December 10

- fitting the side impact bar -

Well, this went pretty well. The side impact bar mounts in 3 places, and it was simply a matter of drilling holes in the mounting plates and bolting in on.

The only minor complication was that the dash needed cutting away a bit, but since I'm making a new dash soon, I didn't worry too much about doing it prettily.

Then of course I remembered that I'd need a hole in the sidepod for the bottom leg of the side impact bar to go through. To my considerable surprise I got this in exactly the right place, first time.

December 11

- fitting the Mini foglight -

Yonks ago I bought a BMW Mini foglight, and this afternoon I fitted it. I used an old offcut of GFRP (the scuttle) to make up a template. It was pretty simple. The hard part was figuring out how to stop it falling out again, but a cunning arrangement of bits of bent aluminium seems to have done the trick. The picture shows the foglight and some gaffer tape mocking up some speculative holes which will let out air that channels itself up into the rear bodywork from the wheel arches - lots of race Furies and Phoenix's have something similar, and my assumption is that it aids high speed stability. Anyone got anything to say about that?

December 12

Very brief update today. Having helped Dan Bromilow today to (not quite) get Woopwoop's CBR1000 Ginetta G20 through SVA today, I felt super motivated to do something to my car. So I replaced 2 of the bolts in the rear suspension that were 1/4" too short for my liking; and peeled off the gaffer tape showing where to make the holes in the rear bodywork (Tim pointed out that it would probably make things worse, aerodynamically, than better. I am a disgrace to my profession... )

This page last updated on: Thursday, Aug 24 2006