Esprit

It's gonna end up with a bunch of cats getting their beatdowns if this continues!

Right, so an update of a very different nature this week. A bit of background on this first though. Not long after I moved into this flat, back when I still had the Elise, I noticed that cats were getting into the garage and pissing everywhere. Well when I say everywhere, that's not entirely correct, they would piss all over the front of the car. Now in an Elise this is problematic, since that's where all of the air intakes are, meaning that you clean the piss off the front of the car (before it etches the paint, and it WILL) but the next time you're driving and turn on the fan/heater you get a face-full of warm cat's piss smell.... LOVELY. So then it basically turns into an almost-clam-off job to scrub out the front of the car to remove all traces of it. Then it happens every few days and you get MEGA pissed off. Easiest solution was to keep the garage closed and to discourage any cats from getting inside. I talked to my flatmate/landlord about it and they agreed and apart from a few isolated incidents over the past couple of years, it's been not too bad. BUT, as mentioned in a previous post, my landlord lost his job and has turned into captain DIY, which means while I'm out working for a crust, he's often in and out of the garage sanding doors and window-frames etc and doing other home-handy-man tasks..... and he's not QUITE as religious about closing up the garage when he's not there as I am. Also, he has two cats of his own who he swears don't piss on anything because they're female and he's not nearly forceful enough about keeping them out of the garage as I am. Long story short, there have been five incidences of cats spraying all over my tools/car/car parts/stuff in the last month alone. It's made all the more annoying by the fact that it's only ever on my side of the garage. Landlord's VFR800 and Civic remain un-urinated. Repeated attempts to get him to assist me in solving the problem have seemingly fallen on deaf ears so I've now got one eye on the "flatmates wanted" ads to see if I can find a place that's not suffering as such. I'm not giving up though and this weekend I decided to be a bit more proactive about things. First things first, I decided I needed some evidence to show my landlord that his cats were indeed culpable (or at least partially). So, this weekend I took my track-datalogging laptop, hooked it into my WiFi network and set up a motion-sensitive spy-camera in the garage to catch the little fuckers red-handed. It alerts me on my PC when it detects motion, as well as recording it so I can pop out and scare the buggers off or administer a beating. Here's the setup, you can see the laptop to the left, the webcam is lower central-right hanging off one of my aborted dummy firewall heat-shields. So far I've managed to catch one of his cats in the act (proof that will be presented to him) and also caught the other snooping around. It also enabled me to catch one of the neighbourhood cats (a tom I believe) in the garage. I managed to disturb him before he had a chance to do anything, but I gave it the hiding of a lifetime. Little bastard managed to draw some of my blood in return, but suffice to say I managed to give ten times as good as I got. I'm not sure he'll be hanging around my place any more This has shown me that it's more than just one or two cats. Thanks to all the irresponsible cat owners around here (of which there are many) our place has become the no-mans' land in a feline turf war and it's clear that this problem is going to keep occurring as long as my landlord keeps being a numpty about all of this. So tonight I'm going to hit him up about it good and proper, it's got to stop. My last bastion of hope is that I've purchased a motion-sensing ultrasonic cat-scarer off EBay. Now I've read some good success stories about these being used to keep cats off gardens so it should hopefully be effective in the garage as well. I know that it's not a dead-cert to keep the little bastards out of my garage, but fingers crossed it helps. Either way it's got to be better than going out to work on the car to find my toolbox, my wheels and spares dripping with cats' piss. Right?

