End of term report!

Wow - almost six months to the day since I got my Seven build finished and on the road. It's been a fantastic summer season, I have 3,100 miles on the clock now. I told my friends that building the car was the most inspiring and creative thing I have done in many years - and now I have to add that actually driving the beast is at least as exciting as doing the build! What the other owners say is exactly correct - you pop out to the shops on a Sunday to get the papers, and get back 2 hours & 100 miles later... you just can't help it!

The other thing that really gets you going is the Lotus Seven Owners Club, with local groups all over the UK. In my area it is 7ReHaB: the Reading, Hampshire, & Berkshire group. A really nice bunch, and there are twice-monthly meetings at a local pub. And every weekend (if the weather is appropriate!) someone has created a driving route through our lovely British countryside - starting early in the morning to avoid the day-trippers, and stopping off for brekkie at an interesting local spot (usually an airfield!).

Cotswold Airport

Goodwood!

Regarding the car, it's been a real trooper. I've been pushing it fairly hard, and it has survived with flying colours! The only things that I have had to do over the last 3000 miles is clean the brake light switch, and re-glue the front cycle wings on (which I had not done properly in the first place! See my post from April. I should have used the "big heads" here )

I've also swapped out the original 14" wheels with 15" Compomotive jobbies shod with Avon CR500 rubber. I'm still "getting to grip" with these - I'm certain that on the track this will be an improvement, but on general A and B roads I'm not sure yet...

Wheels look good!

I hope to be driving the car on-and-off over the winter depending on the weather - I'll be updating the blog as and when necessary. There's a lot on the cards for next year - I've booked up for Classic Le Mans and I want to to drive some of the Alpine passes - Keep watching! 



Brands Hatch Track Day

It's August, and my first thousand miles have passed quickly & enjoyably beneath the wheels. It's time for the first service back at Caterham Dartford, and I thought I'd combine this with a "track day" at Brands Hatch, which is just a few miles down the road from the Caterham factory. Time I found out what the car was capable of!

My co-drivers: Bob & Nige (ignore the rubbish red car in front)

So I had a word with a couple of friends, and on a sunny Monday morning we met up (at a ridiculously early hour) at the famous motor racing circuit. This event was organized by Motor Sport Vision and was allegedly a "novice" day, but aside from ourselves it was difficult to find anyone else who wasn't pretty experienced - most of the other cars had roll cages welded in etc.

Some of the competition!

Anyway, we were allocated four 20 minute track sessions during the day, and we rotated driving / passengering / watching between the 3 of us. I had a short lesson half-way through: Unfortunately it was cut short unexpectedly, when the car in front went off at Druids and left oil on the road!

I have to admit I was utter rubbish at driving. I think it was partly because having built the car myself, there was always a lingering anxiety at the back of my mind that I had forgotten to tighten up the suspension or something! The instructor was getting pretty shirty with me at one stage...

Brake! Turn! Accelerate! etc. etc.

It wasn't until I was sitting in the passenger seat with my mates driving, that I realised what the car was really capable of! I've never been so scared in my life... Bob & Nige were a million times faster than me around the track. In fact, Nige was black-flagged for overtaking an Aston DB9 on the inside at Druids!

Bob at the wheel

Who do you think you are? Nigel Mansell?

I have to admit that since this event, my driving has definitely been cranked up several notches; I learned a hell of a lot in a relatively short time! But I think I need to go back for some more instruction, to really push this amazing little car to the edge of the envelope.

What a great day. Several well-earned beverages in the Thistle hotel bar afterwards.

I would drive 500 miles and then 500 miles more....

Well here we are, exactly one month after I picked up the car from the post-build check and IVA test, and I'm well pleased.

King's Worthy, north of Winchester

500 miles on the clock, and only a couple of minor niggles with the car. There's a small oil leak from the gearbox, which is the subject of some detailed discussions on the Lotus 7 club website (this appears to be due to a design flaw on the bell-housing that couples the Ford Duratec engine to the Sierra gearbox. Some detailed pictures here: https://profiles.google.com/davisjimjo#davisjimjo/photos/5622531303529772385).

