That’s an even odder title than usual, but it’s a hat-tip, as they say in blogging circles, to my Dad who died last week after a long illness. In many ways I got my start in mechanical things from him as I grew up in a house where it was normal for people to do mechanical things for themselves. He also built a car once too, a JAP engined Morgan three-wheeler that was assembled from a box full of bits shortly after WWII.
He liked to tell other people a story about a 17-year old me disassembling the gearbox of my car. This was a Morris Minor, and the gearbox had failed in such a manner that you got 3rd gear in addition to whatever other gear you’d selected. I was performing the delicate disassembly in the middle of the back garden and Dad thought the gearbox was clearly going to be toast but was surprised to see it running fine a few days later. If you’re wondering what the problem was, a baulk ring had shattered into umpteen pieces, doubtless pulled to bits by the mighty torque from the 803cc A-series engine. (0-60 in 52.5 seconds, I’ll have you know.)
Anyway, back to the Spektre, or whatever it’s called. I’ve finally finished the fiendishly complicated rear engine mount as I’ve now modified it to hold onto the reverser as recently discussed. I turned some bushes for this to mount on and welded these into the mountings. The only problem is that I couldn’t work out a way of making them adjustable and being sufficiently robust. As such, if I’ve got them in the wrong place it could well end up being a bit of a problem. As it is, I’ve deliberately put them in such a position that I’ll need a couple of spacers to put the motor in the right place. That gives me a bit of flexibility, you see, as I could make those spacers in such a way as to tilt the motor slightly if I need to.
You will remember that I need to cut a hole in the rear chassis member so that the driven sprocket misses it. It’s time to do that now and I needed first to make sure that I knew how much space I’d got at the back of the chassis. Hence, I perched a couple of the bits of bodywork on the chassis, as in the photo.
The answer to the question is that there’s loads of room behind the rear cross member. I debated for a while how best to modify it and eventually decided to weld in a simple “patch” tube. Later on, I’ll add some additional triangulation to the rear frame as I’ve had to cut some of this out now.
You can see what it looks like now in this photo. As you can see, I did this with square tubing unlike the usual CFS tubing that I use as like this it’s easier to get things to fit onto the existing chassis properly. I’ll go to the shops tomorrow and buy some suitable flat strip to seal up those ugly holes that you can see in the sides of the modification.
I’m actually starting to feel a bit pressured about the upcoming season, believe it or not. As you can see in the last photo I’ve still got the Fury as I can’t quite convince myself that I’ll get the Spektre together in time. However, I’m planning on a real blitz to see where I can get to. Mind you, the skiing season is upcoming… 🙂