Bar the shouting

It’s getting perilously close to the next race but barring a bit of shouting, the car’s now done. I wonder if it will work properly?

I took it up to Andy’s last week and he modified the old exhaust system to fit to the new engine. I think it’s ended up being a bit of a bodge, to be honest, but with luck it will work well. I do keep wondering if I should have had a complete new system built.

Still, this did mean that I could run the engine and at the weekend I did so for long enough so as to get the engine up to temperature and the fan cycling on and off. That also allowed me to work out which fan controller line to use. To make life exciting the CBR1000RR08 ECU drives two fans which come on sequentially. I worked out what order these came on in and used the higher temperature one (on account of the fact that I’m not really planning on the radiator fan coming on all that often) to drive the fan relay.

The other thing I got from Andy was the above clutch cable. This is the length that I measured it ought to be and a decent quality cable with swaged on ends. The issue is that I needed to make a device to restrain the outer at the pedal end. This I did and here it is bolted into the chassis hanging onto the clutch cable outer. You can see the inner going off to connect to the pedal.

First indications are that this works pretty well, although time will tell. I’ve made a collection of attachment points on the clutch pedal so with luck I’ll be able to adjust the pedal ratio should it be be needed. At the moment I’m quite pleased with this, I just hope it works when on circuit. As you can tell, though, I’ve had to chop a bit of a hole in some of the panelling around the pedal box. I’ll have to bung the hole up a bit, but for now it will do.

I’ve added a load of new wrapping around the new exhaust, this time using some better quality stuff, I hope, than that which I used before which just fell to bits if you touched it. First indications are that this stuff, bought from Merlin Motorsport, is rather better. If nothing else it was nothing like so uncomfortable to work with; with the previous stuff I think I ended up with millions of bits of glass fibre stabbed into my skin which took ages to come out.

I done a whole bunch of other small things and started putting panels back, and so on, so that the car looks like, err, a car again. Along the way I’ve replaced the brake fluid reservoir for one that doesn’t have the clutch outlet sticking out of it. As a consequence I’ve replaced the brake fluid and bled the brakes again. I’ve also spent ages re-aligning the suspension; you may remember that an age ago I made some new suspension parts.

In fact, pretty much all I’ve got to do before taking the car on track is to do a big bolt check and finish putting the bodywork back on. Oh, and putting some fuel in would probably be a good idea…

Phew…