Race Stickers Have Arrived

Posted on March 23, 2007 by admin

If you read my blog regularly you’ll know I’m part of a cummunity of like minded nutters collectively called CAM7 who live and work mostly around Cambridgeshire . Although as with most things related to CAM7 this is not a hard and fast rule. (If you’re brave you can subsrcibe to the mailing list at http://mailman.se7ens.net/mailman/listinfo but you better have an asbestos inbox!)

Several of us race, have raced or are going to race and many more have kit cars of various guises. For a while we’ve been chatting about getting some stickers made up that we can all put on our racers\road cars. Well I Finally I got around to organi$ing some and Lorraine at McIntosh Printing http://www.mcintoshprinting.com/ made them up for us. These were very reasonably priced coming in at under £1 each which is excellent value. The service was good, and delivery nice and prompt. What more can I say

These are Cut Vinyl stickers which look much nicer than printed colour on a white sticker background type. Most printing companies wanted to charge £6 or more for a single cut vinyl sticker like these so Lorraine offers great value.

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Odds + Sods Jobs

Posted on March 20, 2007 by admin

With the car away at Tony Law’s being exhausted there is not much I can be getting on with. So this dead time is really frustrating with the season already underway.

So We’ve been getting on with a few odds and sods jobs.

Firstly Duncan and I have been doing a bunch of fibreglassing. Duncan laid up some new mounting flanges for the base of the airbox so that the new floor panel and injectors can be fitted.

Using a simple bent aluminium mould and some plasticene to give nicely rounded corners I made up a couple of filler panels. These were to cover the holes we had cut in the body last year when we mounted the full roll cage. Frankly these had always looked crap and I had wanted them tidied up for a long time. So tha plan is to bond these onto the side pods before they get resprayed British Racing Green.

I’ve also spent a couple of hours chatting via email with Fellow RGB racer Neal Constable-Berry who is also fitting an CBR1000RR. Neal had a wiring problem with no sparks and no fuel pump operation on his car. As I’d already sorted my wiring out I was able to offer a bit of advice and Neal and Andy Bates finally got his engine running so hopefully I helped out inthe trouble shooting process.

The other big thing that we thought we’d get done while the car was away was to build a secondary bench in the Garage. The main issue was that things like grinders and the metal chop saw are pretty dirty and produce an abrasive residue that coats everthing nearby. So I wanted to seperate these from my main work bench on a seperate work surface. Also as part of this process I wanted to relocate my Pillar drill to a better working height and move it to the “dirty” bench.

Of course things didn’t go to plan, and amongst other things we identified a leaking gas meter and had to call out the emergency gas service to sort it out. Using welders, and sparky grinders seemd not to be a good idea near a gas leak!

So with the bench half built and not a foot of available space due to the disruption caused by the shift round to build it Tony Law Rings up and says can I collect the car it’s ready at last and now he want’s out of his workshop as soon as possible. Great! things are finally ready when it is most inconvenent.

Demon tweeks have finally delivered the new front disks, and I’m close to sorting out the rear ones too . So with a bit of luck I might be in a position to start the engine and drive it in the next couple of weeks.

Maybe …. Just maybe

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The First Race of the Season… And I’m not in it

Posted on March 13, 2007 by admin

Last weekend I watched the first race of the RGB season at Mallory Park nr Leicester.
It was great to meet all my racing mates again and there was much paddock ribbing from various members of the community about the fact that I had a perfectly good working race car but I’ve taken it apart …again!

Which is all fair comment and was taken in good heart!

I was particulary pleased to see the novice racer Buzz who had bought Tim Pell’s old Genesis racer bring it home in a Class A third place. Although a bit of mental maths indicated that if I had left the beast alone then that could have been me. Or at least Buzz and I could have been fighting over the podium place!

Hey Ho , Ce’st la Vie!

