September 7th
Spoke to Chris Masters again. He said that I was right to use the brackets for the front brake pipes, which is good as I did that a long time ago. he also faxed a copy of a sample SVA form to me, and said to phone back to go through it section by section. He advised not to use the Yeading test centre (that one that Duncan's Dax passed at) as they have had some bother there. Anywhere else seems to be all right, so I guess the obvious thing to do is to go to Norwich. Apparently there's a new test centre at Derby now which has a short waiting list at the moment.
In the evening I spent a short time trying to polish up the exhaust pipework. It wasn't too successful but I think the application of copious quantities of elbow grease (or buying the right power tool) will do the job in the end.
September 10th
More
polishing. They're sort of vaguely acceptable now. The thought of having the pipes chromed crossed my mind, but
in retrospect seems too extravagant.
The exhaust system exits the engine bay through a large hole cut in the GRP. This was marked out, but I didn't just cut it out. There seems to be a lot of room for manouvre on where the hole is, due to the complexity of the measurements and the pipe bends. The carefulness was probably useful as I ended up with the hole about 25mm away from where the manual measurements indicated.
September 11th
Before
I fitted the exhaust system, I made up a sort of heatshield for the washer bottle out of aluminium sheet. I don't
know whether this is absolutely necessary but why not? These pictures are before and after shots.
After that I applied myself to more hacking of GRP and eventually the exhaust system was mounted on the side of the car. One of the mountings (in fact the only one) seems to be rather stressed but there seems to be nothing that I can do about it other than bending the 50mm diameter stainless tubing that the main part of the exhaust is made from. As this is probably beyond me I'll put up with a little stress. I think the end result looks rather good, and so does Tom. Anthea, on the other hand, thinks it looks hideous. See what you think:
in case you've got to this frame directly and can't get out, go here.