It’d be nice to get going, but of course I need to wait for things to be manufactured. In the meantime I’ve been getting the Fury ready for its next outing, and starting to organise myself for the Spectre build.
Apart from starting to make a big list of things to buy, do and design, I started out with clearing out the garage. I’m going to have to try and build the car with the Fury tucked in the corner of the garage, unless I can find some other convenient way of storing the Fury. In the meantime, I know this will work as I originally built the Fury while the Dax was still in the garage, and I think that was wider than the Fury is, even though it was a se7en-like car.
So, I had a huge tidy-up in the garage, chucked loads of stuff away, put loads of stuff in the shed and moved some of the shelving units out of the garage and into the shed.
And then I re-painted the floor! I’ve been threatening to do this for a couple of years but I’ve finally got around to it. The problem is, the only real way to do it is to shift all the stuff into one half of the garage and paint the other half. When that’s done you shift everything back over and paint the other bit. The photo above is half way through the process…
With that done I could do a few things. As part of the Spectre build I keep thinking about things I’d like to do differently this time. One of these is about anti-roll bars. regular readers will know that I made front and rear bars for the Fury. However, I’ve discovered that the ARBs that are made for the Caterham are actually pretty well made and probably useable on other chassis. In fact, Josh Smith’s Phoenix had a Caterham ARB added to it which seems to be evidence that it will work.
So, I bought a bar from the Caterham parts website, as in the photo here. This is a ½” bar, and they do a slightly thicker one as well.
When I get the chassis, which Jeremy reckons will be shortly after the next race meeting at Mallory Park, I can see if there’s any way to sensibly use this bar, at both the front and rear of the car. Jeremy is a bit askance at me wanting to fit bars, but experience has shown that, if nothing else, they’re incredibly useful for setting the car up. Of course, it rather depends on where the car’s roll axis is. When I get the chassis I shall measure everything as accurately as I can in order to put all the dimensions into SusProg3D so that I can plot the suspension’s movement properly.
Just about the only scrappie part I’ll have on the new car, I hope, is the rear hubs. Essentially, there’s no reason to buy new ones. Here’s the complete front uprights from a 1998 Ford Fiesta that I bought from a breaker. Rusty, as you can see…
The older version of Jeremy’s Spectre design uses this complete upright, only positioned upside-down. The version I’m 
getting uses custom uprights that Jeremy has designed, as shown here.
This upright uses just the hub from the Fiesta upright (or “hub carrier” as Ford call it) so I needed to get the hubs out of the breaker’s uprights.
That’s easier said than done, it turns out. The hubs are essentially pressed into the bearings in the standard uprights. As such, the manual says that ideally they should be pressed out. So, I did so.
I supported the upright using a couple of lengths of M10 studding and by resting the steering arm on my bench vice, as shown in the photo here.
I then pressed out the hub using my preferred press tool, otherwise known as my favourite big hammer. Yes folks, I really do have a favourite hammer! What’s more, it’s a proper engineering ball pein hammer and not the workworking abortions that several friends insist on using.
When treated to a few serious whacks, the hubs come out quite easily. I must admit that I’m not totally happy about this, as it means that if I need to take the hubs off to change the wheel studs, for example, then I’ll have to take the suspension apart to the point that I can get the upright on a bench so that I’m able to use a press tool on it. If nothing else, that means I’ll have to be very careful about making sure that the studs in the hubs are definitely the length that I want before putting the uprights together.
Jeremy tells me that the new uprights will come with bearings, and I guess they’ll be the Fiesta bearings. One thing I don’t quite know how to do is how to separate the bearing completely from the hub. A bit of the bearing, as it promises in the manual, remains on the hub as can be seen in this photo. The manual just says to remove this using a puller. Of course, the puller you’d need would have to fit into a gap that must be at least 1mm wide. I may have to use a couple of screwdrivers… Doubtless reassembly is the reverse of disassembly…
At least I’m doing something. As well as these uprights I also bought the driveshafts from the poor unfortunate Fiesta that donated the uprights. I wanted to see what the joints were like, and to see what the shafts themselves were like. I did wonder if I could reuse the CV joints but they don’t look entirely perfect. Consequently, what I’ll probably do is buy a couple of new driveshafts and use the breaker ones as exchange parts. That’ll get me the joints and I can then get driveshafts of the length I need from the chap that supplied the ones I use on the Fury. Interestingly, the inner joints on the Fiesta driveshafts are the tripode variety, with a Lobro joint used for the outer one; presumably because the outer joint has to articulate more on the (steering) front wheels of the Fiesta.
To remove the last bit of bearing, the inner ballrace, either means using an incredibly smilm-bladed and hard chisel, which may or may not break when you try to ‘insert’ it between the hub and the race, or do what I did last time, use one of the super-thin cutting discs in a 4.5 inch grinder to cut the ballrace and go very slowly and carefully! The other thing to try would be to heat the ballrace with an oxy welding torch, as the small, localised flame would be nice and easily directed onto the race itself and not the hub. This would (hopefully) make the race expand faster than the hub and make it easier to shift.
Hmm, interesting, thanks. One of the chaps that I race against says I just need a “knife edge puller”, and he’s taking his to Mallory for me to play with. I shall see if this works. I’d certainly wondered about cutting it off, you can usually cut such things most of the way through and then use a chisel to break the last bit. It’s all a bit final though. 🙂
Tim