Well, Christmas came slightly early! Courier just arrived and the fine blokes down at Stainless Design have done a great job at making up my new undertrays Don't let the name confuse you, the undertrays are aluminium! They've still got to go off and get anodised, which will be done late January most likely if I can't get them in before Chrimbo but so far they look fantastic. They're basically replicas of the OEM items except the engine undertray is in slightly lighter gauge sheet (1.2mm as opposed to 1.3mm). See here in direct comparison with the old, more corroded items:

Today's task was to get the roof reinstalled. Since I re-did the firewall it's just been sitting on the car and the rear window has been in my bedroom. Now normally, this would be a 30 minute job, but in the finest tradition of this rebuild, I've stretched it out to a whole day Now, I noticed a while ago that the powdercoat was peeling off the roof catch plates on the rollbar shroud. I wasn't going to bother with doing anything about them, but then figured "why not?". Now, normally I'd swear more about British weather and salt and all that, but I actually recall the same issue on my old, NZ-new '98 S1 Elise. It possibly wasn't quite so bad on the Elise, but it was there nonetheless. It is slightly perlplexing though how these manage to rust since they're on the inside of the cabin. I remember thinking on the Elise that they got wet from when it rained with the soft-top off, but on the Exige the roof's there to stop that. Either way, the quality of the original powdercoat was shocking since there's no way an interior fitting should rust like this! Perhaps water gets on them when driving with the window open in the rain? Either way I decided to fix them. Here's what they looked like on the car: And what they looked like once I'd drilled out the rivets and removed them: 20 minutes with the wire brush and they're back to bare steel. You can see that there was actually a bit of rust underneath the powdercoat by the pitting on the one on the right. It was then time to prime them and paint them. I didn't bother POR15ing them like many other bits on the car. It's not an area I'd expect to suffer much weathering so a good quality spray primer and satin-black topcoat was applied: These were then reattached and hung back on the car with new rivets: I also took the time to clean up the track where the rear window sits, clean off the rollbar itself (a lot of dust and dirt collects between it and the roof), replace the fasteners on the rear window shroud (with stainless ones) and refurbish all the rubber seals on the roof and rollbar with rubber protectant. this should hopefully extend the life of the seals by a few years, but in any case the rubbers were all in superb condition and looked just fine for now. Onto wiring tomorrow I reckon, so long as this damn cold virus doesn't keep me in bed.

Just a brief mid-week update: Got prices back for the undertrays, going to cost about $320 for the pair I reckon, which should include anodising (that's about 135 quid at the current exchange rate for the Brits). They'll be ready by mid next week and I'll just have to source an anodiser that can do them. Got some nice new bits on the way from the UK now, should be here in time to put under my Christmas tree. Due to the splurging though I've had to forego a Christmas tree this year and will be fashioning one by gluing together left-over Exige bits Will be a quiet weekend this weekend and will probably busy myself by re-attaching the roof panel (which is currently just sitting on the car) and will begin constructing my adaptor loom... scary stuff for a colourblind lad like me!

Thanks.... I think No, I sent a bunch more money across to the UK for more bits today and am thinking about sending a large chunk more across before Christmas for something else that's come up and I got to the point this evening where I said I think I've ACTUALLY got a problem... like an addiction... still.. at least this hopefully has an end point in a few months.. that's the frustrating thing, it's gone on nearly 2 years and at time you just can't see the end.

Right, well not a lot to report really. Got my bits to start making up the adaptor loom. Will need a few more bits before I can finish it, but this weekend I may have to begin the soldering! I've modelled and drawn up my undertrays and have sent them out to our suppliers for quoting. Hopefully they don't come back insanely expensive Other than that, all is going well. Got a couple of new things I'm cooking up for the car on the horizon and we'll see how those pan out

