Below are some pictures of the car in the state it’ll go into storage, this is the most assembled in one go I think it has been so far.

The KBS paint looks better in the pictures than in the flesh.

This’ll be the last post of the build for some time as we’ll be moving to Japan in a few weeks for a few years.  Hopefully during that time I’ll be able to work on the body design as well as a revised improved design for the chassis.

Here is the chassis frame back from being sand blasted and primed. Since these were taken it’s had a coat of KBS Rust Seal and I’m now in the process of building the whole thing back up so it can go in to storage, more pics soon.

In an attempt to reduce the dozen or so spam bots that register on the site each day I’ve implemented a Captcha plug-in, which should slow them down (stop them I wish!).

I’ve been through the registered users and deleted the ones that I think were spam, if I got it wrong and deleted your real registration, sorry please register again.

Hopefully if this works I can open up the security on the comments a bit more.

As usual its been too long since I updated the blog…

The news is essentially the build of the car is going to be put on hold for approximately 3 years.
This is due to me changing jobs and in a couple of months myself and family will be moving to Japan until about the end of 2014. Which as you’ll understand will make working on the car a bit difficult.

So in the mean time efforts are being dedicated to getting the chassis to a point where I can get it blasted and painted ready for storage. I’m nearly there with that and pictures will follow in time.

I intend to carry on the design process for the body of the car and other outstanding items during the time away. Also I’m thinking of revising the chassis design to come up with the MkII version and fix all the bits I’m not happy with on the current version. I’m not sure who’ll build the MkII, it certainly wont be me as the MkI chassis is 95% there so I am stuffed if I’ll start again. But it seems somehow a shame to keep all the design work bottled up in one car, I’ll need to think some more on what that process might look like though. I had been determined to keep the car design to myself until it was constructed and running and proven to be worth the effort, if I do that now though it’ll be at least 5 years away before it see the light of day (i.e. a long time), on the other hand I don’t want to waste peoples time building something that turns out to be horrible to drive. I guess I’ll need to think some more on this. Thoughts?

I”ve not been home much for the last couple of months, hence not much has been done on the car. In actual fact I’m away on business again now, so still no work on the car.
However I did get some time at home since the last post and here’s where its at…
Firstly I sourced from a local wreckers a handbrake from a Toyota Land Cruiser of all things, below shows it installed, due to limited floor space in the car it needed to be installed vertically, the cable retention bracket for the floor is yet to be done.

This was pretty much the last thing that I could think of – could be bothered to source before stripping the car for final welding and painting. I’m in no doubt I’ve forgotten to weld something on I should, but I needed to draw a line somewhere and this was it.

So here it is partially dismantled…

And here it is back on the rotisserie for welding…

It’s now of of the rotisserie and the lifting brackets have been cut off, so now I’m using the engine crane to pick it up and rotating the thing.

On one of my trips this year I had time enough to get to Barber Motorsports park in Birmingham, Alabama. Where there was a legends of motorsport event happening, one of the many cars there for the weekend was the one below an Argo JM16 which I really like looking at so post it for no reason other than that.

No progress to report as such, but used a Gigapan Epic 100 to take the image below.
This is a link to the image on the Gigapan.org website and the full screen version.
This image is hundreds of regular pictures stitched together to form a 720 mega pixel image. So you can zoom in to a tiny level of detail.

By the way the welding on the sheet metal is just tacking it there so it looks a bit tacky at the moment.

Time for another monthly update.  The tubes to which the side boxes on the car will be riveted – bolted are now all in place.

The first pic show what I had to do to give something to rivet to at the rear, again where I’d not put the cross brace in properly to the CAD model.

The next picture shows the strips to which the bulkheads in the boxes will bolt, with 4mm bolts, I’ve decided  to bolt where possible rather than use blind rivets everywhere.

Another view of the same thing.  More welding to be done, once the frame is stripped again.

