793 replies to this topic

[turbotoaster]

Bolted on the painted ones, looks smaller in the pictures than in real life

[turbotoaster]

Made my first canard end plate, just need to make another when i can get another piece of carbon


Fitted it and popped up a local car meet, its starting to look more complete now from the outside

[turbotoaster]

Did a bit tonight, im waiting for my new longer bolts to arrive so I can raise my gear shift mechanism even higher, because ive moved my drivers seat closer to the centre of the car and im 6ft3 even with the shifter raised 100mm over standard the gearknob is right by my knee when in 5th, so the plan is to raise it another 50-75mm.

The issue I have at the moment is that the forward/rearward movement of the gearshift is fine as the plinth I made is a triangle, but because its an isosceles one, there is alot of side to side movement, when moving the gearshift even more I knew this was an issue.

So what I did was use one of the rivnuts in the passenger compartment as a fixing point with a spare tie bar and connect it up, putting a few millimeter of tension into it, now theres no play side to side so its easier to get reverse/5th, also being adjustable there is still enough thread in it to allow me to raise the shifter higher.


Also when dan made me a brace to hold my chargecooler over the inlet manifold, perfectly fine but made in steel which im trying to reduce in the car because of rust/weight issue, since I had a piece of carbon tube spare I decided to save a bit of weight.

[FLD]

My mate gives it the sign of approval





 

 

Looks like warren from EC.

[turbotoaster]

yep, thats him, he will be my race engineer.......or in his words, calling me a **** every lap on the radio for driving to slow

[FLD]

[turbotoaster]

got some longer bolts so i could raise the gear stick 165mm to its final position, its much better now and the gearstick is only about 70mm from the wheel, so now I can keep both hands on the wheel for longer and the gearknob clears my knees in 5th, took a bit of adjustment because of the new position but now the gear change is silky smooth.



Also finished the other canard end plate so that stage 1 of aero is now done, just need to do some testing now to see what the aero balance is like, if I still havent got enough downforce on the front end I will switch to my high downforce canards

[FLD]

Looking good.  I really hope you do well. 

[JG]

Looking good

Which part of that looks good?

[simonlpearce]

Some comparisons of before all the carbon/aero bits were added and after in terms of lap/sprint times would have been interesting to see.

[Baron Von Scubadaddy]

I like the gear shift 

[turbotoaster]

Some comparisons of before all the carbon/aero bits were added and after in terms of lap/sprint times would have been interesting to see.

 

Yes, it would have been good but with or without aero would take a complete resign of ride heights, camber, roll centre, spring rates so would be alot of work and time so for the moment I will try it with it all on, the good thing is, everything is removeable so If I dont like it I can always drive the car without it.

 

I like the gear shift 

 

Yeh its very simple to do, made 2 ali plates, used a hole saw to cut a groove in them for the carbon tube to drop into, then used 180mm long m8 cap heads to bolt all the way through and into the rivnuts in the floor.

 

I just used a tie bar on the side to stop any side to side movement, its now rock solid and reduces my time off the wheel, would be very easy to make one for a vx220, but to raise it as high as it is you would need to either remove or add an extension to plastic gearshift cowling so it still touches the floor, anyone who is compenent with fibreglass should be able to do it.

[turbotoaster]

Little bit of an update today.

Stripped my nitrons down so that I could fit my race springs, amazing how much crud and muck collects everywhere, took quite a while to clean them all properly

Big difference between 450lb and 900lb springs!


Next I fitted my roll centre adjusters, took a bit of fiddling to get it all together but glad its done


Also dropped it down to race height to check everything clears, looks good!


then did the same on the rear

650 vs 1150lb


fitted, I kept the helpers as im not sure if they are needed or not so better safe than sorry

 

This is my final ride road height, 98/115

 

[turbotoaster]

Had a bit of a busy day today.

Woke up this morning and decided today would finally be the day to cut out of my roof, another thing ive been putting off for while but with how hot everything is getting when theres some spirited driving I decided now was the nice to sort it out.

As they say the first cut is always the worst!


