Tiger Tiger Burning Bright

If I might quote William Blake, ” Tiger, Tiger burning bright, In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry.”   Although I guess Blake didn’t have to work on his focus like I clearly need too in the pic right, although given that age’s penchant for laudenam, things might have been a bit fuzzy for him too

Anyway, I’m waxing lyrical, because the more observant of you may have noticed that this particular Sabre tooth tiger is attached to a chunk of red bodywork.  Which is great news.  Andy dropped it over one evening last week, and I arrived home to find  the components parts of an AB Performance Sabre sitting shining nicely in the sunlight on my driveway.  It now sitting in the tall grass, looking menacing, and indeed it does have a fearful symmetry.   It’s also incredibly low, and rather long.  We’ve measured it and I think I have about 4″ free, lengthwise, in my garage for it.   I suspect I’ll need to engineer an easily removable front or rear panel so that I can walk around it in the garage.

You can see there’s one or two bits missing , like the bonnet, which I’ll collect from Andy next week, and also that this is second hand body work, as its carrying Lee Baverstock’s name.   In fact I think it’s third hand as at least some of this  (the side pods and rear tub I think) were on Richard Wise’s prototype Sabre in its first year of running, and which Tim gently rearranged using the front of his Fury halfway round Clearways at Brands hatch.  It’s going to look great when I finally get around to painting it my now traditional Subaru blue. Although in fairness it looks great now.   I will have to move it though for when Kate wants to hang out the washing.  I bet Adrian Newey doesn’t have that problem

Anyway, the reason I’m pleased to have it, is that I needed the floor profiles to finish off the  exhaust system.  Before I started though, Duncan, Duke  of Limpage, and Lord High Protector of Crocked-Knee turned up on Saturday morning to be installed in his normal position on the throne of tyres. Kate and I administered the now traditional offering of a bacon Sarnie and the weekend’s work commenced.

The exhaust sits inside the the right hand side pod, and I needed the floor profiles to make sure that I could position the silencer can correctly within the pod.  From the position of the exhaust can, I could  then work out the final routing of the secondary exhaust components.

You may recall that I’d built the primaries back in the spring, but stopped the system just after the merge collectors, so now I could crack on and finish it.  Andy’s magic length for this section of the exhaust is  ” As short as humanly possible”.  Hence the 4-2-1 section is pretty compact, the secondary merge collector is sitting on two short lengths of connecting pipe TIGed onto the individual primary collectors,  So fitting this bit took a fair amount of trimming  and fitting of partial 90 degree  bends cut at an oblique angle to get the edges to line up, the curves to fit, the lengths the same,  the tubes parallel and correctly spaced to slip in the merge collector.  Not easy. But eventually we got there, and the secondary collector is a firm slip on fit.

All I need to complete the system now is a 45 degree bend to feed into the can, and an exit tube out of the can.  This is where  I’ll mount the stupidly mandated slice of Catalytic converter that the RACMSA require to please the green lobby.  I can’t help but think that pumping out palladium and various other heavy metals by fitting a catalyst  to an engine that was never designed for one, is a very bad idea.  Much worse than a bit Carbon Monoxide.

I’m currently in two minds as to whether or not I should weld the secondary and primary collectors together, to form a single unit. However, experience has taught me that trying to fit 4 primaries into a single 4 way rigid connector is bloody hard work… so I may elect to join all these units together with tough springs, but I’ll ring Andy in the morning and see what he thinks. You can clearly see that my welding is nowhere near as good as Andy’s… lets hope it holds together.    Also in this picture you can see the red -10 JIC hose fittings for the oil cooler take off adapter , so it seems my previous modification of the take off unit has been successful, as they both clear the exhaust system by a reasonable margin.

Now talking of inputs and outputs… I’m pleased to report that I’ve finished the fuel system.  The fuel tank is clad in a couple of square meters of insulating NASA style space blanking to protect it from the engine bay heat, and the output hoses are all routed, fixed in place, and again heat shielded.  The connection to the main fuel rail is via the OEM connector , at one end, and by a JIC -6 connector at the other end.  This in turn links to a quick release, dry break fitting, that will serve as a fuel dump connection, and coincidentally also used the RACMSA mandated fuel sample valve.  No one else seems to bother with these in club motorsport, but just recently a few people have been fuel sampled, so I guess I ought to fit it.  Also it will be handy to be able to easily dump out the fuel and it will provide a handy point for testing fuel pressure. To this end I’ve also fitted a pump override switch in the engine bay, so that I can flip on the pump independently of its normal control via the ECU.

SO with exhaust 80% there, fuel done, electrics done… I only need to work on completing the oil and coolant circuits and this baby will be ready to run in the next couple of weeks. cool