There was another silver lining to my late arrival in the paddock. Fellow racer Colin Duce has also changed to the CBR1000RR this season and is using an identical sump to the Nova one I have fitted, although in a longitudinal install. Colin has already blown one engine in pre season testing and at Mallory’s hairpin his oil pressure was again dangerously low. This prompted much head scratching between Colin, his spanner Man, engine builder Andy Bates and various other members of the CBR1000RR community including me. The upshot of this is that we are all going to fit baffle plates to further control oil surge. Andy thinks that under heavy braking in a north south install all the oil may have disappeared into the clutch housing (it holds over two litres) and no amount of swing in the sump can help it scavenge oil that is actually in the clutch housing

So my late drive shafts may well have saved me blowing an engine by delaying my startup date until these teething problems are sorted. But I do feel very sorry for Andy and Colin over the costs for the blown engine.

The car is still at Tony Law’s being exhausted, and I’m still waiting for brake rotors and fuel bits from Demon Tweeks. Unless i get it back together in the next two weeks I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll even make the third race of the season at Lydden Hill.

Still I might use the time to finally respray the car in metallic British Racing Green (I’ve had the paint on the shelf for two years) and get the garage sorted out with some additional storage\tidy.

The other thing I’ve sorted out recently is some team stickers for all the Cam7 boys who may be out racing this season. The stickers simply say “[Cam7]Racing” which nicely reflects the email subject lines which are a feature of our community\collection of nutters.

I’ve also got some nice “Driver: Adrian Moore , Mechanic : Duncan Mepham” stickers made up. so it will be nice to have our names on the car at last.

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Instruments and Hoverd-Palm Dash

Posted on March 4, 2007 by admin

While waiting for the brake disks and other parts to arrive, I’ve been trying get on with some other useful stuff. First on the list was finalising the installation of the bike clocks on the steering column. This took a while, but now gives me a nice clear view of the instruments without them smacking into my knees when turning corners.

For my secondary instruments including oil and water temp, oil pressure, lap timing, run time, GPS speed and gear indication. I’m using a nifty piece of software that Tim Hoverd has written for a palm. It relies on the serial output stream from my DL1 data logger. Tim and I often compare logs from our races so i took the opportunity to relocate my sensor inputs to match his to make this easier. Eventually I got it working for oil pressure, but water & oil temps and RPM still seem to be eluding me. I’m getting no RPM feed at all, and water and oil temps are both 300+ degrees at Idle which seems a bit exessive. So I’ll need to sort that out ASAP.

Also today I did a bunch of other little wiring jobs including sorting out the neutral light indicator, the fan control circuit and so on.

All that’s left on wiring now is a 12v switched supply to tell the DL1 where the start finish line is so that it can do the lap timing. A bigger still LED cluster for oil pressure warning and to fit and route the serial cable for the palm.
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More Wheels, Tyre & Clappers

Posted on February 25, 2007 by admin


Duncan and I, spent most of today resolving the problems of calliper fit and alignment. The output of our labours is shown here.

No this isn’t the quest for weight saving gone mad using a perspex steering arm and a wooden calliper mount would be a bit daft eve n for me. :-)

No this is prototyping a solution for the front brakes, using materials that are easy to machine and fashion into shape using the tools available, you do it this way and then transfer the measurements to the metal components and get them machined up.

Using the wooden block we established that the existing calliper mounts need to be thinned down by about 5mm to 16mm thick to allow them to fit onto 265mm disks and this works nicely inside the 14″ wheels. We also established that the mount need some pockets machined into it to clear the rotor mounting bolts and pads.

265 mm is a step down from the existing 275mm disks but 5mm on the radius shouldn’t matter much. Plus most of the people in the paddock run smaller disks than me, I’ve event attracted remarks about having “boy racer brakes” :-)

The steering arm has been shortened by about an inch and I’ll get new ones cut to this pattern during the week. Changing the arm will make the steering a bit heavier, but hopefully will not introduce any nasties like bump steer, plus we’ve been very careful to move the mounting hole along a line drawn between the centres of the existing hole and swivel to ensure that the Ackerman angles dont change.