Next is the shifter mechanism, its a cable design as any sort of solid rod mechanism looked impossible to fit.  It uses to 80 series Hi Lex cables sourced through Flexible Drive Agencies.  The aim was to eliminate as many levers and linkages as possible from the mechanism.  The drop to the cable on the floor was required due to space limitations but the fore – aft cable has none in at all, it simply loops around the passenger footwell to go to the back of the car.  All the levers and shafts rotate on miniature ball races, that kind found in RC model cars for example, which are nice, sealed and cheap.  The spherical bearings on the cable and rods are THK units.

At the gearbox end its kept as simple as possible too, the fore aft cable loops around again for a direct push on the selector shaft and the cross action cable acts onto a lever.  Its is possible for it to work directly like this as the cables have swivels built into them (under the boot near the fixed end).

The mechanism appears to work pretty well at a standstill hopefully it work when the car is moving.

A couple of other things I forgot to put in the previous post.

There is a third baffle in the fuel tank close to the fuel pump end, this serves to form a surge tank. Controlling the flow of fuel into this area of the tank are two of these:

Which are check valves again from Fuel Safe.  By the way if you do not live in the USA buying parts from Fuel Safe is a royal pain, but I got there in the end.

The fuel tank itself holds 50 litres which should be enough.  The tank vents through a roll over valve again from fuel safe and all the fittings will go in through the plate to which the fuel pump will be attached.

Once the fuel tank was complete i could then do the steel work to hold it in place in the pictures in the previous post you can see the angle attached to the floor and the two uprights that are part of this.

Also combined at least partly with this is the bracketing which the battery will sit in.

A long time since I’ve updated the blog. End the end of last year I was able to get quite a lot of laser cutting done, a mixture of steel and aluminium parts for various parts of the car.

Here’s the parts currently waiting to be fitted to the car…

Some of the parts cut were for the fuel tank, which took a few steps to finish, after being cut I then had them folded and then took them to a another guy who welded it all together for me.

Here’s the finished tank sitting in its final location in the car…

The openings in the top are from left to right in the picture, first the fuel inlet, this uses a Fuel Safe filler valve, this has a one way valve as part of it, which is good in case of an accident…

Then in the middle is the opening for the VDO fuel gauge sender and on the right is the opening for the fuel pump.  Internal to the tank are stiffeners – baffle plates that line up with the two vertical tubes you can see which will have to straps bolted through to hold the tank in place.  The tank itself will supported in rubber strip.

The frame at this part of the tank is sheeted in steel essentially as it was the most straight forward to complete the process, I determined to plug the weld the sheet to the frame, it soon became apparent that the sheet would need to be clamp to the frame and tacked in place to hold the parts close enough together to plug weld properly.

This side show the opening for the fuel filler cap…

At the rear where the sheet meets the roll tube there is clearly some work to do to attach it cleanly.  The root of the issue here is that the top left diagonal in the picture I centred on the roll tube rather than keeping it in line with the other tubes.  The causes another issue later on…

Other parts from the laser cutting enabled the exhaust system to be basically finished, the mufflers are from a late model Holden Commodore V8, which are apparently very good, but frankly the main design considerations are that it is neat tidy and passes registration.

The support brackets, this is all bolted to the engine and transmission so there no need flor flex or rubber joints in the system as it’ll all move together with the engine.

Back to the sheet metal, I want to structurally rivet and bolt the 10″ wide aluminium boxes to the sides of the car but I don’t want to drill holes in parts of the frame that I can see from the stress analysis are the most highly stressed parts of the car.  So I’ve decide to attach additional rails to the side of the car and then those can be riveted to.

Here’s the left hand side of the car…

Here again where I did not follow the CAD model with the top rear diagonal caused issues again so that the new rail can fit neatly against the top rail of the car as shown below…

The next job done has been to fit the windscreen wiper and motor mount…

I think I’ve managed to work it so the car only needs one wiper blade.

Also done is the mounting the tabs for the inboard ends of the brake lines, which are Corvette Z06 Goodridge parts.

And that’s it for the moment hopefully more updates soon.

I’ve been through the registered users on the site and deleted out what I thought were the spammer logins, please register again if I’ve got inadvertently deleted any real person as I may have got a few of those by mistake.

A real update on the car will be soon…