Right well it's been a weekend of getting little things done so far. Frustrating news is that Ken's pretty snowed under at the moment so the engine won't be able to go back into the car until the week after Christmas holidays.... so the plan of having the car back in one piece in time for them has gone out the window. Bad news is that this pretty much writes off my chances of getting the car track ready for a bunch of trackdays I'd booked in for January/February. Crap. The upshot of this is that the wiring etc, which I'd planned to start on once the engine was at home in the car has now been brought forward and I've now started figuring this out. I've spent a good few hours going through the car and wiring and trying to figure out how I'm going to run cables and looms to get everything wired up. I'm about to pop off into Jaycar to grab an enclosure so I can start laying out the adaptor loom between my VHPD engine loom and the Emerald. Another job I've tackled today was cleaning up the under trays. I wanted to get the front under tray back on this weekend, so figured I'd clean all of them up at the same time. I hauled them out of a dark, dirty corner and laid them out on the lawn: I then spent a few hours cleaning them up. I decided (before wasting too much time) that I'm going to remake my own engine bay under tray as my one's seen better days. It was bent before (when I got the car) and I've straightened it out a bit. It's been hacked about a little to clear the exhaust and one of the NACA ducts has seen better days. Surface corrosion's also pretty widespread from where it's suffered salt splash around the rear wheels.... time for a new one then.... I'll make it a bit tidier and I'll clean up the hacking about that was done to clear the exhaust manifold collector. I'll order a new NACA duct from Geary this week and I'll get a new panel laser cut and folded and then anodised. The other two cleaned up fairly well: Having said that there's still a little corrosion damage on the front as well, and since I'm already getting the engine bay under tray re manufactured, I figured I'd get the front undertray done as well (since when have I taken the easy route eh?).... so I'll head into work tonight, SolidWorks them up and get some drawings done so I can get manufacture under way.... job should be a carrot. Right... off to do some more electrical type stuffs.... where did I put my soldering iron?

Right well a little midweek update. My new billet alloy, stiffer upper engine mount arrived today along with the new silicone exhaust mounts: I decided to try this instead of my stock hydrolastic engine mount I've already reconditioned. I've always got the option of swapping back to this one if I feel it's too harsh, but I figured it's worth a go. The good news is that because I'm talking about engine mounts, it shouldn't be too long before the engine's going back into the chassis

Right, well I spent Saturday getting completely sunburned out at Waiheke Island. When one of our company directors said he bought a new holiday house on the island, we weren't expecting it to come with its own sodding peninsula! The day was spent drinking, swimming, kayaking and generally laxing out. This was followed by an all-night dance party in the city, which was rather awesome. All of this resulted in a Sunday where I was probably slightly less productive on the car than might have otherwise been. Still, I got a fair few fiddly jobs done that took a bunch of time. The front clam is now bolted on and shimmed up. Happy to report the panel gaps are now better than ever... although it's still no Audi! It really did bring home how now the bodywork really lets the rest of the car down. When I started this job, the bodywork was the best bit. I'd have never bothered to improve it.... the rest of the car's now come up that good that something REALLY needs to be done about the paintwork and finishing. Still, that's not in the scope of this rebuild. Plan is to get it back on the road for the summer, enjoy the hell out of it and when June/July rolls around we'll whip the body off and get it all refinished so the outside is just as new as that which lies underneath. I'll keep it in the factory Titanium colour for sure, but the paint finish will be given the same degree of attention that you've seen throughout this thread. Late on Sunday and this evening I also got around to cleaning up the front wheel-arch liners and reinstalling them. This was a time-consuming process as they were plastered in tar on the inside, and dirt on the outside. Nothing a bit of elbow-grease couldn't fix. Here's the right hand wheel arch without the liner installed: And here's the left hand wheel arch post liner installation: Tomorrow I shall get the liners finished off (reattaching the fuse box and relay box to the top of the LH liner, and oil lines to the top of the R/H liner). I will also head into Alert Motorsport and get some NORMA clamps for the brake lines so they can be attached to the wishbones the the wheels can go back on. Carr will be back on the ground and looking strangely complete from the front then. I'll then clean up the front undertray and get that screwed back on as that's one less thing I'll have cluttering up the garage. WIN!