Its a bit rough but with my limited skills it will do the job, can aways get a bodyshop to make it look nice after a few season racing.

Needed to put an oil catch tank on the car aswell so made up a bracket to hold it with carbon tube, just need to change the fittings on the catch tank and get some tube to hook it up



Also had a youtube channel visit me today to run a feature on me and the car, should be up on youtube within the next 10 weeks, but they have already put a picture on there facebook page, alot better than my dodgy mobile phone pics

 

Well I decided I really needed to get all the wheels pointing the correct way today and the handling was peaky to say the least, especially on bumpy roads, I knew the car was running way to much camber on the front and to much toe out so as much I wanted to set it race height and get it all geo'd for that, I knew for the moment I just needed it a bit safer to drive.

So I popped into Blink Motorsport this afternoon for him to have a look over the car and generally try and tidy it up......as you can see from the picture below, it was a good reason we did.

Putting the hawkeye sensors on the wheels

The interesting results, the toe out at the back and the massive front camber explains no wonder it wanted to dance around even in a straight line(im guessing when the youtube video comes out you will be able to see how hard im concentrating to drive it)


The camber at the front is still with some shims in, so the good thing it I should never be camber limited no matter what tyres/slicks I run in the future

After plenty of tweaking we got it everything more in line with what it should be, its still fairly aggressive(what you would run on a elise trophy race car) but much more inline compared to before.


Next up we tested bump steer, since im running an eliseparts steering arm kit with bump steer adjustment I didnt really know how to stack them up, so we loaded the car up and watched the screen and the good news is under bump the toe doesnt increase/decrease which for the moment I would rather have as I would like bump steer to be taken out of the situation for the moment so I can concentrate on the rest of the suspension tuning.

Then it came to seeing what it weighed, now ive mentioned in previous posts what i thought it weighed and also that I had used a local weigh bridge to get me in the ball park, in my head I had a figure of 730kg fully fueled and turns out I wasnt far off.


This is with 99kg of ballast on the drivers side and about 10kg of fuel in the tank

As you can see, for the big chunk of ballast in the car its not that bad side to side weight balance, shows though either I need to loose 20kg or the car does(I plan on pulling more weight off the engine aswell as myself)

But the cross weight was out at 47.8% so 2 quick spins on the rear passenger side coilover and we are at 50%


One thing I also found interesting was the front to rear weight balance, ive tried to take as much weight out of the back end as I could, but then ive added a big heavy turbo, thick walled manifold, heavy wheels with hub adapter spacers, bigger undertray, big diffuser and rear wing and it still seems im lighter percentage wise than a stock car.



Finishing everything up

Overall im really happy as I was something I needed doing, mostly because I wasnt enjoying driving it up to that point and also because I was worried I would run out of front tyre before long!

Blink Motorsport were great, everything he did he explained the reasons why and what we can and cant do, which was great information for when im at the track. They also do mapping which I wasnt aware of and are very interested in mapping the car which since there local once ive put on a smaller turbo we are going to give it a go
 

[FLD]

I think you're running out of excuses to race it now   I cant wait to see it go.

[Pidgeon]

Your new springs aren't seated correctly on the top collar on the pic of the rears above.

[Kieran McC]

How to destroy the looks of a car

[G-Bob]

How to destroy the looks of a car

 

It's not pretending to be anything it's not.  It is function over form and I think Lee is well aware that the aero has detracted from the original lines.

[turbotoaster]

I think you're running out of excuses to race it now   I cant wait to see it go.

  I know its getting to thr point where I haven't got much left. Its pretty much, wrap manifold, plumb oil catch tank, map engine, get sticky tyres, then drive like a man possessed and try and keep It out of thr kitty litter!!  

Your new springs aren't seated correctly on the top collar on the pic of the rears above.

thats because the car is jacked up with the wishbone fully extended and the ride height not set

[turbotoaster]

little article on my car, should be a video in the next few weeks, the car isnt finished but I like some of the pictures they took.

 

http://www.carthrott...weve-ever-seen/