At the rear things are a bit tighter. Using a 254mm disk should give me around 5mm clearance between the handbrake arms, the disk and the wheel. Whether this is enough to allow the handbrake to operate will remain to be seen. But if necessary I’ll adjust the calliper arms and hopefully it will be fine! The step down from 275 – 254 diameter rotors is a bit large but most of the braking happens at the front.

Overall the smaller rotor sizes should save about 2.5Kg from the car which should just about offset the heavier rims.

Many thanks to Duncan, when he comes along and helps out in the garage I get much more than twice as much done. Cheers Mate.

While Dunc was wood working I also got the rear suspension bushes and suspension mounts painted up. So that once the brakes get sorted we should just be able to bolt them back on.

So major outstanding jobs now are

  1. Get it rolling again (with or without brakes on 15″ wheels if necessary) so that I can take it and get the exhaust fitted.
  2. Fit revised braking system
  3. Modify the anteater airbox to take the upper injectors
  4. Fabricate handbrake mechanism
  5. Fabricate reverse lever actuation mechanism.
  6. Finalise diff & engine mounting when adjusters arrive
  7. Fit Tim Hs Palm DL1 based laptimer and temp sensor & tidy internal wiring
  8. Pre season suspension setup
  9. Get it rolling roaded and fuelling setup
  10. Fit Driveshafts and chain
  11. Get a trackday and some instruction in before going racing again

So not much left then!

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Brakes, Wheels and A Sense of Humour Failure

Posted on February 25, 2007 by admin

W ell another week passes and still I don’t have drive shafts. I’m beginning to think that I will certainly miss the first two races of the season and my first outing will be the double header at Lydden Hill in April. Still missing races does save me money but while I like making and fixing things in the garage I also like the camaraderie of the paddock and fun of racing. Hmmph.

Anyway, the major issue to resolve this week was getting the new wheels to fit. One of the consequences of moving from Class A to Class B is that Class B is limited to 6″ Rims whereas class A is allowed 7″ rims. It seems a bit daft as the 6″ rim rule hails from a time when class B was limited to (I think) 140 BHP. Whereas as redrafting of the rules to make it a 1000cc class means that modern engines can be used that put out 165+ bhp, pretty much bringing it in line with class A. I didn’t spot the anomaly in last year’s draft rules regs (when I had a chance to suggest the change) so as rules are rules and I need to get some 6″ rims to fit.

I bought a stack of old Ford Escort Xr3i Alloys off ebay for 14 quid, these are actually pretty light and weigh about 6 Kilos each. Unfortunately this makes them a bit heavier than my existing 15″ OZ Superleggarers at about (5.5 KG each) but at least they were cheap, are the right offset and fit my Ford hubs. So all in all a bargain. These are also 14″ rims rather than 15s because 14″ rubber is substantially cheaper than 15″ rubber (£200 per set of tyres) so If I’m changing wheels, buying myself some rubber savings down the line also seems a good idea

Like Tim, to make life easier I have also bought some of the new swanky Wilwood Powerlight callipers that include a handbrake mechanism. I had lost my previous handbrake mechanism when I removed the diff and these seem the easy option… Erm No “easy” is not the word