Cheers for the heads up... mine's the newer K3 unit (that's an older MD3K) but yeah, it's similar

Haha well thanks (I think!)... given that I'm of the British persuasion

Right, well another Friday night and given that I can no longer afford a social life thanks to this sodding car, I decided to get a bit of work done on it Now, I started this evening by re-cleaning up the entire front section of my car. Why? Well, my landlord recently lost his job, and since he's now unemployed he's turned into Captain f*cking D.I.Y! (Underwear on the outside of his trackpants and all) and this week's job has been to repaint all the doors in the house. Now, he's done this on his side of the garage, but as well you know, when you're painting and sanding you make a mess EVERYWHERE. So my car now looks like a cocaine factory exploded all over it. You'd think he'd have had the courtesy to come and tell me he was going to be doing it in the garage but nooooo. Some people! GAH! Now, over most of the car I don't really care because it's already covered in dust, but the whole front area I've been working on I'd managed to get spotless.... which I had to do AGAIN! [/rant] I then got into reinstalling the heater unit, which took about half an hour to get into position. This was followed by complete re-removal of the heater unit owing to dropping a washer down inside the fan blower... F*CK! Anyway, finally got it back in and sorted, all in place. And then with the heater trunking installed: If you compare those photos to the ones posted on November 15th, you'll see it's a HUGE improvement. So I stood back admiring my work for a little bit..... and then it happened: That's right! For the first time since about March/April '08, my car now has a front clam! Ok, so it's not bolted on yet (that'll happen Sunday hopefully) but it's on there and that's 90% of it and it looks AWESOME! I've gotten used to seeing the bits of bodywork on the car sitting there under an inch of dust and grime, but the front section, having been covered up for 20 months is still fresh and clean like the day I removed it. I forgot how gooood it looked. Needless to say, I'm a pretty happy camper! I don't often post pics of myself in this blog, but here's one of me looking rather chuffed with myself: Oh... and one just a little less reserved! I'm out all day tomorrow, but will be back on the car Sunday to get the front clam pretty much bolted down. From there I'll clean up and reinstall the front inner arches, front undertray etc. Apart from a bit of modification to the battery wiring and final battery installation, the car is now finished ahead of the doors. RESULT!

Right, well I had most of yesterday away from the car spending time with the family, but today was a full car day again. I started off by rebuilding the blower unit now that the fan casing was dry. Here you can see it rebuilt and sitting in a vice with weights holding the outlet cowl on while I was waiting for the Sikaflex adhesive to cure. Test-fitting this cowl on, I could see that it wasn't a great fit, so I made some small additions (adhesive foam rubber) to the fan casing to seal around it a bit better. It should make it a little more efficient I hope. While I had a tube of Sikaflex open, I decided to bond and rivet the floor mat studs down. This was actually a rather tricky job to do tidily, Sikaflex gets EVERYWHERE! Trying not to get it over upholstery and clothes was a tough mission, but I managed okay. Here you can see 'em back on the floor, ready for when the mats go back in. I then got back to the heater box. This was cleaned up and stainless washers were bonded on to the heater casing to reinforce it around the rivet holes. This was to prevent any spreading of the cracks in the casing around the rivet holes, and to create a stronger joint. This took a while to get right, but it went together pretty smoothly. Then, finally I could reunite the fan unit with the heater unit to make the thing whole again! Apologies for the blurry pics, my cellphone camera seems to have trouble with shiny plastic and a flash! Compare this with how it came outta the car and I think you'll agree it's a small improvement.A LOT more durable now too! Off away with work for a few days now, so will hopefully be back in the garage on Thursday or Friday to fit it all back in again and cet the front clam on! ABOUT BLOODY TIME!

