Esprit

Fully dressed it's around 82kg, or a little under.

Well here's hoping If I can ever finish the thing I'll be stoked

from my hazy memory of mr esprit, he is the type of guy whos all about the rota hoez and camo doorcards. Hahah 12As are substantially heavier than a RoverK And yeah, the Exige is a Chlamydia-free zone so that rules a rotang out

If this is true, then I'm not really bothered.... it's just that the project has just been waiting a few days for a part for most of the past 18 months.... I've been going 3.5 years on this sodding car now without driving or enjoying it..... I was a young man when I started.... I have grey hairs now.

Maybe BMC A-series?

Hehe, nah the 2zz ain't that bad, just in Elises they've proven pretty fragile things until you spend good money on them.... although I suppose that's no different to the Rover I've got now, except the Rover is at least light

Sadly it's all the engine in/out business that's ripping my sack right now Would rather root my own mother than resort to a crappy 2ZZ

Car ate all my money.... no money to be addicted to anything else. Being dirt poor is a good way to avoid addiction.

FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!! I got the gearbox bits today and took them over to KW, which was all good. But when I inspected the bits it turns out we're still one bit short thanks to a miscommunication. On top of this there's another part (the 5th gear on the input shaft) that I'm not 100% happy with and would rather replace than risk assembling it into the rebuilt gearbox. This is going to cost another buttload in shipping and delay things a few days, which means my weekend which I'd planned to be spending getting the car reassembled means I'll be instead spending the weekend sitting around with my thumb up my arse.... great! Bloody car, I really don't know why I bother, I don't get any joy from it any more and I truly have reached my limit with it now.... I just want it finished so the bills can stop and I can buy a house.

http://helmart.co.nz/ Supplier and painter of ARAI GP-series helmets

Just a little pre-weekend update.... replacement gearbox parts have been ordered and should be here middle of next week at the latest. Aiming to get the box bolted back to the engine and the engine back in the car and running next weekend. Hopefully the following week will involve getting the clam back on and doing some skids. This weekend I'll be making up a new, improved inlet manifold gasket and trying to get everything matched up as closely as I can. I remember once upon a time when I had a life.

It will be painted by someone who knows exactly what they're doing, trust me

Not really build related, but the car must be getting close to completion now because my new helmet showed up today. It's an Arai GP5W, and I've wanted one for some time since I tried one on a couple of years back. The visibility is a lot better out of the wider eyeport and when in the Exige I'll be using it with a peak and not the visor as it's got fitted now. This should allow a lot more ventilation inside a hot closed cockpit, which is something that on longer track sessions becomes a problem in NZ. Especially on trackdays where they won't let you run with the windows down! Oh and yeah, it's plain white... but it won't be staying that way for too long I hope

Possibly up to 1000... engine built to handle over 9000, but 8500 will be safe. Power will probably peak around 8400 though I'd guess.

Just out of interest, here's the dyno-plots from the run-in. Bearing in mind this was a conservative tune on 6-month old fuel, with a failing gearbox and not much attention paid to ironing out the kinks. It's not too bad. This dyno session was more about getting the engine under load ASAP and bedding it in. After the run-in I hope we can add another 15 or so bhp to these figures.... which should be achievable @Rear Wheels @Engine

Nice that she's back running. Perhaps a mapping session is in order for the Link?

Of course, this all depends on Quaife.... I'm going to shove a rocket up their sphincter tonight and make sure they move heaven and earth to get me my parts in timely fashion.

More than balls deep... all that's left exposed now is my head and ankles. Found the fault with the gearbox and someone else will be paying.... clear traceable fault. Won't say any more since I've people to talk to tonight but hopefully a repair will be a matter of just getting some new parts from the UK, hopefully within a week or two. Aiming now to have the car on the road October 1.

Yeah I was a bit fuuuuuuuuuuu. But what can ya do? Too far down this road to quit now.

