Caterham Academy 2012 - Build (Day 10)

Day 10:

I phoned Caterham first thing this morning to get advice on the handbrake situation and was advised that it would be a safe bet to change it just in case. I think it is the right thing to do given the hassle involved in changing it now vs changing it once all of the rear end is in. Given Caterham can send me a new one to arrive tomorrow morning it seemed like a good excuse to carry on doing other things, so today I continued working on the interior and weather gear.

First off I got the knee protector panels located and fixed to the chassis rails under the dash, inserting and fixing the rubber trimming that goes along the top of the inner side-skins as I went. It looks like a 5 minute job, but took me a couple of hours by the time I had got all of the holes drilled and the rivets in both sides. Once the inner side-skins were done I could move onto the cage and get it fitted properly, which wasn't too much of a challenge once I had manhandled the rear locating holes into alignment with the mounting brackets in the boot. I am not sure if they do it on purpose, but everything on a Caterham seems to be 1 - 2mm out of alignment, so this took a bit of brute force and some swearing, but at least I know it isn't going to go anywhere now it is in.

With the cage on and all the bolts torqued up properly I moved onto the hood, getting the bars bolted to the mounting brackets at the front of the boot and the tensioning straps attached to the chassis rail at the back of the boot. The hood then went up so that I could line up the doors and get them mounted. This was another pretty straightforward job, but it took plenty of time to drill the holes for the mounting brackets and then line up and attach the various mounting poppers on the chassis rails (which fought a long battle with my drill-bits, blunting a number of them as we went along).

Whilst these seem like funny little jobs to be doing at this stage, there is a method to the madness, as they all need to be done before I can move onto the boot cover tomorrow, which has to go on before the belts can go in and the seats after that. I think there is probably another day of work on the interior/weather gear before it is all finished, but I may leave that for a later day and move back onto the rear suspension, assuming the new handbrake cable comes through on time. It would be great to have the car down on its wheels and started up by Thursday. Fingers crossed!