Esprit's '01 Exige Over-winter refresh

[Esprit]

Well, 20 minutes with the dremel tonight and I managed to carefully cut away the casing on the KnockLite. I've now got a KnockLite-lite

I've ordered a third push-button switch from RS, coming in from the UK, so it'll look like the other two I'm already using on the dash. This will replace the board-mounted microswitch you can see to the left of the photo. The LED will also be stripped from the board and soldered onto a fly-lead so that it can be bulkhead mounted like the other two identical LEDs on the dash. My rotary-switch for the Map-switching is due soon, which will hopefully complete my plethora of things I've now got to squeeze into my gaugepod. I'll be working a few miracles on the SolidWorks on the weekend I think to see if there's any way I can get it all to fit. Fingers crossed I'll come up with something

My radiator is now in the country and has been held at Customs so there'll be a wedge of tax to pay on that.... will no doubt have to go through a customs broker again, which will cost me the proverbial arm and leg.

Must chase up my engine this weekend too. I've been contacting Ken @ KW and he's been strangely silent the last week or so so I'm hoping it's a good silence, not a bad one.

[Esprit]

Right, a good bunch of hours on SolidWorks later and I've finally managed to massage the radio-gaugepod into a shape that I'm happy with, and still manage to (just) fit everything in. The pics below show how everything should look when it's in. SolidWorks predicts that everything should be pretty well visible at the angles, which is nice :

Click pics for supersize images:

Showing what this all contains is as follows:

Gauges:

SPA Design Oil Temperature/Pressure on left

Stack Wideband Lambda on right.

10mm LEDS (left of panel):

Top = Oil Pressure Warning (Latching, white when lit, accompanied by latching audible tone)

Middle = Programmable Knock warning (yellow or orange when lit, and optional green-lit shift-light)

Bottom = Oil Temperature Warning (red when lit, accompanied by latching audible tone)

IP64 Momentary Push-Switches (Right of panel):

Top = Red = Oil Pressure/Temperature warning acknowledge/reset

Middle = Black = SPA Design Oil Pressure/Temperature gauge programming button

Bottom = Yellow = KnockLite Knock display programming / adjustment button

2-position toggle switch: Master power on/off for oil pressure temperature external warning (LEDs and Audible)

3-position rotary switch: Emerald Map-selection: Green = 95 Octane Map, Yellow = 98 Octane Map, Red = Avgas Map.

So yeah, it packs a fair bit of stuff into the vacant radio slot. Fingers crossed it won't look too garish and ad-hoc once it's in place, but if it comes out looking like the CAD renderings, then it shouldn't come out looking bad at all (hopefully).

Now to get making up the buck to mould the damn thing!

[Esprit]

Today was Christmas come early! Stuff arriving left right and centre

First off are my new injectors (which have been here for a few days). They're new 380cc Bosch EV6 injectors. Should be more than enough for my application and sized to be at about 70-75% duty cycle at max power. These are a much more modern and fast-reacting design than the old EV1 type, so should hopefully do the business in terms of fuel-metering

Secondly was my gorgeous new ProAlloy radiator. It's beautifully made and very much a "nice to have" piece, now that I won't have to worry about exploding end-tanks. Will now measure up and make up some new ally fan mounts to go on it before it goes back in.

And lastly, my new battery mount arrived today and am MEGA stoked with it thus far. It's a LOT stiffer than I expected, which was good because I was trying to design in stiffness. It's probably overkill and I could have made it a bit lighter! Having said that it's also much lighter than I was expecting. It's bang on the predicted 225g weight, but holding it in your hands brings home how light that is

I'm confident that if it fits in as I intend it to, it'll be MORE than stiff enough to do the job to even the stingiest scrutineer's satisfaction! There's still a fair bit of work to do on it, I've got to test-fit it, drill it and the washer bottle mount for the through-bolts that'll hold them together. The battery clamp will then go off to the anodisers to get a nice black anodised coating, before having rivnuts and EVA foam lining attached prior to final installation.

So far so good!

[Esprit]

Good news everyone!

Test-fitted the battery clamp tonight and it fits perfectly... well almost It looks like it's going to do the job peeeeerfectly and is going to be immensely stiff and solid once in place.

You can see it mocked up in place below:

When designing it, I couldn't get an accurate measure of the angle that's bonded to the Exige chassis (at bottom of the photo). Due to this, I deliberately oversized the lip on the battery clamp that fits underneath it. The idea here was that it could be trimmed back after test fitting. I've got 10mm to whip off at work tomorrow and it'll be good to go

It's always nice when you design something and it works just as you plan There's a bit of slack in it still, but I'd designed in an allowance to line it with EVA foam so as to stop any chances of it vibrating and making any noises or anything. Will hopefully trim it at work tomorrow and then a second test-fitting will be made to mark out the rivnut drillings then it can go off for anodising SWEET!