Apart from this, I need to sort out a bit of farting from the engine when I blip the throttle, but that's about all - it's a great, great car and a frighteningly brutal drive!

Here's a short video - Starting in Sherborne St. John, driving past The Vyne house, to Bramley:

(Originally shot using a GoPro HD Hero camera at 720p50 resolution with H.264 encoding. Uploading to the blog has degraded the quality rather a lot, I'm afraid...)

I'll be posting more interesting photos and videos as they turn up during the summer...

Stop press: I've just got back from an excellent blat with the 7 club. It was a beautiful summer Sunday morning, and a great early-morning drive. From Basingstoke we took the country lanes past Stockbridge, then across Salisbury Plain to Compton Abbas airfield, just south of Shaftesbury in Dorset. There's a good little restaurant there, and whilst we gobbled up a full English breakfast we were entertained by a Tiger Moth and various microlights buzzing around our heads.

Quite a collection of petrolheads had turned up for the brekkie: In addition to 30 Caterhams, there was a motley collection of large motorbikes, a beatiful blue Lotus Europa Twin-Cam, a Healey 3000, an MGC, and various other interesting pieces of machinery.

After a second cup of coffee it was back in the cars for a blast to Fordingbridge, then through the New Forest to Romsey, then Winchester and back home again. What a great, great drive - I cannot think of anything better to be doing on a summer Sunday!

Hope the weather is like this for the rest of the summer.... I've got to book up the first 1000 mile service at CC pretty soon, and I'm betting there will be quite a few more miles under the wheels before the winter recess.

Seven - Licensed To Thrill!

It took a whole boring week for the local DVLA office to process the registration paperwork, but finally - on 3rd June, exactly 5 months from the delivery of the kit, my car got the government green light and was declared road legal. So I hopped on a train over to Dartford, and went to pick up the post-build checked, IVA-tested, pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed and de-briefed Seven!

Good thing I ordered the SV body... I need to lose some weight!

Whilst I was there, Kate was good enough to show me around the factory. It was Friday afternoon and the rest of the workforce had gone for the weekend, so it was pretty quiet. Lots of cars on the shop floor though. I guess business is going pretty well despite the recession.

Thanks for the tour Kate!

I finished up the paperwork, gave Kate back some duplicate parts I had accumulated over the past few months, climbed in, started up, and headed home. It was great to be behind the wheel of a Seven on the open road again - over a year since I had last enjoyed the experience. It was an uneventful drive around the M25, very busy on a Friday evening of the half-term week. But hey - the sun was shining and I had a smile on my face even stuck in the traffic!

After I got home I had a good look under the bonnet to see what had been changed during the PBC and IVA tests. There didn't seem to be a huge amount done - the engineer had tidied up the battery cable wiring and improved the ECU ground connection, plus added some extra sleeving in a few places on the lighting harness. Obviously all the suspension components and tracking had been properly aligned, and the lights adjusted. On the road, the car felt properly tight and responsive, with no pulling to either side even under braking. The gearbox and diff were fine, plenty of clonking and grumbling noises which was pretty much as expected!

I'm still a little perplexed over the 12V power socket in the boot - Caterham have added a couple of cable-ties to the harness, but that's about all - I still don't understand why it failed IVA on this...

Anyway... Here are the scores on the doors: Total build time = 175 hours, which worked at as four months of weekends, approximately 32 days work of between 4 and 8 hours each. Not including waiting for Sean to send the missing parts....!

I thoroughly enjoyed the build process - there are still one or two minor jobs to be done, but I can't wait to spend a lot of the summer behind the wheel.

