First time driving.

Its got to move.

Looking back at my last post for the 21st of February, it seem such a long time ago. At the end of February thing got into a real rush to get the car mobile under its own power. We moved house on the 13th of March so that was a drop dead date that needed to be met. The rush was due to the driveway at the old house being a steep and narrow nightmare with no room to turn around a truck / trailer at the bottom. So the car first trip would be up this drive and there’d be awkward consequences if it didn’t make it in one go.

Step one was to assemble as much of the car as possible…

At this point I had a throttle cable but no throttle pedal, this was made from some steel tube and sheet.

Here it is installed.

The bracket to hold the cable is glued onto the steel tube with the cyanoacrylate adhesive used to bond the floor and other panels on so it’ll never come off. the other 2 holes in it are to hold the cover that’ll be made at some point. The pedal arrangement is not finished, but this was functional enough.

At the other end the prototype 3D printed throttle pulley would have to suffice, and a bracket was made to hold the cable in place.

It won’t run!

Now with a functioning throttle and connected and filled cooling system the car stubbornly refuse to run for more than a few seconds. Eventually after much stuffing about I realized it was simply not getting enough fuel now that the cooling system was connected and the water pump had something to work against. Using the auto tune function in Tuner Studio the fueling was adjusted to at least get a reliable tick over happening. But not until I’d tried a whole bunch of incorrect ideas for the issue first.

Up the hill.

With the exhaust system using OEM Commodore mufflers the car is remarkably quiet. So much so that when I made my first attempt at the hill no one else in the house noticed. Thankfully it got up the hill ok and here it is after its first official drive.

Moving.

The next task was to get it (along with the rest of our stuff) to the new house. with the width of the car it won’t fit on most car trailers that you can hire. so with some great help from a fellow Sports Car Builders Club of Western Australia member. The car was picked up and put on the back of his flat bed truck.

Whilst picking it up by the roll frame should be no problem at all, just seeing it picked up for the first time was a bit stressful. It also got to serve as an impromptu center of gravity test. Which looks to be about where I hoped it’d end up.

Onward…

After getting installed at the new house, I’ve been able to start making progress on the car again.

first the hand / emergency / parking brake (whatever you call it) was connected up the ugly bracket below holds the 3 cables in place, these all connect to an aluminium piece to transfer the loads between the cables (sorry no picture of that) and its bolted to the floor at the rear of the car.

Whilst doing this I changed the rear springs for stiffer units. I’d sourced 2 cooling fans, I decided to go for genuine SPAL units as everything I found online stated the cheaper knock offs were rubbish.

At 12″ diameter these were the largest that would fit on the radiators I have. The next exercise was to fit them to the car…

CNC Back in action.

But before that could happen the MPCNC needed to be fixed and back in action, long term I’d be much better off having this going to cut parts out for me than doing it by hand. so getting that working became the focus.

Here it is doing its first part in its rebuilt state…

And with the lights turned off!

The new machine design is a great improvement and now after more testing and tweaking I can cut parts out approximately 4.5 times faster than before, partly this is the machine and partly this is me understanding the machine better with experience.

Radiator fan assembly

The final design for the fan assembly is 3mm aluminium plates hold the fan in place on the radiator.

This leaves a approx. 20mm gap between the face of fan and the back of the radiator, ideally if I could have got it flush against the back of the radiator I would have left it at that. But the bolts attaching the fan to the brackets were not going to allow that. So a shroud needed to be made to control the air flow.

Here it is done on the MPCNC.

This took a bit over 2 hours to cut out, it’s approx. 380mm square. Folded up and attached to the fan it looks like this.

In general I don’t like the idea of this type of shroud, most of the time the fan is going to be off, so the shroud is an unnecessary blockage forcing the air to go through the fan opening. In this case as the fan covers such a large part of the radiator I don’t think that this is going to be an issue. Here it is attached (trialt fit) o the car.

With the left hand side done I’ll machine another shroud of right hand side. In theory these parts could have been made by hand, but not by me they couldn’t.