[Esprit]

Today I went over to visit Ken at KW, who is handling the engine assembly. Progress has been steady, with the block oilway modifications now complete. These basically involve basically port-matching the cast-in main bearing oil delivery channels in the block to the larger, machined-in ports in the crank cradle.

From this point there's just been a lot of check-assemblies to test everything's going together as it should.... so far so good

State of play at the moment is that the bottom end is effectively done now, with the final seal-up on the oil rail and crank ladder to happen this week. Then we'll be bolting on the dummy head again to check that everything spins freely as it should with the pistons and liners all in place. The pistons will be centred in the bores and then the actual cylinder head will be installed and dummy-torqued for the first time (with the old gasket) to check the valve-to-piston clearances.

This will just allow us to verify that nothing is going to collide and go explodey when we first spin it over. After that's done, the head will come off again, and everything will be given a final clean-up and lube prior to finally installing and torquing the head with the new MLS gasket. Cams will then be finally timed to Piper's specs and the ancillaries like the oil pump, water pump etc. will be bolted on.

The last thing to do then is to spend a bit of time port-matching the inlet and exhaust manifolds to the new ported head.

The long-block will be completed at that stage and I think that's probably when the time will come to re-mount the engine to the gearbox and the whole lot will go back in the car shortly afterwards.

I'm hoping that in the meantime, the car will have come along far enough that it's ready for the engine and there'll just be some minor plumbing and wiring left to do before we can start thinking about livening it up... perhaps around middle-end of November

Still a way to go, but there's a small twinkling light at the end of this tunnel now

Oh and no update would be complete without pics so here we go:

The block from below, HMI Crank and Arrow rods in situ:

Looking at the deck from the top with the liners fully installed and Omega forged pistons pretty much ready to go:

Another view of the deck from the top:

The cylinder head uncloaked and basically ready to bolt on :

[Testament]

open deck block hhmmmrrrmmrmm. all looks nice and shiny though.

[Esprit]

open deck block hhmmmrrrmmrmm. all looks nice and shiny though.

Nowt wrong with it I'm not planning to get boost up it or get mega horsepower out of it, so all is good

Blows me away how light the engine is.. the shortblock you can see there with crank, rods and pistons is light enough for me to carry under one arm.. maybe 30-35kg or so

[fuel]

mmm through-bolt goodness

[Esprit]

Houston: We have clearance! 2.9mm of it in fact! No pistons smashy valves for me!

The bottom end is now together and looking brilliant, and Ken will be doing the final head torque-down soon, so it'll become a long-block at long last (see what I did there?!). Starting to look like an engine again!

In other news, my Canton Racing oil filtration stuff arrived from Uncle Sam today... stung me a packet on shipping for some reason, which reminds me to always get quotes for shipping stuff.... costs seem to vary wildly between suppliers... this package costing about five times as much as others of similar size/weight I've had sent! Oh well, lesson learned, it's here now at least.

Had these filters recommended to me by a few people in the know and I couldn't see a reason to go against them. Shown here is an adaptor canister with takes a replaceable filtration element (shown at left). I bought a 6-pack of the filters, which should last me a while.

These synthetic filters offer twofold advantage over standard off-the-shelf filters. For starters they filter down to smaller particle sizes, down to 8 microns as opposed to about 25 microns for a pleated paper-media filter. Secondly, since the filtration method is different (depth filtration versus surface filtration) the oil filter can flow much more oil than a standard type filter, far more than the engine will ever pump, and hence can do without a bypass valve. This means that the engine is filtering all the oil, all the time, whereas a normal oil filter at high RPM may be bypassing a significant amount of the oil around the filter.

It's probably needless, but I figured it was worth a shot for the extra peace of mind

I'm away for the long weekend as of tomorrow so nothing will happen on the car this weekend, I will return next week though for more pointless rebuild action.

[Esprit]

Not much progress this week, been waiting for a few things to arrive.

Piper cambelt arrived this week and is now out with the engine. The head and pistons getting CC'd this weekend so I can work out compression ratio and decide whether to run the head gasket with the "saver shim" or not.

Tonight I just picked up the anodising I had done on the battery clamp and the radiator fan brackets I made up... looks a million bucks.... much like the rest of the car is beginning to

[Esprit]

Right, a perfect, sunny, late-October Saturday! So what better way to spend it than NOT getting a tan from inside the workshop?!

This afternoon I begun shaping up the buck for the dashboard gaugepod. Of course I've done this before, but for the aborted single-gauge pod. This is for the new "MkII" design as I spoke about a few weeks back.

