calipers are painted (plated?) in.
I also painted the front ball joints (except the lower ones cos they can't really be seen) and track rod ends black, since they were a sort of manky metal colour which didn't really look very good.
These, and the brakes, will be needing a second coat of paint later.
Next was time for a call to Westfield to chase up some missing parts and for some technical advice. I hadn't spotted any instructions for fitting the anti-roll bars, and appear to have two rear fitting kits rather than a front and a rear. Once I'd had the installation explained to me, it appeared fairly straight forward, so I could tackle the rear.
The ARB mounts on some small brackets which are fixed at the same point as the rear mount point for the upper wishbone. The bar then mounts across the rear of the diff carrier, and the droplinks attach to some brackets on the lower wishbone.
Fitting was pretty simple, the trickiest bit being removing the scorched on (what looks like) masking tape from the bar itself where it had been masked to stop it from being powder coated.

The next task is the fit the reverse gearbox. I had already prepared for this by identifying the four brackets which attach to the gearbox housing, which are then mounted into the chassis.
From what I've read, the reverse gearbox and it's required prop arrangement is likely to be the achilles heel of the car. I'm expecting the box to give me a hard time and be a general maintenance and reliability pain, but I'm going to give it a go and see how I get on. I will probably look into swapping over to a single prop and electric reverse arrangement at some point in the future - possibly over the coming winter, but for now I want to get the car built, and on the road.
Fortunately it goes in without much trouble, the only slightly tricky bit being getting the nylocs on the chassis mounting studs which pass through the smaller reverse box mounting brackets, to tighten evenly so that there is a fairly equal spread of thread at each end.


Once this is done, I can attach the front flange of the rear prop (already attached to the diff) to the rear flange of the reverse gearbox. Again, this is a simple enough task, just a little fiddly since there isn't much room for manouvre of fingers between the gearbox housing and the flange.

Problem time! I notice two vaguely serious problems now. The first and most worrying is that there is, what can only be termed as, sod all clearance between the rear prop and one of the chassis tubes in the tunnel. By sod all I mean about 1mm if you're lucky! OK, so this prop isn't likely to waggle about very much, but I don't think anyone in their right mind would be happy with that sort of clearance. In fact, there is a small tag attached the prop which just marginally touches the chassis as the prop turns.
The second and (only) slightly less serious problem is that the bolts which are used to mate the prop and reverse box flange, are pretty much in a similar situation - there is hardly any clearance between them and the gearbox housing.
And on that note, it is time to give up for the day and think about the problems
(Apologies for the poor quality of these pictures - I hadn't worked out how to do macro shots, d'oh!)

6th June 2002
First job of the day today was the same as yesterday. Painted the second coat on the rear brake discs and calipers, and the front ball joints. This takes up quite a bit of time actually.
Once that's done it's time to sort out the clearance issues I discovered late on yesterday. After speaking to Westfield it seems that my prop clearance is definitely insufficient, although by the sounds of it they do run them quite close anyway (that's rev boxes and dodgy prop angles for you!). Their recommended method of adjusting this is to slacken off all the reverse box mounts, and then lever the box against the chassis to adjust it in it's mounts to lessen the rear prop angle.
After a quick appeal for an extra pair of hands on cam7, Jim pops over from his office just over the road to give me a hand. It turns out to be a simple enough job, and Jim is soon consigned back to work!
You can't see it very well in this picture, but the clearance is nearer 10mm than 1mm now, so I'm happier that it will be ok - the prop shouldn't be flailing around very much anyway.
Next job is to sort out the prop flange bolt to reverse box clearance issue. Westfield suggested that I chop a thread off the end of the bolts, but when I tried to do this I think I either killed the hacksaw blade or they are quite hard. I suspect the former actually.
However to maintain the integrity of the bolt, Bonce saw the obvious answer which I must have been looking right past - just stick an extra plain washer under the other side! So this I did, and swapped the front prop flange / rear rev box flange bolts. Problem solved. I don't think the extra washer is any worse a solution than chopping the end off the bolts.
Using the same method, I then attached the rear flange of the front prop to the front flange of the reverse gearbox. This one is a bit easier to work on since the other end of the prop is not attached to anything and can be moved around easily to improve access to the prop bolts.
Surprisingly, I'm now starting to run out things to do. I've been having a background think about it and I reckon I'll be in a state where I need to get the engine in soon! There really isn't a great deal more I can do to the car without having the bodywork or putting the engine in.
The only other real task I can do before the engine is to sort out the fuelling at the rear end. I start gathering the parts I need to do this, but am immediately scuppered by the lack of the bracket to mount the fuel pump. Without this, it's not really worth starting this job, though I can do the first step which is to prepare the chassis for the fuel tank by applying foam tape to the rear struts which it will sit on.
Having finally received a small collection of nuts and bolts from Westfield I can revisit the very first job I did, the pedals. I try to fit the clutch pedal to the pushrod via the clevis using the bolt which was missing - I don't think the the bolt is long enough as it will result in the pedal being too far away and won't leave any adjustment. I'll just go buy a bolt for this job rather than try to explain this to Westfield.
I can fit the clutch fluid reservoir to the chassis mounted bracket though. Once fitted I also chop and fit the pipe which connects it to the clutch master cylinder. I'm still just a few nuts and bolts away from having the pedals fully working though!