Well, another tough Friday evening's work on the car. Today, thanks to Geary's excellent service at Eliseparts, my new heater blower arrived! Sadly, it looks like it didn't survive its transcontinental trip in the best shape and upon opening the box it was clear to see it'd taken quite a knock. This casing was quite out of shape too! I had a bit of a look over it and it looked repairable (my last casing certainly wasn't!) so I decided to use it, although I'd have to strip it down, panelbeat it and then rebuild it... so not quite the hassle-free solution I'd hoped for! Eliseparts were very helpful too and agreed to give me a discount on my next purchase, which will be coming shortly. So with that, it all got a bit deja vu! I stripped the casing down and whacked it about a bit with a ball pein hammer. After about 20 minutes I'd gotten it back into its correct shape again. I then set about stripping the paint off with the wire wheel and emery. The paint the blower comes with is extremely fragile and thin, which is half the reason they rust out so badly when exposed to the UK elements. This casing was much nicer to strip because I didn't have the rust to contend with! This would get the POR15 treatment to cover the scratched paint where I'd bashed it a bit and also to protect it with a much more resilient coating. I got the first coat on, but then ran out of brushes. Given that it was now 2am, I decided to call it a night. I left the casing hanging at work drying. I'll get up early in the morning, pop down to Placemakers and buy some more brushes and get a second coat on before it completes its 12 hour cure cycle. Hey, at least I got further than I did last weekend!

Quick update: Engine is now built into a long-block. Compression calcs yielded a final result of 11.25 which is a good level... slightly above stock but not hand-grenade material. Next job is getting the inlet and exhaust manifolds port-matched to the head. After that it's a matter of loading the chassis up on a trailer and uniting the two into one. Will take some photos when I take my exhaust manifold in tomorrow.

Yeah, i've vowed never to again.... although I might in the future, just bring a chassis over to turn into a race car... since all of the other crap will be torn out. You don't generally care too much about cosmetics with a race car... the impetus of this build is to have a perfect car built in the original factory mould.... This is my expression of what I would have got if I'd handed Lotus Sport an insane amount of money back in 2001 and asked them to build me the ultimate Exige.

The thing with salt corrosion is that once it's sprayed on there, it kinda stays around. Every time it gets wet, the salt re-dissolves and the process starts all over again. Conceivably you only need to drive a car once or twice a year in the wet. It's the same with roads as well... salt can actually linger around for weeks/months in lesser (but still corrosively significant quantities). There were even rumours that during the seventies, they used to periodically salt some main routes year-round in places to actively increase the demand for the British motor industry.... obviously back in the days before imports became viable and the British motor industry was still very much alive and kicking. Indeed the reputation for British cars being rot-boxes was very much the climate/roading system's problem than the fault of the cars. Ironically, cars like mine suffer even worse given that they're generally developed on a shoestring budget, with components being made out of metal rather than plastics like a more mass-produced car. Sure you get great chassis and dynamics but the details are often fairly lacking. More exotic brands are even worse. I've heard of Ferrari 360s rusting completely through panels in cars less than 2 years old. Lamborghinis are even worse... even the Murcielagos/Gallardos rust up pretty quick. You just don't tend to hear much about them, thanks to their closed-dealer-network. Plan is to have it back in one piece by Christmas, and running shortly after. Hopefully mapping/tuning will happen through January.

This. Believe me, this is not poor condition. I'm lucky in that all of my corrosion has just been surface corrosion, I can still largely clean back to bare metal. Many similar-vintage cars over there have had stuff literally dissolve. It's purely climactic, it's not uncommon for some cars over there to fail MOTs for structural rust after 3-4 years.

Right, just a small Tuesday night update! Have confirmation that the new fan/blower is in transit so if I'm lucky it'll be here by the weekend. Spent an hour or two in the garage tonight refitting the driving lights. Their name suggests that they'll be useful should I ever actually get to drive this thing. Here's the refurbished bracketry for them, compare to the photo taken in Saturday's (14 Nov) update and you'll see that it's quite the improvement. Satin Black enamel over POR15 undercoat, means that they should be a lot more durable than the OEM powdercoat. And here's a shot of the driving lights installed in the crash structure ready to go... at least, despite all the recent troubles, the car is still smiling! My other task for this evening will be placing a call to Hofmanns and ordering my Chris Randall spec Nitrons. Been meaning to get these underway and should bite the bullet and put wheels in motion before the need for them becomes urgent. The show goes on....

Haha wish I had the luxury to walk away... I'm just getting stroppy with the bitch... she wants to play hardball, she'll get it! I'll beat her yet!

