Too much to do

Since the last meeting at Brands I’ve had a collection of things to do. You will remember that I said I’d broken my finger in the first race at the weekend. So I did but it’s really rather minor. I did manage to work out a way of continuing to work on the car which involved modifying a pair of work gloves by cutting two of the fingers apart and gaffer taping them together. I was quite pleased with that, although the hospital have now unstrapped my finger and it’s floating free so these fetching gloves are now looking for a new home.

I’ve got a collection of things that I want to do to the car after Brands. One is to get it mapped to see if that’s where the power is disappearing to. So, I phoned up these people who are recommended by Andy Bates and got the car booked in there for a trip before our next track outing at Snetterton. Problem is, I really need a lambda boss in the exhaust system to do that. Andy forgot to weld one in for me when he built the exhaust system. So, I got a boss from my friend  Chris up at trigger wheels (he sells the bosses for a fraction of the price that other people do) and took my tail pipe up to Andy. The chaps there welded the lamdba boss on and it’s now back in the car.

As you can see, this car which started out a few weeks ago very clean is now starting to get all grimy. It’s really difficult keeping all this stuff clean under the onslaught of the elements and track marbles.

As the next meeting is at Snetterton, with its collection of fast straights then I’d realised a while ago that I probably ought to change the gearing for there. So, I took off the 52-tooth sprocket that I’d got in place and put a 50-tooth one on instead. However, in consulting my big spreadsheet I can see that really it’s still going to be too short and I probably need to get a smaller sprocket, 48 tooth I think, before Snetterton.

Of course, I did a lot of work making changing the sprockets dead easy. Even so, it took me ages to change the thing, probably because I didn’t really know what I was doing. Hopefully next time it’ll be easier. However, I think I might have to machine a couple of slightly shorter turnbuckle links to change it again. That shouldn’t take too long though.

One real problem at Brands was the oil temperature which was, to use the technical term, sky high. Atone point it got up to about 145° which isn’t clever. So, I clearly need to improve the oil cooling. There’s two obvious ways to do this. One is to get a bigger cooler and the other is to shove more air through it.

I thought about it for a while and decided to do both of them.

First up was to mount a new cooler which is done as in the photo on the left. This is a 19-row cooler as opposed to the 13-row I had before. However, my suspicion is that the biggest problem is that there’s insufficient air getting to the cooler and getting away from the back of it.

First up, then is to arrange for a much larger duct on the inlet. It seems as though the NACA duct I as using before just wasn’t up to it. So, I’ve decided to cut a much larger hole in the sidepod, which if nothing else gets rid of some overweight GRP, and to fabricate an aluminium duct. This will be along the lines of the ducts you see on many LMP style cars. First step, though, is to cut a big hole. So, which much girding of loins I set about the sidepod with a jigsaw and it ended up looking like the next photo.

You can see the remains of the front end of the NACA duct here, I always knew that wasn’t going to work if I’m honest. You’ll have to envisage what this is going to look like with a sort of aluminium box leading down to the cooler. And without all that GRP dust.

Finally, I became convinced that the rear end of the car is still too high up after Brands. As such I need to modify the rear suspension, again. Sigh… However, I haven’t quite figured out how to do that yet because I’m running out of places to put the top spring mounting. In fact, Adrian’s coming round later to talk to me about it. He doesn’t know yet, but he is…