Day 11

One and a half days until the car and I return to Auckland. Work harder!

Since the windscreen was booked in to be installed at 2pm today, we needed to get the dash permanent installed. Some of the switches I was waiting for had not arrived, so I ran cables without the switches attached, this job would be twice as hard with the dash installed. The dash (which is now black) is riveted in and waiting for the glazier. It's starting to look nice.



The glazier arrived pretty much on time as I was tidying up and making sure the felt was sitting nicely above the dash board. Clint went through his preparations, cleaning the glass and masking the edges etc. The glass had some glue residue from the tape that had held it in place over the last 9 months while it has been waiting for us! A bit of turps and a glass scraper did the trick. The end result is quite stunning. The car looks so much better with the front window in.

After the dash and window saga, I completed the radiator install (a few bolts and a couple of brackets hold it down against high density stick on foam attached to the new air deflectors (required for the small radiator).

Bruce and Paul continued with the welding and grinding... Inverter mount points are now sorted and Bruce has started shortening the central harness mount points because the stuck out far to much and caused issues with space.

Anyway, time for bed. The car is looking good.

Day 8

It was very cold this morning and it seemed to get colder as the day went on (winter is fighting back).

Today Bruce focused on finishing the half shafts (the car won't be going far without these!). I spent some time organising a sign writer to make decals of the sponsor's logos to go on the car. This included sizing them up and making a pattern for the logo going on the top of the front windscreen.

The radiator turned up today. This encouraged me to look at the details of how we are going to plumb this thing in. Turns out we have a bit of fluffing about to do (always the way). The inlets/outlets on the radiator, inverter and the pipe to the back of the car all have different diameters. Paul is going to make appropriate adapters for the pipe which solves most of the problems. Still leaves us with the inverter to motor connection which we will sort out with an appropriate size change adapter (could change the inlet on the motor or inverter, but I would rather not play around with these, at least until we have fired it all up). To get everything ready for Paul, I removed the aluminum pipes from the car and cut of the ends we don't need. The radiator receives air from the front air intake which is at ankle hight. This air is channeled up through the near horizontal radiator before exiting through the middle of the bonnet (this increases down force and reduces drag.

Now that the heavy engineering is finished in the cabin, I set about tidying up. After vacuuming I installed the POT box and connected the recently fabricated connecting rod (also attaching a return spring to the arm). Everything lined up nicely and the travel is good. It is all mounted above the level of the steering column, so it is well out of the way.

Earlier in the morning we also went and checked out the trailer progress. Everything is looking good. Discussed a few minor details like hook locations. The trailer will have a scissor jack at the front to control the tilt angle. We sourced one of these from a wrecker. Tried to get a common one with some corrosion protection which I think we did a reasonable job of (looks like it is anodised).

Thats all for today.

Day 4

Another day at the office. Today didn't feel very productive, but we organised a few things and made some decisions along the way.

Firstly, we have arranged to install bucket seats and have them upholstered as well. We removed the original European spec seating (which really is just a shaped floor pan). It is not very supportive and doesn't look very nice either. The NZ designed bucket seats are going to much nicer, they provide more support and make a bit more room in the cockpit.

Changing the mount points for the motor has been slow going, but we are making progress. We have been trying not to compromise the space between the end of the motor and the rear firewall (because this space is going to house a section of the battery pack). We needed a small redesign of the brackets which prevent motor rotation around the axles. The original design was encroaching a little too much on our battery space. This is sorted now and we will hopefully finish the welding tomorrow.

Finally, we have decided to retain the original front mounted radiator design. We do have the option of using a small radiator in the side pod air intakes which would save a bit of weight, but we are not going to do this at the moment. In theory the small radiator should be more than enough, but we don't really know if extra cooling is going to be significantly beneficial for our ability to run at full power for long periods of time. Hence we are making use of existing plumbing for a front mounted radiator. We will be starting with a medium sized radiator, knowing that we can go bigger or smaller without any hassle. This is a nice position to be in as we start to test out the capabilities of the car. We will be recording water and motor temperatures with the on board computer so we will be able to monitor the behaviour of various setups and make decisions from there.

Stay tuned.