Today was one of those days you just wish you'd stayed in bed. Right now I'm sitting here looking at Exige bits wishing I'd never bought the f**king thing. I've just had a complete gutsful. Today, I decided, on the advice of a few people, to pull the heater/blower box out and inspect it. I had decided previously not to do it since it was working fine. However, after seeing some photos of how shocking they can get, I decoded to bite the bullet as it wasn't the sort of thing that could be done later on. Getting the bastard out was a fun job in itself, the car's basically built around it so it's a bloody tight squeeze getting it out. A couple hours of swearing and skinned knuckles and I managed to free it. Stripping it down showed what I expected... rusted to f**k. It also showed one of the most shoddy and poorly engineered heater-assemblies I've ever seen in my life. If there's a bit of this car that's good being buried, never to be seen it's this piece of shit. I began to strip it. Now, the heater box was plastic, the brackets on it had all but dissolved though so these had to be removed. Drilling out the rivets on this proved to be a difficult task, since the plastic it's made out of seems to have been made from the same stuff as Michael Jackson's face.... it wanted to break as soon as you looked at it. The blower case was in piss poor shape. It had more rust on it than my father's E-Type heater unit did when we rebuilt that car. The only difference was that it was 40 years old and had spent its life in America, whereas this has only 6 years of UK weather. I've said it before and I'll say it again, this is the LAST time I buy a UK import car. It was so rusted that one of the studs holding it to the heater box snapped clean off as I went to separate them. So began several hours of wire-brushing, scrubbing, buffing etc and I managed to get most of the rust and old paint removed and back to respectable condition. I then set about making up some studs, one to replace the one that broke off, and three more to replace the rivets that had to be drilled out to release the fan motor from the blower case. These were then welded to the body and it was now ready to be POR15ed. This is where things went from bad to worse. I was just giving the fan case a final buff on the wire wheel around the welds prior to painting when the wheel snagged on one of the studs (I wasn't paying close enough attention I guess). This ripped it from my hand, smashing my fingers against the workbench and the blower casing to the floor at about a zillion miles an hour. This was the final straw and so began the longest string of profanities ever shouted by a human being. My finger was beginning to turn purple where it had been all-but dislocated and the fan casing now sat on the floor with a thumping great dent in it. I decided that at this point I'd had completely enough of this shitty car and went to the tool chest to find a large lump hammer and proceeded to give the sodding fan blower a fitting send-off. F**king thing. I then went online and ordered a new one from Eliseparts, it just wasn't worth the bloody grief. Anyone want to buy an Exige? Going cheap, some assembly required.

Right, well today was a day of delayed progress.... but progress nonetheless, and I'm almost at a huge milestone Started the day by prepping the floor-mat securing studs. These were riveted and bonded to the floor, and I had to get rid of the old rivets and the old adhesive gunked underneath them.... what better tool for this than a lathe?!?!? One of which I happened to have handy! This enabled me to clean them up and punch out the old rivets, leaving four clean floor mat studs ready to bond on. I'll probably do this next weekend as it's a two-person job. My attention then turned back to the front of the car. I spent two hours cleaning up the rest of the front end (got rid of that damned dead fly!) and then gave the front compartment a liberal wipe-down with ACF-50 to make sure that no aluminium corrosion will occur in any of the hard-to-reach places. I then got to thinking whether there were any other jobs I wanted to do before the front clam went back on. The only thing I could think of was to clean, lube and realign the door hinges as both doors were hanging a little low (you could feel them rubbing the striker just a little as the door closed). This done, I had no more excuses not to mount the front clamshell! Now, the front clam has been resident in my bedroom for the past eighteen months. In fact, my bedroom has been so full of Lotus parts that it's rather cramped at times! No wonder I don't get much sustained interest from women! (Well either that or I'm crap in bed.... or both!). I've been very much looking forward to getting it back on the car! So I pulled the blanket off I'd had sitting over it to keep it safe and clean and laid eyes on it for the first time in a loooong time! It then went out to the garage to hang on the car.... this is something I've wanted to see for so bloody long! Unfortunately, I was then thwarted by being pedantic. It was at that point that I noticed that the powdercoating on the driving light brackets, which looked fine, was basically falling off and the brackets were nice and rusty underneath. I don't know how I'd previously missed them! So mounting the clam had to go on hold for the afternoon while I pulled them off, cleaned them up and painted them. Here's what they looked like once I'd pulled a bit of the old powdercoating off: These are currently hanging in the garage, waiting for their coating of POR15 to dry. I'll be rubbing them back with some wet/dry tomorrow and then overcoating them with a satin black spray. Because these bits are up the front of the car, potentially in direct sunlight and POR15 isn't UV stable, this'll prevent the paint from looking crap after being exposed to a lot of sunlight. Tomorrow the front clam WILL go on! HUZZAH!