So first, take one piece of 4x4 (actually 2x 2x4s glued together in my case):

Use the previously generated SolidWorks model/drawings to cut out some paper templates and use them to figure out where material will be removed from. Take to the wood with a radial arm saw, a hacksaw and a coping saw and quite possibly several other kinds of saw:

Spend a few hours whittling away with a wood-rasp, sandpaper, a linisher and whatever else you have lying around and itl'll look something like this:

There's still a fair way to go on it, and I've over-cut some areas so they'll need to be built back up with bodyfiller and re-sanded. This will happen tomorrow.

Once I'm happy with the rough shape, it'll start getting finish-sanded and fitted in the dash (for accurate sizing).

I'll then lay a few coats of paint on to get it nice and glossy so that it makes a good mould-surface.

Let's see how far I get tomorrow.....

[Beaver]

loving the work mate, some serious coin and time being spent. just a thought, did you think of using high density foam for your pod design? i have used it a few times for moulds and it is very easy to work with. also a lot easier/quicker to shape than wood. might be a bit late, but maybe a thought for the future

cheers

[Esprit]

Cheers Hunted,

Yeah did think about using it, but didn't have any handy and had a shedload of wood hanging around and figured it'd be okay

This is my first time doing buck-making etc, so having wood being a little slower and more forgiving makes me take it a little slower and hopefully f**k up less

[tortron]

welding is a great way to get an in-shed tan

[Beaver]

Cheers Hunted,

Yeah did think about using it, but didn't have any handy and had a shedload of wood hanging around and figured it'd be okay

This is my first time doing buck-making etc, so having wood being a little slower and more forgiving makes me take it a little slower and hopefully f**k up less

haha i know exactly what you mean

[Esprit]

Just got home (at 3am) and decided to try a cheeky test-fit. Good news is that it fits and the viewing angles are just as I'd hoped they would be. Gauges will be nice and visible

Fingers crossed that it'll look a little bit less conspicuous when it's trimmed up in blue Alcantara like the rest of the dash

So far, so good

Apologies for the dodgy 3am camera-phone pics!

[Esprit]

After looking at the buck sitting in the dash last night, I decided I'd try to round off the left hand side a bit. Ideally i'td be totally rounded off but with the need to fit the LEDs there, that's not going to be an option. I decided to modify the LEDs position and make them radial with the gauge, instead of vertically aligned. Then I'd reshape things a bit and this is what I'm looking for (Click links for large pics):

I've started filling and reshaping the buck but it's slow going to get the shape just right.... stay tuned...

[Esprit]

I said it would be slow.... and I was RIGHT!

It's just really been a day of slowly shaping, sanding, filling, re-sanding etc.... but it's getting here

I'll let the pics speak for themselves:

[bubblegoose]

take it back to the oldschool and just use the wood instead

[Esprit]

Right, well not much on the Lotus this weekend. Have a Monday trackday at the new Hampton Downs track tomorrow, so I've been prepping the GTi6 for some track abuse since the Exige quite clearly won't be ready for it. It's kinda sad that when I signed up for he trackday about 4-5 months ago, I was sure the Exige would be ready to début on the new circuit... something about best laid plans and all that I guess.

But today, I did manage to get a little bit done on the car.

First involved getting the new custom-made fan-mounts riveted to the radiator. Now in place and looking a million bucks:

I then set about getting the radiator mounted in the car, which turned my attention to the rad-fan. This looked particularly sad, so I decided to strip it for a bit of a check-over and clean-up.

Upon stripping, it became patently apparent that the fan, like the rest of the car had been pretty badly affected by the cess-pool of hydrochloric acid that is the UK. Here we can see the fan motor casing looking like an artefact from the titanic:

I immediately feared the worst, and while I knew it was working when the car was pulled off the road, I feared it mightn't much longer. After contemplating importing a new fan, I decided to investigate further. I pulled the motor apart and thankfully the ingress of cancer hadn't affected the innards. Bearings were still in good order and sealed. I slapped a bit of moly grease where appropriate (just to make sure) and sealed it back up.

I then set about tidying the motor up, first attacking it with the wire brush:

Then the primer:

Before finishing with several coats of fetching satin black:

The fan basket and blade assembly was then treated to a nice clean-up and a liberal coating of plastic restorer/protectant to help stave off the elements. This, reunited with the fan motor completed the process:

The fan was then tested and received two thumbs up from the fastidious bastard in charge (me).

I was then stopped in my tracks from further assembly by the great nyloc nut shortage of Nov '09. I then decided that it was late and that I had a trackday in the morning so it was best to stop arseing about with my wreck of a Lotus and get some shut-eye.