Caterham Academy 2012 - Build (Day 7)

Day 7:

Today I started late as my little girl was doing a harvest festival performance at school and I wanted to go along and see it. I am burning brownie points with the family quite quickly at the moment, so it was a good way of earning a few back. It was also the cutest thing I have seen for a very long time and quite lovely to watch her up there performing (she is 3 so spent most of the time looking a little confused by it all), so no great hardship and a nice break from the build for the morning.

I got into the garage just after lunchtime and spent a few hours finishing (most of) the wiring and getting (most) of the cooling system done. A few small jobs remain, namely working out where two remaining rogue wires from the main engine loom go, getting the expansion tank fitted when the new bracket arrives and taking the slack out of the throttle cable, but they aren't anything major. Once that is done I will focus on tidying everything up with cable ties and doing a final sweep of the engine bay to make sure it is as good as it can be.

I managed to get the springs from the exhaust primaries to the cat fitted, which were causing me issues yesterday, but this required some gentle persuasion with a hammer to be directed towards the retaining clips before they would go on. I then got the diff out and set about fixing the handbrake and cables into the transmission tunnel before the diff can go on tomorrow.

All being well tomorrow will be full steam ahead on the rear end of the car and the hope is that by the end of the weekend I will have the majority of the mechanical bits on. The hope is that next week I can focus on getting the cage and interior installed before trying to start her up and run final checks. I think the next couple of days should see me break the back of the work and have something more resembling a car than boxes of bits. Here is hoping tomorrow is a productive day!