*** Stop Press *** IVA PASS !!!

Thursday 26th May - I've just heard from Kate at CC that the car has passed the IVA test! This was at the second time of asking - apparently it failed the first attempt because of "the cigarette lighter socket". Now I am completely flummoxed as to what could possibly have prompted the DVLA to fail my car on such an insignificant item, and can't wait to get the car back in order to find out (a) what on earth was wrong with the socket, and (b) what they've done to fix it!!!!
Anyway, I'm feeling pretty damn good at the moment and can't wait to pick the car up after DVLA registration in the middle of next week. Shame I missed the bank holiday tho'.... Hope it bloody rains all weekend!

Gentleman! Start your engine...

It's about ten days before the man from Caterham comes to take the car away for the post-build check (PBC) and government Individual Vehicle Approval (IVA) test. All that remains is the starting of the engine, tidy up the loose ends, tighten all the suspension bolts, and install the various plastic caps etc. that are required for IVA. Thankfully there's a huge long weekend ahead (courtesy of their highnesses the Duke & Duchess of Cambridge, gawd luv 'em).

First thing to do is fill up all the various fluids and check for leaks! For the brakes and clutch I used a Gunson EeziBleed which worked OK, I had to bleed the brakes at least 4 times over the space of three days and they still feel a bit spongy after all that. I'll ask CC to look at this as part of the PBC - There's no evidence of leaks, and it may be just that the pads need "bedding in".

I thought the clutch was going to be easy, but it is difficult to get at the bleed nipple without spilling fluid everywhere and I couldn't seem to get the pedal to operate correctly even after several bleeds. I finally realised that the problem was not hydraulic at all - The operating arm in the pedal box was not adjusted correctly to allow enough pedal travel, so I had to remove the split-pin and re-adjust the pedal "throw" myself and it works fine now. Phew!

Next I filled up with engine coolant and checked for leaks. Nothing obvious yet, but of course I expect things will change after the engine gets started and heating up! Incidentally the reservoir took all the 5 litre container plus nearly a litre of a second bottle, so I'm not too worried about airlocks since this is more than the manual says is required anyway.

Gearbox oil went in next, and this was the one I was expecting to be a pig given the notoriously difficult drain plug access. I created a filler tool, comprising a funnel fitted into a 500mm long fuel pipe of 6mm internal diameter, fitted into a final 100mm length of thin, clear, plastic tubing flexible enough to make a tight 90 degree turn into the gearbox side. I fed the pipe down from the top of the engine bay, and into the side of the box. This worked fine and I poured in about 1.5 litres of oil before it started leaking out all over the garage floor. Getting the drain plug back in was fiddly but not too difficult: I tightened it using not the recommended modified Allen key but instead the actual 15mm off-cut that I had sawn off the Allen key to start with - This fits nicely between the drain plug and transmission tunnel, and you can turn it with a spanner.

Finally I added 5 litres of engine oil, until it showed on the dipstick . Everything was ready to start up the engine! I had even charged the battery the previous night, and filled the tank with 15 litres of super-unleaded from the local garage.

The recommended procedure is to first "crank for oil pressure", so I disconnected the inertia switch to stop the fuel pump operating, gingerly inserted the starter key, and turned to position II, ignition on. The starter button was under my fingertip... press, and.... nothing. Not a dicky bird. A little flummoxed, I tried turning the ignition key to the normal start position and this worked fine - I cranked away, and lo and behold, got a decent pressure reading on the oil gauge. Hooray! But the push-button starter switch must be wired up wrongly....

Re-connecting the inertia switch I cranked again, expecting the engine to start, and... nothing. I scratched my head for a good few minutes, checked all the connections, and then realised that I probably had not disengaged the immobilizer. So I turned the key again, waved the fob around near the immobilizer aerial, and was rewarded by the sound of the fuel pump priming up the system. Another turn and.... life!

Brilliant! I was beginning to lose hope there for a while.... Anyway, the gauges are all reading sensible values so I switched off again to re-check the engine oil level which had gone down a little. Then I started up again, and ran the engine to "hot" until the fan started up. This all seemed to work OK, the temperature gauge stabilized at 80-something degrees, and I think the thermostat is working but some of the hoses seem to be remaining a little cooler than I had expected. The heater is pumping out hot air, though.