What better to do on a Friday night than work on one's broken-arse car?!?! This afternoon I went over to see the fine folk at Rivtec to get some rivnuts. This allowed me to insert the rivnuts required to finish up the battery clamp. Spent this evening with a Stanley knife, double-sided adhesive tape and skinned EVA foam sheet (1.2mm) and lined the inside of the battery clamp with the foam. The object of this was to make sure the battery sat inside the clamp nice and snug, with no chance of any rattles. An hour or so and 'twas complete! Beholdeth! Then it was time for the moment of truth... bolting it inside the chassis.... and the result is that it's worked out PERFECTLY, I couldn't be happier with it. Once it's situated in, the washer bottle mount is bolted on via the thee button-head screws you can see below. Then you simply bolt the sliding washer bottle mount to the chassis as you do normally, whilst putting some downward pressure on it (to put the new battery clamp in compression). This done, the battery is now locked in SOLID, the stiffness the shape gives it is surreal and if anything I could have probably gone a touch lighter on the design (although it'd have become hard to manufacture). Trying to tug at the battery with all my strength results in no perceptible flexure. WIN! So all in all, 230 grams of bracket locks it all together nicely. Here you can see the whole lot bolted in place: And in more detail: And finally, with the washer bottle installed in its mount, to show that it all fits how it's supposed to. Sad thing is, that with the washer bottle in it you don't get to see the pretty clamp assembly... but oh well, some of the most beautiful works of engineering are hidden I reckon all up the battery clamp cost about $100 from go to whoa (about 43 quid). Of course it's also required several hours of my time, but if I started billing hours to this rebuild project, I'd end up in tears I'm sure. Only question mark over the battery now is whether the cables will reach. I'm going to have to clip and remake some of the cable ties to get them to reach I think, and it'll be an absolute pain in the arse to screw the terminals on, but I'm pretty sure it'll work out without having to extend the loom at all. It's not ideal, but that's the price you pay for mounting the battery like that and the associated stability / C.O.G. benefits. More tomorrow *edit* Just looking at the photos, I can see I'm REEEEALLY going to have to get in there with a vacuum cleaner and get rid of that dead fly!

Just a quick hour or two in the garage tonight, pottering about as ya do. Firstly, I must start with an admission. Tonight, I sunk to new lows of GJOBness... I think it confirms my madness. I actually made up a bucket of warm, soapy Meguiars, and gave the crash structure a sponge-bath, both inside and out. I never thought I'd get QUITE so bad as to clean out the inside of my crash structure, but there you go... new lows have been achieved! However, I'm pleased to report that 23000 miles of road grime, fly guts and grit have now been replaced by clean looking carbonfibre.... so that's something right? It wasn't all spongebaths though as I managed to get the refurbed radiator fan mounted back onto the new radiator: I then also managed to get the radiator remounted in its carrier frame, although only loosely, since I realised I didn't have any of the M6 penny-washers I needed.... will borrow some from work tomorrow and sort it then.... still, it at least LOOKS like it's got a radiator again, and that's gotta be a good thing!