Right well it's been a little while since I've updated but things have certainly been happening. Sadly it's not been going entirely to plan and we're back in a bit of a hole, drama drama drama. I got the engine all primed up a couple of weeks back but was disheartened last weekend to return to the car to find a puddle of coolant under her that had clearly leaked out of the head gasket. This was an initial worry and after a few days of panic, I found out that sometimes these MLS gaskets on the K weep a bit until they've been through a few heat cycles. We decided to chance our arm and run it on the dyno and see how things went. So, on Friday, I loaded the car up on the trailer and headed north to hopefully get the car ready for the road. Got up to Glenn's and we got the car bolted onto the dyno and quickly warmed up and under load. Thankfully, the water leak cleared up right away so our hopes of having the engine seal itself up worked out. Things were looking good. The engine however was making hard work of things. It was off-song, and while it was making more power than it was last time on the dyno (with the knackered valves) it was still a mile away from what it was before Christmas with the initial engine build. We pressed on working the engine hard to ensure a good bedding in of the rings. We were feeling a bit down over the engine power when the gearbox started jumping out of 5th gear on the dyno. It had done this a couple of times before, but was now doing it consistently... strange as it'd only done this on the dyno. Glenn ended up having to try to hold it in gear as we were doing the large pulls and even then it was kicking out and getting worse. Obviously this bent a selector fork or something as it then jammed the gearlever which then took some freeing.... we then couldn't select 5th or 6th gears.... the gearbox was toast. Despite this we had a bit of a brainstorm as to what was causing it to be down on power. We theorised that the box was probably on the way out and was dragging... however on a hunch I decided to look down the trumpets at the manifold gasket since I did a lot of work cutting the ports out on it prior to my first build. As I suspected, this hadn't been done on the new gasket I'd had fitted and this was partially shrouding the inlet ports around the injectors. We stripped the inlet manifold and roughly butchered the gasket and reassembled. We ran the engine again expecting to maybe gain a few horsepower and miraculously the engine came right on song and gained almost 30! Obviously the obstruction was causing some nasty turbulence that was killing the flow. A bit more tweaking, and despite running it conservatively and only running it to 8000RPM, we made 192bhp at the rear wheels or 211bhp at the engine (assuming a 10% drivetrain loss)... not bad for an initial tune on 6-month old petrol. This bodes well for the engine to make 225bhp or so (205bhp at the rear wheels) once it's fully run in and happy, which is somewhere around my goal of 220-230bhp for the engine on the stock exhaust and throttles... which isn't too bad. Sadly though, it was a bad day overall with the gearbox issues so we're back to pulling the engine out for the umpteenth time to split the box and rebuild it. Already the engine is about halfway to being back out of the car and a good garage session in the morning tomorrow should see it swinging from the crane again and the gearbox parting company. We'll strip it ASAP so I can figure out what's gone wrong and how to fix it. I'm unspeakably pissed off about the whole business, but hey, at least the engine is playing nice now... just the gearbox to sort then I can hopefully start to run the car again..... at least until the next fuck-up!

Another day and more progress. Thanks to my good friend Richy, today we managed to get most of the rest of the engine peripherals hooked up. In connecting things up, we found that the reverse light switch on the gearbox has taken a knock during transport and ripped the wires out. Due to this, I'll wait until next weekend to fill the gearbox because I've now got to sort this out as well as change the driveshaft seals. I'll try to track down a replacement this week and I'll get Glenn to wire it in for me when it goes up to see him for the dyno. On the good side, most of the rest of the sensors are hooked up and I got the engine mounts all torqued up. I managed to get much of the old synthetic oil drained out of the oil cooler lines as well. I got the engine refilled with coolant and static-bled and I then filled the engine with the running-in oil. A hearty chunk of cranking on the starter without the plugs or injectors connected got the oil pump primed. Once I had oil pressure I was able to remove one of the oil cooler feed lines from the oil thermostat and purge the remainder of the old oil and air out. Just before packing it in for the night I got the gear selector cables reattached. Mission for this week is to get hold of a new reverse light switch for the gearbox and to HOPEFULLY receive the new driveshaft seals. I'll swap these over as soon as I can before filling the box with fresh MT90. Once that's done, next weekend will involve getting the driveshafts back in place, the rear suspension bolted back together and finishing off the engine peripherals by fitting the airbox, throttle cable and remaining sensors. We'll then see if we can get the engine to fire, which should hopefully be fairly straightforward. As soon as it fires, we'll shut it down and get the rear clam and undertrays on. I want the car complete and ready for the road before we trailer it to Glenn's to break the bitch in on the Dynapak. At this stage we're looking pretty good to have it done by the first week in September or thereabouts and I can get to work putting the miles on it with limited RPM to get it all run in.... hopefully this time will have a happier ending than last time....

