Airflow

I’ve managed to spend a couple of days in the garage since Christmas so here I am again. I feel as if I am slowly getting somewhere now, doing a collection of smaller things although there’s a couple of bigger job still looming.

First up was fitting a NACA duct into the sidepod to shove some air in the general direction of the oil cooler. This was just a pre-made duct which I rivetted into the sidepod. (But, these pre-made ducts aren’t NACA ducts, they’re the wrong shape. Although, I see that Demon Tweeks are now selling ducts that they say really do follow the original NACA design. Yes, you’re right, this is a bit of an aerodynamic hobby horse of mine…)

To be honest, I don’t really know why I rivetted this in position. I should really have bonded it in to neatness. However, it’s done now. If it offends me later I’ll come back and drill the rivets out again.

I only really put the duct in the sidepod because I’d taken the sidepod off to add some attachments to the floor of the car. As on the Fury these are just rivnuts in the GRP and little M5 bolts through the floor. It’s all nice and rigid though. While I was here I also satisfied my vanity a bit by cutting back and polishing all of the bodywork. It makes a truly huge difference, probably not really observable in the photos, but the car looks positively gleaming now.

While I had the sidepod off the other side, I did something I’ve been meaning to do for ages and trimmed the tail pipe. Now it’s like this I can spend a while fixing a slice of catalytic converter to the tail pipe to satisfy the (stunningly ignorant) powers that be.

A job I’ve not really been looking forward to was making a windscreen. On Jeremy’s car, as in the photo on the right, this is quite a large wrap-around thing. There’s a good reason for this in that the sides of the car are actually very low and it’s probably needed to avoid blowing the occupants to kingdom come. I’ve always been intending to copy this, to some extent, on my car and so I set about making some cardboard templates to do this sort of thing, as in the next photo. It’s amazing how much cardboard I use for things like this. You will see that I’ve decided that any passenger is going to be uncomfortable.

With that done I made up sheets of 4mm polycarbonate, Lexan no less, to match the templates. I then struck a bit of a problem in that the front screen, when attached to the flange on the bodywork fouled the dashboard and the gear paddles. Ooops.

After a considerable amount of thought I eventually mounted the front screen on spacers to move it forwards slightly. Of course, this meant making a slightly differently sized screen. It seems to look OK though, as in the next photo. Of course, you can’t actually see the screen as it’s, err, transparent.

In all the faffing about with screens and dashboards, I have been wondering about making the dash itself even smaller and moving the Palm to the side of the wheel. I’m wondering if that would actually improve visibility. It might also help  with getting the serial lead into the Palm.

So, here’s the state of the to-do list. I think I’m going to have to make a seat next. If you don’t hear from me again, it’s because I’ve glued myself into the car.

Pre test:

1. Make seat
2. Mount a camera somehow.
3. Do a mega bolt check.
4. Setup the suspension. This’ll have to be a guess at first but it’s a start. One issue with this is that I think I’m going to have to modify the little gadgets that extend the track rod ends as I think they’re a smidge too long.
5. Make rear undertray
6. Adjust master cylinder pushrods and throttle pedal.
7. Fit mirrors.

Pre race:

1. Fabricate some sort of inlet for the airbox.
2. Possibly as part of that, make a cover for the upper injectors and fuel line. As it is at the moment it’ll give a scrutineer heart failure.
3. Fit roundels and race numbers. Fit other missing decals.
4. Think about adding additional triangulation to the engine compartment.
5. Add some yellow.
6. Fit the catch tank.
7. Get a lambda boss welded into the exhaust system. While this is being done, get the little fitting on the exhaust that I damaged re-welded.
8. Add catalytic converter to tail pipe.

Long term:

1. Duct radiator out of  bonnet top.
2. Come up with some way of making cockpit adjustable ARBs.