Slowing down

The car that is. This is the second update in as many weeks, I’ll have you know. This one is really about controlling the car and I’ve now finished running control cables. in this photo, if you look carefully, you can see the gearchange cable (along the top rail) and the clutch and throttle cables (snaking up from the floor). I’m adopting the sort of strategy that you see in proper race cars and trying to avoid drilling any holes in the chassis by the copious use of tie-wraps. The chassis is such a nice thing that it’d be a shame to start drilling holes in it.

This cable routing does mean that the clutch cable has to run across the floor of the car. Anthea suggested I might catch my feet on it but I pointed out that my feet were usually further forward than my knees, it being anatomically necessary.

All of these cables converge, obviously, at the engine and in order to provide the throttle cable something to connect to I’ve put the throttle bodies on the engine, artfully adorned here with some blue roll. One thing I’m going to have to put on the top of the throttle bodies is an airbox. The one for the J15 I cut about so that it pointed the other way. However, I believe in the Sabre it will fit on in the orientation that Mr Honda intended. As such I’ve ordered another one which should arrive soon.

Continuing the theme of controlling the car, it was time to put the brakes on. As such, of course, I’d need to put the corners in place so here’s the front right corner with the brakes all in place. As you can see I’ve held the brake disc in place with a couple of wheel nuts. The brake lines are all there though. What I haven’t done here is finalised the connection of the calipers to the uprights. This needs a spacer that I haven’t yet got from Andy. However, for now the caliper is in essentially the right position.

One problem with the Sabre is going to be sorting a decent wheel to go over this lot. I want to stick with 13″ wheels but getting the offset right and avoiding bashing into the calipers is going to be quite tricky.

That’s a little problem with the Sabre but one of the nice things is the little tabs that are welded in to the wishbones that give you and easy way of tie-wrapping the brake line to the wishbone. You can just about see a couple of them in the next photo.

I spent ages deciding how to get the brake line from the front to the rear of the car. The choice was really whether to keep it inside the chassis or go along the outside, just above the floor. I eventually decided that I’d never be happy with it outside the chassis and, even though it might look a bit uglier to a casual observer, I decided to run the lines down the inside. It does mean you get this slightly wibbly wobbly line but it should work OK.

At the back of the car I did kind of cheat slightly by mounting the tee piece on the earthing post, as in the next photo. However, it was convenient!

You may notice that unlike my usual practice, I’ve done all the brakes lines in flexi-hose rather than using Cunifer for the central bits. I’ve actually decided that it’s easier to do it this way and you do end up with fewer joints and fewer difficulties with mounting the solid pipes.

So, that’s the end of a weekend’s work. It doesn’t look much really but it’s surprising how long it takes mounting all those brakes and lines. However, something odd’s happened in that the chassis suddenly looks, at least to my twisted imagination, a bit more like a car. It occurs to me that after doing the handbrake then “all” I’ve got to do is the electrics and the engine ancillaries. Watch this space…