Right, it's been a busy week in the garage. First off, was to get my new extinguisher bracket anodised, tested and fitted. It turned out working quite well. I've still got to figure out where to mount the remote charge cylinder which will be a challenge, but so far it looks good! Next I had to pick up my completed engine: Then today I stuffed it into a hole with the help of my friends James and Nikki Colverson. As it sits now I've still got to torque up the mounts but I've got about half the lines and wiring hooked up. Should have that finished tomorrow. I'm still lacking the new gearbox output shaft seals as one of the old ones is weeping. I've yet to decide whether I'll get it going with the old seals then fit the new ones, or whether I'll just hang fire and fit the new seals this coming week and get it running next weekend. I'll figure it out I'm sure

Well it's been a busy few weeks and not nearly enough of that has been on the car. I spent a while last weekend designing up a new bracket for the extinguisher to allow it to mount in the same place as the old one without having to drill or bolt anything else to the chassis. It's being manufactured and I'm waiting to get it back and then send it for anodising this week. Today I set about mounting the nozzles. I'm holding fire (pun intended) on the engine bay nozzles until the engine's back in so that I can see where they need to be positioned to cover the engine with no shrouding. The interior nozzles were a no-brainer though as these had to mount in the middle of the car firing directly outwards into the footwells. This is the way Lifeline mandate them to be to achieve FIA rating. After tossing up a couple of options, I decided to pick up on a couple of pre-existing holes under the dash in the middle of the car. I think these holes are used for mounting the HVAC console in the air-conditioning-equipped cars... meaning in mine they're ripe for other uses. I went into work and designed up a simple bracket to hold the nozzles, and then cut and folded it in 1.2mm sheet-alloy. I spent a little while getting it really tidy before I mounted the nozzles on. Here you can see the nozzles mounted into the bracket with the tubing lines attached to the tee. To this, I then added the fire-resistant braiding: From here it was an hour upside down in the footwell mounting the nozzles in. The end result was worth it though as they're perfectly placed, yet completely invisible unless you're looking under the dash for them. They're also very tidy when you do stick your head under there... thus satisfying my OCD I ran out of time to run the line from the extinguisher up to these nozzles, but it's going to be a nice easy run up the centre console. One evening this week I'll pull the centre-divider out and run the line, and it should all look just right! Hopefully by then I've got the extinguisher mounted in too and I can figure out where I'm gonna mount the charge-canister and run the wiring. On the engine front, I'm going to give KW a call tomorrow to remind them I'm waiting on it and hopefully it'll be something approaching assembled by next weekend.

Another successful day today on the car. Mission today was to get the interior and seats in and roof on. One thing I wanted to get done while the seats and roof were out/off was a little plumbing. My latest acquisition for the car was a Lifeline Zero360 FIA fire extinguisher system. This arrived in the country last week and while the whole thing won't be hooked up for a while, I wanted to use the opportunity of having the car empty to run the line from the extinguisher, through the rear bulkhead to the engine bay. I managed to find a nice easy, tidy path from the extinguisher (to be mounted in front of the passenger's seat) to the engine bay. I've run it up the centre console with the wiring and I follow the loom across the top of the fuel tank and I'm using a previously-blanked hole just behind the left-hand door. Once this was done, I was able to reinstall the rear fascia: Followed by the seats. Here you can see the extinguisher just sitting in situ for positioning. So the car's now pretty much ready for the engine when it's done. I'll keep busy the next couple of weeks making up more bits for the extinguisher system (brackets for nozzles, the cylinder etc) Onwards!...

And another useful evening in the garage tonight. First I managed to get the Lava Mat patch trimmed and stuck onto the firewall in the right position. This is to handle the more extreme radiant heat that gets past the exhaust manifold heat shield. This stuff was surprisingly easy to apply and I've got bags more of it I'll be using in the future for other shields. Then it was time to finish and fit the foam heatshield. The end result was very good. I didn't get it QUITE right around the left hand side of the firewall as for some reason it came up about 6mm short. But given that it was the same size as the last one, it's all in how it's stretched during fitting. Sadly its a one-shot job so you can't reposition it when it's in place so it's staying put. The rest of it is spot on though and looks even better than my original attempt. The aluminium tape around the edges really finishes it off and it was much more robust-feeling when I was stretching and squeezing it into place. Here's the finished article so you can see how the whole lot comes together. Looks rather good I thought! Job done! Tomorrow I'll route the line to the engine bay for the extinguisher, get the interior bulkhead panel back in, get the seats in and the roof on. Then I'll tackle where to / how to mount the extinguisher in the tidiest possible way. Just for good measure, here's a couple of shots of my overcrowded and VERY messy garage at the moment. Hopefully it's not too long before the damn thing can go back together again and free up enough space for me to have a muck-out. It's WELL overdue, I've got so much crap in here! Note use of duvets to cover the car... which is actually really good as they give a bit of cushioning should shit fall on it.... good if Auckland does what Christchurch has been doing and gets all wobbly!