You may remember that I’ve all sorts of problems bleeding the J15’s brakes. Well, I finally decided that the pedal box I was using was designed incredibly poorly and had no chance of ever working properly. The only way to bleed the brakes would have been to take the master cylinders out and somehow arrange for them to be horizontal. Of course, in that position you can’t really pump on the pedal to get the air out. Although, to be fair, other techniques such as reverse bleeding are possible. However, getting the master cylinders horizontal was always going to be the core issue.
Category: steering
Brake, turn in and…
I’ve been pressing on, although I don’t seem to be making sufficient progress to make me feel comfortable. Still, some things are happening. I have, though, managed to completely finish the hydraulic side of the braking.
So, here’s a nice shiny picture of the final arrangement of the master cylinders, lurking at the bottom of the footwell.
Four wheels on my wagon
It’d be nice to be able to move the car around in a while, so having put the rear suspension together I set about the front suspension.
Well, that’s annoying…
I ordered a set of taps from RDG Tools and tapped one of the brake mounting blocks to M10x1.5 for the mounting bolts through the calipers. The end result is shown in the photo here. I’ll make some spacers of the proper size, and get the correct length bolts, rather than using stacks of washers. However, it seems to fit fine which is good.
And stitching her back together again…
As good as my word, I fixed the central tub back together again. The photo here is of one side of the re-attached bodywork. Anthea commented that it actually looks quite good, and it could even be left like this. I don’t actually think that’s the case as when I paint the rest of the bodywork it’s bound to degrade.
And for my next trick…
… I will saw this attractive young woman in half. Well, I will in a minute but I need to explain why first.
The thing is, I wanted to check the steering rather more carefully, and perhaps change the routing of the column a soupçon. In order to do that, I needed to check how it fitted under the bodywork. The problem is, I had to do lots of faffing around to get the central portion to fit over the cage; for example to allow the front hoops of the cage to stick through the bodywork, and also to allow the steering column to poke through the front of the central bodywork section. You can see both of these in the photo on the right.
Just take a seat, will you?
A thing I’ve been concerned about for a while is whether the seat belt mountings are OK for use with the HANS device, which requires that the angle of dangle of the belts between the HANS and the mountings is within 20° of horizontal. So, I installed a seat (that is, the old blanket that I use for such things) and took a video of myself sitting down in the seat in various ways. The photo on the right is an image capture from this video, which I made with the video camera I inherited off my Dad.
Two car Tim
There’s quite a lot of good photos around of the race at Snetterton. The one shown here was taken by Derek Jones’ Dad at Russell chicane. That’s Tony just behind me, thankfully.
Stand upright at the front!
I’ve finally got the front uprights through from Jeremy, who hadn’t received them from his suppliers for ages. Here’s a photo of one of them, as you can see it’s jolly shiny!
Oddly, I seem to have two discs too, which I didn’t realise that Jeremy was going to supply. They’re not the size that I’m going to use, and have already bought, but I might be able to press them into use as spares, I suppose.
Controls
I think I might have resolved the pedal box conundrum. On the Fury I’ve got a pedal box that came from OBP which works pretty well. I had spoken to them about their top-hung pedal box but given up because it was too tall. Adrian mentioned in passing that they did a bottom hinged one with the master cylinders pointing back to the driver. After looking at their website they do indeed do so, so I’ve ordered one! This is the photo pinched from their website here.