Sunday afternoon drive

One thing I wanted to do was to improve the ducting on the inlet side of the radiator. I know from past experience that paying attention to this reaps huge benefit with respect to the cooling efficiency. First step was to bond some bits of Correx into the bonnet to constrain things slightly. If you’re not familiar with it, Correx is corrugated plastic sheet, most commonly seen as estate agent’s sign boards.

That doesn’t connect up close enough to the radiator though, so I made a couple of “ears” for the radiator, like the one in the next photo. Hopefully, this’ll at least get air into the radiator. I really need to test the car to find out though. Problem is, with it being a bit parky outside it isn’t a great test.

After a week spent nervously drumming my fingers on the table, I had a phone call from Jonathan, who was making the driveshafts, to say that they were ready. So, not wanting to commit them to the uncertain ministrations of the postal services, I nipped up to South Yorkshire very early in the morning and picked them up. Here they are, next to the previous ones on the workbench. You can probably see that they’re just a smidgeon (a technical term, that) shorter than the old ones were.

I’m trying hard not to think how much this faux pas has cost me. Not being too successful at the moment though.  Once I had these I re-installed the complete rear suspension. Along the way I installed the joints with the proper CV and Tripode greases that I’d located. (OK, Jonathan told me about them.) The latter stuff is the rather iridescent colour shown on the photo here.

Once all that was together it looked much the same as it did before; but, it didn’t come to a grinding halt at 80% bump which was a great relief. What’s more, I don’t think the tripodes are going to fall out of the cups on the diff either. (The shafts are located firmly in the outer CV joints which are of the Lobro style. The plunge movement required is provided by the tripodes moving in three big grooves in the inner bearing cup.)

One minor issue was that the hub nuts, when tightened up, move to a position where the built in nut-staking mechanism can’t be used as it’s past the staking groove in the stub axle. I got around this by maching a couple of thick thrust washers, like the one in the photo. I got rather a lot of chatter while parting this, hence the not totally smooth top surface, Hopefully it won’t be too big a deal. Now I just need to torque up the hub nuts to the final torque, which will be done by standing at the right point on a breaker bar, and staking the nuts in position.

You may remember a while ago I put a NACA duct in the sidepod to supply air to the oil cooler. To, hopefully, make sure this does its job I put a bit of ducting in to point straight at the cooler. As you can see, it has to go around a rather inconveniently placed bit of chassis.

The weird lumpy bits of GRP are a consequence of the extension I had to make to the sidepod. The lumps are where the rivets were in the strips of aluminium I originally used (and in fact wish were still there) to initially extend the sidepod.

And that, barring a million little things still to do and many, many, improvements that I’ve been hatching, is just about it. I pushed the car out so as to turn it round so that I can put it on the trailer when the time comes. While out, I took a few photos of it. Yes, I know, the front of the roll cage is too high but I’ve got a plan to fix that. Apart from that, I reckon it looks pretty good. If I had the time and the inclination, I’d spray the roll cage black, I might still do so in fact.

Inevitably, the to-do list is not empty though. At least the jobs get smaller overall: Pre test: Torque and stake hub nuts. Pre race: Think about adding additional triangulation to the engine compartment. Think about adding some yellow. Get a lambda boss welded into the exhaust system. While this is being done, get the little fitting on the exhaust that I damaged re-welded. Add catalytic converter to tail pipe. Long term: Get the car on a rolling road. Consider ducting radiator out of  bonnet top. This depends on how well it cools and how hot my feet get. Come up with some way of making cockpit adjustable ARBs. Or, possibly, make some skinnier ARBs. Make some dive-planes Make a tonneau cover. Put some trim around the hole in the sidepod from whence the exhaust tailpipe emerges.