With the mind set of changing as little as possible I performed some trial fits of the 14″ rims on the cars. This is much easier to say than do. As I now had a new set of wheels, two different types of brake callipers and two or three different types of brake disks thanks to Tim Pell who had loaned me a stack of ally belled brake rotors to use as alternatives. The permutations seemed endless, If you then throw in the fact that to get the offset right you might need spacers behind the disk or calliper mounts, to get the calliper – disk clearance right you may need packing washers between the calliper itself and the mount And anytime you change anything the calliper has to come off, the wheel has to come,off everything gets unbolted and you pretty much start from scratch you can see that it is a long and frustrating process. Particularly when you get to the end of it and see that without major modifications there is no way it is going to work with the 14″ wheels bells and callipers. AAARGH. At the back the operating levers for the handbrake mechanism foul the wheel and at the front the steering arm and calliper both get in the way.
OK lets use my existing Rim’s and forgo the potential rubber savings. Job done!. Erm no …about an hour later it dawned on me that of course I can’t use my existing Rims they are 7″ not 6″ and are illegal. ArgghggggggGGGGGHHH!
At this point with timescales already tight, no drive shafts, no exhaust and delays being injected into the timetable everywhere I had a real sense of humour failure at the frustration of it all! Even considering junking the entire season.
However common sense prevailed and I thought “OK lets get some new rims, sell the old ones to cover the cost and we are away.” Racing usually comes down to choices to spend money in order to make things easier or quicker :-( . Erm No, this wont work either it as appears that 6×15 Rims are not a common size in race wheels. The only options available are Compomotive MO/MTs and these way a full 2.5 Kg heavier than my existing wheels and would cost the best part of £500 pounds.
AARGH! I know racing is a nutty thing to do but spending £500 quid to be heavier and go slower is very simply stupid and the 10KG gained would undo much of the good work that has gone into lightening the car this season.
So after a long think about the problem while on my 2.5 hour commute to work and a chat with my dear wife Katie who is totally reliable at being practically minded and pulling me down to earth we came up with a solution. If I’m likely to miss Donnington anyway, accept that that is going to happen, use the money saved and the additional time to sort out the brakes and smaller wheels by getting stuff machined to fit. That way at least you are ending up with a car that is lighter and will save you money in rubber in the future. Plus the Ford alloys are pretty cheap so getting a second set to use for track days\wets is an option then.
Simple eh Aren’t ladies great at common sense, if I had any of that I suppose I wouldn’t be racing any way :-)
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External Injectors Mounting

Posted on February 20, 2007 by admin

Andy Bates at AB Performance has sent me the mounting plates for the CBR1000s intake trumpets and extenal injectors. I’ll use the lower plate (pictured here) as the base for my modification to the cars airbox. I was going to use the upper plate as well but when I weighed it it was close to a 3/4 of a Kilo. The upper plate
only supports the injectors, but these are already supported by a casting fitted by Mr Honda to the original plastic airbox.

I figured if I could mount the injector rail on some aluminium standoffs then I could achieve the same for very little weight gain. Remember that this is on top of the engine and very high in the car so all weight lost here is especially important.

So after much measuring to try and ensure I got the injectors properly centralised on the trumpets I made these standoffs to hold the injectors at the correct seperation from the mounting plate (90mm measured from plate to tip). I’m pretty pleased with it considering I only made it using hand tools, a bench grinder and a drill press. plus is only weighs a couple of hundred grams and doesn’t restrict the airflow.

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Dift Mounted on New Ali plates

Posted on February 18, 2007 by admin

The new laser cut 8mm NS4 alluminium differential mounting plates turned up from Peterborough Laser cut today. so this weekend was spent mounting the diff in it’s final position. Here I must credit Dave Turner a mate from Cam7 who spent a lot of time refining my original diff mounting plates drawings. Dave performed a bunch of finite element an analysis (FEA) on these mounting plates. His work allowed me to reduce the plates from those which were 15mm thick and required expensive machining from billet aluminium, down to plates just 8mm thick which could be cheaply cut from flat plate by the guys at Peterborough Laser Cut.

The Diff plates are still awaiting the chain tension adjusters (which Dave T is also machining for me).The small ears close to the rear of the plates are for bolting to brackets which will be welded to the transverse chassis member and provide lateral stability for the whole assembly.

With the diff mounted I could also finalise the engine bay signal wiring, the position of the oil pressure sensor, and all the electrical connections. The engine bay is now beginning to look very neat and complete.

This weekend I mounted the power Commander which I had imported from America and saved over £100 on it’s UK purchase cost.

The only fly in the ointment was that I had it confirmed that my new driveshafts will not be here in time for next weeks appointment at Tony Law. So I’ve had to post pone this to the 6th March. This makes it highly improbable that I’ll make the race that I was aiming for on the 25th March. Right nowI’m constantly being promised they’ll be here in a couple of days and sent out immediately… but I’ve heard that at least three times now :-(

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