Lagged

So, I needed to fix the Fury. That meant I needed to make a new wishbone and here it is sitting in the jig. The problem was that in thinking about the design of the wishbone then at one point I must have lost my presence of mind.

I decided, you see, to lose the little legs on the right hand (inner, or proximal as Bob would have it) end of the wishbone by putting the cross-piece closer to the end. After all, I reasoned, there wasn’t any chassis in the way of it. What’s more, as that was the bit that had failed then surely it’d be better to not have that leg flexing away?

So, I welded it all together and discovered that although there indeed wasn’t any chassis in the way of it, that the inner CV joint on the drive shaft really wanted to be in the same bit of space as that crosspiece. So, even though by this time I’d painted the wishbone I cut the mis-located crosspiece out and welded another bit in instead.

Still, that’s wasn’t too much of a pain. After the re-re-making I stuck a load of rod-ends in the new wishbone and bolted the suspension all together. At least the Fury now sat on its wheels straightish, unlike what it had done a week ago.

The biggest issue now was that I needed to realign everything. I must admit that I’m getting to hate this as it’s a tedious pain in the bum. Well, the knees actually. All the same it needed to be done. In order to do this I get Tim out of the shed, as you can see here.

Tim, you see, is 100kg of sand, thankfully represented as 4 25kg bags, that I use as, errr, Tim. This way I have a fighting chance of sitting in the car and squinting under the car to check the ride-height.

The really wierd thing about all this is that after checking everything I didn’t have to change the toe settings on the left rear at all. That is, although I’d just whacked the rod ends on then I’d miraculously got them in the right position. I suppose by the time you’ve done this a few hundred times, and it feels like that, then the probability of at some point getting it right has to get at least a bit closer to 1. But then, the same comment applies to winning the RGB tyre-draw and I’ve still never won that even after 6 years of trying.

So, the Fury was now all sorted for its trip to the last RGB meeting of the season at sunny Oulton Park. I wonder how it’s going to go.

But, you ask querulously, what’s happening with the J15? Well, essentially nothing although I could now do a couple of things. One of the problems with building cars is that when there’s a lot of things to do, which there always is, it’s hard to work out which one to do. My view is that anything’s good enough. That is, you don’t have to fuss about doing the right one. This is by way of explaining the apparent irrelevance of wrapping the exhaust headers, as in the photo.

I’ve done this because I’m a bit wary about how hot it’s going to get behind me in this car because of the proximity of the engine and the headers in particular. I’m also a bit concerned that that battery is going to get too hot as well. So, I’ve decided to wrap the headers, as here, at least in the first bit of their travel. I’ve tried not to overdo it, as that can have the unfortunately result of dumping more heat into the (GRP) sidepod which might not be good. When I get the car running I’ll check the sidepod very carefully for this. I might end up doing as I did on the Fury: cutting a socking great hole in it!