Long time no see

So, you might well wonder where I’ve been. The answer is, beavering away but not finding the time to talk about it due to all the other non-car work that’s going on. So, this is kind of a catch up post where I’ll probably spend too little time really telling you all the stuff that you’re desperate to know about.

First up is the dash. As you may remember, I was debating how to do it and I did fit the original J15 dash panel. However, after much faffing about I decided that I just didn’t like it. So, I was looking for fit a different one. After the last post a number of readers suggested Adel clamps as things to fit devices to tubes without actually drilling a hole in the tube. I did look these and essentially they are just clever friction devices that clamp around a tube. I got to thinking that I could achive much the same effect with, wait for it, tie-wraps. After some experimentation it actually works rather well. And, as a consequence, in the photo above you can see the new dash panel which is just clamped into position onto the tubing where the latter is made slightly bungy by wrapping some tape around it. You can see the back of the new dash panel in the second photo here.

Note that I’m using a boring old mechanical master switch, unlike some of the electronic bits of trickery that have appeared on some RGB cars. I’m of the view  that boring is best, really.

I was talking, if you’re still awake, about replacing the mechanical water pump  with an electric one. I decided to do this and here is the block blanked off where the original water pump was fitted. This is one of Andy’s little devices that works well except that you have to spend a hour working out exactly how it mounts. Now I’ve done so it looks fine. I’ll be using a Davies Craig water pump and I’ll reroute most of the pipework as a consequence. However, I will be retaining the thermostat which many people delete. My reasoning is that without the thermostat the cooling system is working entirely open-loop which is basically just bad control logic. One of the things I really enjoyed as an undergraduate engineer was control systems (although I understood what it was about only dimly) and the efficacy of closed loop control systems has been with me since. Pity about the open-loop CBR1000RR ECU really…

With that I get to the cause of the big silence really. As you might have heard me say, I’m very unimpressed by the standard Sabre bodywork. This is from a whole collection of points of view including aerodynamic efficiency, complexity of design and aesthetics. (Some people like it, I think it’s absolutely hideous.) For some time now I’ve been meaning to get more into bodywork and I’ve finally decided, in cahoots with Adrian and Tom, to get on an try something. The intention is to make some bodywork that’s essentially as simple as possible but which has a chance of working from an aerodynamic point of view. So, I’ve been purchasing a prodigious quantity of timber from the local Homebase store and adding to that a lot of screws, nails, a large quantity of 3mm MDF and a quite alarming amount of hot glue. Much of  the latter has burnt me in various places…

The reason for the thin MDF is that you can bend it in some quite sinuous curves, albeit only in a single direction. You can see some of the curves in this photo of the front of the buck that’s now in progress. The compound curve that’s at the rear of  the nose cover is done with polyurethane foam blocks, cut from a larger block bought from easycomposites. Thus cuts and sands nicely although in the process it generates a quite prodigious quantity of dust which gets everywhere.

Obviously, there’s a bit of a problem with the nose section in that there’s a socking great ARB sticking through it. In the long run, it’d be nicer to re-engineer this so it isn’t so obvious (I keep musing about belleville washers but I can’t see how to make it work.) In the meantime, we’ll have to cover this somehow. Here I keep thinking about P51 Mustangs but you might not understand that…

The end is in sight for finishing the basic structure of the buck, at which point filling and rubbing will commence. In order to prototype that we’ve just made what looks for all the work like a meat loaf but it actually has all the surfaces we’ve got in the buck incorporated into it: filler, exposed foam, filled-over foam, MDF, MDF rubbed down so it’s gone all fluffy, exposed screws and filled-over screws. The intention here is to try covering it with one of the new thixotropic moulding undercoats that are now available to see how much in the way of inadequacies that can disguise. In fact, as I write the second coat of that is going off in the garage. I’ve got the door open as the remains of the last lot went staggeringly exothermic in the mixing pot after we’d finished. I don’t really want to burn the house down.

The end intention of all this is to make some bodywork using resin infusion. Whether that works out or not is anyone’s guess…