Right then. The time has come to actually get this J15 finished. What would be nice is to get the car finished by the end of the year which would give me time to do some testing in the New Year. This picture is the car in its current state, sitting on the drive between the motorhome and the trailer while I used the entire garage for the Fury.
It was out here a while ago now because I was chasing a minor problem in the Fury about the engine oil pressure. (Eventually resolved by changing the oil. I suspect that I had a can of oil with the wrong viscosity marked on it.) All the same at one point I decided to swap the pressure relief valves between the two engines. Of course, when you do this all the oil falls out of the main pressure gallery and you have to make sure that oil is pumping around properly before actually starting the engine.
I still don’t know why but it took ages to get the J15’s engine back to working properly. In the meantime I’ve take the sump off twice, disconnected the cooler, and so on. Still, it’s all done now so I can press on.
I need to do some minor changes to how the bodywork fits. The initial reason for this is that I decided, after much though and loin-girding to cut off the return that was at the rear of the central tub which went over the seat belt mounting holes. You can see the absence of this part in the photo above. You can also see that there’s some rivets which are attaching a bit of aluminium which is under the GRP because it all went a bit wibbly-wobbly after I’d done this.
I’ve not got a socking great hole at the back of the seats! The plan is to make a small ally panel that will fit in here. I’ll do this is some way that permits easy access to the plugs in the engine which was another of the reasons why I cut up the original item.
The photo above shows the rear bodywork hinged backwards. I’ve decided to remove the hinge as it makes accessing the engine pretty tricky, even when it’s hinged right back. For example, it’d make changing the sprockets quite a pain. So, I’m aiming to change this with a couple of locating supports. In fact, I want to construct a support at the back of the chassis that reaches up and sits under the rear bodywork to provide some support there.
I think I’ve finally finished faffing around with the pedal box. I did discover that if I pushed really hard on the brake pedal then the top ofthe box flexed slightly so I’ve added another bit of square tube to the top of it. The photo above shows some of the genesis of this. I do have to do a bit of panelling here but as it’s all flat(ish) stuff that should be too hard.
OK, I am, right now. Going back to the garage with a laptop to watch the GP third practice. Wish me luck…