Although, to be fair, it’s still a long way away… I’ve managed to make a decent bit of progress over the long Easter weekend, the time albeit being marred by death of an old friend and being laid up with a bloody migraine. (I reckon I know what it is now, whenever I take a holiday I get cluster of migraines. Apparently that’s not uncommon.)
I’ve made the final four end moulds, there’s two or them above. That means that I can now make bodywork parts without having to use other parts as fences. Of course, I haven’t actually done this because I’m pressing on with the car proper now.
One part of that was to finalise the wiring. As I think I mentioned, I’d bought a new CBR1000RR loom so as to make everything fit nicely. (I couldn’t do this on the J15 because I had to have the air box in back to front.
Even with a new loom, there’s still a lot of it that’s surplus to requirements. Rather than leaving this in place to confuse me I’ve stripped it all out. That does mean I spent a while surround with bits of coloured PVC though. I made a little panel, which you can see on the right of the photo, on which I’ve mounted the relays and the regulator. I’ll also put the Power Commander on there when I find out where I’ve hidden it.
Once that was done, and all bound up again it looked a lot neater, as hopefully you can see in the photo. Best of all, though, was that as I’d used the same pinout for the dash wiring, and I’ve kept the J15 dash, I could connect up the dash and turn on the ignition. I can’t actually start the engine because there’s no oil in it and no coolant. However, apart from that everything looks good. The ECU is happy and it runs the fuel pump (or at least the relay clicks) and the engine management light goes out as it should. So, that bodes well for when the time does come to start the engine.
I wired up the water pump and checked that it ran; I’ve taken the relay out now, though, as I don’t want the thing running when there’s no coolant in there. Following the thought above, I then put the fuel tank in and wired up that pump. After connecting up the fuel lines I then turned on the ignition again and the pump ran, pissing fuel out all over the place. With some judicious juggling of hoses I fixed that it that’s now all done, barring the tank vent which I need to fit, if only because the tank keeps clunking because of the air in there heating up and cooling down.
That means that barring things like connecting up the coolant circuits and getting an exhaust system (hmmmm…) the engine’s all done. I could therefore move elsewhere. First candidate was the extinguisher system and after some faffing around I managed to find a place to put the extinguisher, as in the photo. I then made the inevitable collection of brackets on which to mount the nozzles. (I think I’ve mentioned before that car building is really about making brackets.)
This photo shows the nozzle that points at the engine, it’s attached to the header tank mount which means that there’s one bit of aluminium that’s doing two things which is always a pleasing thing to achieve.
So that’s another system done. The next thing to think about was the transmission. I’ve had the bits for this sitting around for ages so I put the bearings together, connected them to the diff and put the diff into the chassis. After some time spent musing about gear ratios I found a nice new sprocket and cut it in half as in the photo. I’ve decided to go back t0 split sprockets as changing things seems a bit tricky on the Sabre. I do now need to buy a new drive sprocket though. I haven’t actually fitted the chain yet; I’ve got a one but I want to be sure how many links I need in it.
As part of looking at the transmission I fitted the driveshafts. However, at this point I realised that the one set of fasteners that Andy doesn’t seem to have provided me with are the ones to bolt the outer driveshaft flanges to the stub axles.
Finally, to finish off a decent collection of steps forward, I fitted the logger into the car and checked that it seemed to be working. (It does.) I then started looking at where to put the instruments. Currently, though, that’s still held together with cardboard and gaffer tape.