7th June 2002
Given that I can't do the fuelling, the last sizeable job I can do before the engine is to sort out the gearchange linkages. I actually started some preparation for this yesterday, by opening up the holes in ali panels for the main gearchange mounting bracket (the holes were present, but didn't line up). Also drilled the holes in the chassis for the reverse selector mount.
The selectors are mounted pretty easily, though it is becoming increasingly busy in this area of the tunnel, calling for nimble fingers and not dropping anything! The fiddliest bit is actually threading the gearchange rod down the tunnel.
It's all fitted, but I can't connect it all up. The gearchange rod is fouling the reverse box mounts and the front end of the tunnel where it meets the quadrant. The manual says that the rod "may need some adjustment", but it's pretty chunky and will require some brute force applied in just the right spot.
I'll have to study this to work out exactly where and how much to bend it.

The next small job which I really need to sort out is the torqueing of the prop flange bolts.
Access to the rear ones with a torque wrench is nigh on impossible, so I'm going to have to think of a clever way to do that. I have a go at the front ones, which are marginally more accessible in that I can just get the torque wrench on some of them.
I managed to get some of them to click on the torque wrench (about 3 out of the 6 I can get it onto), and some of the others felt close to clicking but then went a bit soft - bad news. Upon speaking to Westfield about this, I discover that the torque setting in the manual is actually wrong and I have been trying to do them up too tight. This means they are knackered because they use binx nuts on the back, which I've obviously damaged by over-tightening. Westfield will send replacements.
I also worked out how to get better access. What I need are ball-ended hex sockets which I can attach to the torque wrench. This will allow me to be not totally square to the head, and hence give me some clearance of the prop to get the wrench on.
A quick tour of the local tool shops later, and the only solution seems to be to buy a couple of appropriately sized ball-ended allen keys, and chop the ends off to make something I can get into a socket. But until I get the replacements through I can't do much now at all.

8th June 2002
Having pretty much exhausted the list of available tasks, I fitted the brake flexibles.
This was a simple enough job to do, just requiring one end of each flexible to be attached into the caliper, then the other end to the chassis mounting plates using lock nuts. The rigid brake pipes can then be attached to the flexible in the chassis mounts. All fairly straight forward, except I managed to pull a (not very well fixed) rivet out when bending one of the front rigid pipes to fit. This will require the rivet to be drilled out and a new P clip rivetting in.
Also one of the front flexibles is missing it's locknut, so I can't complete this one.

10th June 2002
First job for today was to fix the front rigid pipe P-clip which had come adrift during the bending of the pipe to meet the fitted flexible. This was at a bit of a tricky angle which is clearly why the original rivet wasn't in very well and came out quite easily.
The rest of the evening was spent on missions. I went over to see William to collect some knackered old Sierra wheels which I will use for pushing the car in and out of the garage on to avoid the risk of getting some build debris in my new/proper ones.
I also called in on Tim, who chopped some allen keys for me using his angle grinder. These will be used for torque tightening the in accessible prop flange bolts since they have ball ends.

11th June 2002
Received the replacement prop flange bolts and binx nuts in the post this morning from Westfield. So todays job was to fit those. I'm getting well practiced at doing these bolts now, so it's a fairly simple enough task to do the straight swap. Hopefully I won't have to touch these again for a while, other than to torque tighten them.
Having sorted the plans to fit the engine at the weekend, I had spoken to Westfield to find out if there is anything in particular I need to know about doing this. They have said that I need to align the exhaust with the bodywork before I can attach the engine down to it's mounting plates, but I can get the engine into the engine bay.
More investigation reveals that this is because the exhaust has no flexible section (I knew this) and it is mounted by attaching it directly to the bodywork. This doesn't sound like the smartest method when there are captive nuts already fitted to the chassis for this job.
So I get the exhaust and manifold out for a look - I will probably try to fabricate some sort or exhaust mount which uses the captive nut rather than attach it directly to the bodywork.

13th June 2002
Have received some more of the missing bits from Westfield. So now it's time to get on with sorting out the mounting and plumbing of the fuel tank and pump.
First job is to attach the intertia switch to small plate welded into the rear of the diff carrier part of the chassis. This is very simply and easily done (before the tank goes on!).

Also pictured here is Tims engine hoist which has been brought round in readiness for the engine to go in at the weekend.
Next up is to mount the fuel tank. It is held in place by two aluminium straps which are attached to the chassis using rivnuts on top of the upper rear diff carrier tube, and beneath the lower rear chassis tube. The straps are lined with foam tape to stop the tank from sliding around.
The tank itself is quite neat, and is pre-fitted with gauge sender and breather, and has an integrated swirl pot to reduce any G-induced fuel starvation problems.
Now I can fit the fuel pump. This is mounted on an aluminium bracket beneath the diff. I assume this is so that it is the lower than the swirl pot on the output of the fuel tank (nearside).
This was a bit fiddly to install since the diff brackets are a bit in the way, and I had to drill right through the chassis member (!) to put nuts and bolts through. Anyway, it's on now.

©2002-2009 David Hackett UDM4