December 15, 2020.

A job done some time ago but not shown, was to make bump stops for the suspension units. As supplied they did not come with these and even if they had of done they would have been the wrong length I suspect.

Shown is a rear unit fitted, these were shorter than the front as the rears operate at a higher rate than the front (they are more upright). So more damper movement is used through the full range of suspension travel.

There’s a number of reasons to limit the suspension travel, firstly it keeps the suspension travel inside the parameters it was designed to, secondly without the stops its possible the suspension could move to the point of the chassis hitting the road which is not generally a good idea.

The stops were made from polyurethane rod 40mm in diameter, whether or these are the correct stiffness for the function is a guess at this stage.

Beyond the details, overall this is how the car sat in the garage a week or two ago…

After a stuff with the first shop I ordered it from, I finally got the battery for the car, here its seen with the main circuit breakers mounted to it.

The battery is smaller than the tray I’d designed to take the battery, so a 3mm aluminium plate was cut for it to sit on and an L shaped spacer was also cut from polycarbonate to hold it in the corner of the tray. The whole thing will be held down by a clamp and have a FRP cover over the top to protect it, hopefully this will look as per below when done, except the cover will not be transparent 😉

With the basics of the battery in place and the location for the connection panel to the engine fixed, next was to fix the location of the fuse / relay box for the engine control. A water proof case was chosen to be the box, the most logical place for it to fit was on the floor as shown in the picture. Access to once the bodywork is in place will need consideration when doing the body, but no other location made sense.

The wiring harnesses as supplied by diyautotune have wires in for all of the two main connectors to the ecu. Many of these were not currently needed, so the first job was to separate out the required wiring by function and group them together as needed to fit the plug layout on the connection panel.

When starting to do the panel connectors I made a number of mistakes, so stopped.  I’d previously started a wiring diagram for the engine systems but not gone down to the connector level, so I decided to get that done to try and avoid further cock-ups.

This is where the wiring diagram is at, at the moment, I think it covers everything need to run the engine, the rest of the systems for the car will be treated essentially as separate to those needed to make it move. 

Ignore the colours, they’re mostly nonsense, some of the fuse sizes are a bit of a guess

Having got this sorted out I could do instructions for each connector, so I should stop getting them wrong. The connector schedule typically look like this:

I’ve labels on the plug side wires so having a fist full of green is not so much of an issue.

The connectors have the receptacle numbers on them, though they’re so small I need to take a photo to make sure I’m going to the correct place.

Eventually the panel looked like this…

Hopefully most of the wires are in the correct holes, there’s nearly 100 wires terminated into these connectors I need to buy a few more blanking plugs to fill the few remaining unused holes and strap the cabling down on the input side.

Aside from the electrics, I’ve printed to the two molds to be used for the remaining parts of the firewall, these need to be done before the cooling system is completed, as there will not be access to do with the cooling pipes in place.

The final parts will be in glass fibre and covered in Nomex / heat sheild material. So surface finish on the GRP parts is not that important. Hopefully this method of making GRP parts will work decently as if it does I will used it for future bits.