Into the final furlong now! With the car down on its wheels I re-torqued all the front and rear suspension bolts, and tightened up the rear hub nuts to 240nm. This was easier than I thought because there's a nice hole in the centre of the alloy wheels which is exactly the right size to allow the 41mm socket to enter, which means that if you put the handbrake on, chock the wheel, then you can torque away to your heart's content.

Last but not least, I installed some of the plastic caps that are required to get the car through the IVA test. Unfortunately CC had not sent me enough of the correct sizes, so this will have to be done during the PBC. ...And for a final laugh, I tried fitting the windscreen wiper arms only to find that they had sent me the ones for a left-hand drive car! Hohoho.

Anyway, nothing was going to dampen my spirits as I merrily drove the car down my gravel drive and back again, revelling in the fact that most of it works! Brilliant. It's a sunny spring day and I have a top-notch sports car, shouting "Drive Me! Drive Me!" loudly in both ears.

 
Ironic post-script: Mr. Caterham arrived today to collect the car for the post-build check and IVA. Would it start? Would it f**k. Over a minute of cranking and bugger all. Mucho embarrassment as I had to push the car onto the van... I'm still puzzling over this, don't quite understand what the problem is/was. Will be very interested to hear from Caterham what the diagnostic computer says...

Weather kit and sundry bits

The project is getting close to completion now, and I've started reading through the new IVA Guide provided by Caterham. The first thing that hit me was that all my work on the front lights (see the previous blog post) was going to have to be done all over again! The new rules state that all wiring harnesses need to be sleeved, and wherever a harness passes through metal it needs to have a grommet. So the main headlamp harnesses need to be reworked, and the indicator repeater wires where they go through the cycle wingstays need to be re-routed via grommets, and (most irritating of all) I need to add grommets to the top wishbone mounts, requiring the wishbones to be disconnected (which in turn means unbolting the front anti-roll bar). Bugger. All this faff took me a whole day.

 Grommets a-plenty

As with most of the frustrating jobs on the car, I feel much happier now that this has been done...

Next, I re-connected the battery to check the lights were all still working. This revealed quite a perplexing problem with the indicator repeaters working intermittently. After much probing with my meter, I located the problem to poor earth continuity on the actual hub assemblies (left & right), which are the return electrical connection for the indicator repeaters. This is because the only mechanical connections to the hub are via wishbones, track-rod ends etc. and all these are via plastic or rubber bushes. In fact the only metal-to-metal connection from the hub to the car chassis is via the brake hose (!). So my wiring problem was due to a tarnished copper washer on the brake pipe entry to the caliper. Who'd have guessed that?

Now, with the electrics finally put to bed, next job is to fit the weather equipment. This meant first of all that I could finally re-install the boot floor and carpet, tie up the diff breather pipe (which I have brought through the boot floor, clipped to the sidewall, and added a black-painted breather from a toilet cistern), and bolt down the luvverly painted roll cage.

Next, the hood goes on. This is, as anyone with knowledge of Sevens knows, something of a Heath-Robinson affair. Nevertheless my hood fitted OK, although I hope I don't often have to use this in anger or in despair.....

I also drilled holes and bolted on the hinges to take the doors (or "sidescreens" as you are supposed to call them, because for legal reasons a "door" is fixed, whereas the Caterham screens are removeable).

Next I fitted the IVA mirrors, which are bolted onto the windscreen uprights (rather than onto the sidescreens). Finally I fitted the boot cover, which requires fixing the "durable dot" popper buttons to the leatherette cover. I'm not very happy with the tool supplied for this - it doesn't do a very good job of peening over the dot button rivets, and I think I'll do these again later.

Last, but definitely not least, I applied the rear-end badges. I think this looks bloody good myself...

The only thing left to assemble on the whole car is the exhaust silencer, which I bolted on without the supplied heatshield (because the shield appartently fails IVA).

The end is in sight now......