Look at that. I bet you wish you’d got your own twinkly bar stool for Christmas too, don’t you? For some time I’ve wanted one of these in the garage and Anthea bought me one for Christmas, which I think came from that purveyor of fine quality garage items known as Argos.
You may well think I’m completely batty but there is method in my madness. Since I got the TIG welder (see the next photo of the welder tower) I’ve wanted a tall seat that meant I could sit at the bench, with two hands able to do TIGgy things and one foot able to press the TIG foot pedal up and down. The stool is ideal for this, if a trifle ostentatious. Not, mind you, that I’ve done any TIGging recently.
To be honest, I’ve not really done that much over the holiday period.
One thing that I wanted to do over the winter period—a list of things that got rather truncated due to the blown engine—was to make a decent airbox for the engine. I’ve never been happy with the “turn the Honda airbox round and blow in the top rather than the bottom” approach and having spent a while looking at the airbox on the Radical that we shared a Birkett team with last October I think it’s worth having a go at making one completely from scratch. (Although, I might start with the flange on the bottom of the Honda airbox as that fits the throttle bodies nicely and has a couple of nice sealing gaskets in it.)
To that end, I put the engine back in the chassis (it’s a lot easier to manoeuvre without the rest of the stuff that’s on the garage floor). What I have to do now is decide how I’m going to make the airbox. The two possibilities are making a mould using expanding foam for a buck or making the whole thing out of aluminium. At the moment I’m unsure which would be better. It’s actually got a couple of tricky bits to it as I need to arrange for a filter and I also need to position the secondary injectors above the inlet trumpets somehow. Of course, whether this would actually work better than the modified standard airbox is slightly open to doubt. For example, the secondary injectors are mounted on the outside of the standard box and the air turns through 90° as it goes past them. In the idea I’ve been thinking about, the air would flow directly past the injectors on its way straight into the inlet trumpets. As such, I’d like to retain the existing airbox so I can do a back-to-back test on a rolling road.
With the engine in this position, I took the chance to do a couple of modifications that needed doing to the engine mounting frame by moving one of the mounting lugs and slightly repositioning the stay for the gearchange cable outer. Mind you, I really wish I could come up with a decent way to make a gearchange that didn’t need a push-pull cable. I think they’re really horrible things…