The hole job

The U bend was put back on the toilet and after fixing the 90deg bend to flat board and covering in masking tape, Dad layed up a few layers of fibreglass to create a flange to join the bend and airbox (sorry no pictures). After some trimming, sanding and drilling the flange was mated to the 2 parts as seen below.

It was then just a matter of bolting it on the spacer and making up an aluminium support bracket. We are pretty pleased with how it has turned out, very secure, neat and hopefully give the best breathing possible (based on the bike design)

The height of it all does look very menacing and we were wondering how much bonnet was going to have to be cut out and how it would affect my field of view! This engine is one of the smallest due to the lack of secondary injectors and variable trumpets in the airbox, the later R1 is much taller.

I am getting a new bonnet to build up a plug for a new design that will be more accommodating  for the modern injection bike engines, but for now we will just cut a hole in the bonnet. To do this i copied the shape of the airbox on to a piece of card, cut it out, placed it over the engine and marked up where the bonnet pins on the chassis were. I then aligned the template with the bonnet pin holes in the bonnet and transferred the cut out onto the bonnet

The first problem we encountered was that with the front of the bonnet wrapping under the ducting for the radiator it was almost impossible to lower the bonnet over the airbox, and once it was on the hinge it definetly wouldn't work. There were 2 options, make the hole in the bonnet bigger (longer) or cut the lower edge of the bonnet away. We are creating a new lower front end for the bonnet to incorporate a splitter which would mean that a hinged bonnet would not work any way so it was decided to cut out the lower section.

The wooden spars are still entact to attach to the hinge bracket if we need them, but by adding 2 bonnet pins to the top of the upper wishbone chassis mounts, it now now ,means the bonnet lifts on and off easily, rather than the scrabbling around trying to get to the hinge bolts.

Now that the bonnet could be lowered on properly, it became obvious that a lot more of the bonnet needed to be removed!!! First off the choke and secondary throttle position sensor fouled the bonnet, so this was nibbled away, then the throttle cable mount, AIS valve and breater pipes started touching so this required more cut out, then the coil pack on the front spark plug caught, then the 2nd, then the 3rd and then the 4th, and finally the front top corner of the cam cover fouled!!And this is how we ended up with this whacking great hole!!!! So much for a neat little hole!!!

The bonnet must have been 20mm thick in places due to all the repairs and graftings of bulges onto it, and i reckon i have cut 3kg of weight out of it! New lightweight body work is definitely needed!!!

Even though its only temporary  (maybe the entire season temporary!) the hole needed to be covered to meet the regs. The bonnet is all over the place in this area due to the curves and existing bulge for the old airbox, so the initial idea of forming an aluminium panel over the top was not looking easy.  It was decided that a fibreglass bulge would be the easiest, but how could we form something over all the bits and bobs on the engine. Hunting around the garage and workshop we found some thick foam (from the base of an unused seat from the the bus) and trapped it under a plastic bag between the bonnet and engine so it covered and formed its self over the bumps and knobs of the engine. The trouble with this was it was still a bit too uneven and left an abrupt edge between the hole in the bonnet and the protruding foam, we needed something flexible and flat to smooth the foam out, this was found in the form of a piece of carpet!! With this trapped under the bag, between the bonnet and foam laid on the engine it gave a nice smooth  bulge. We then used masking tape to blend in the curves and reinforce it, and covered the boinnet in plastic to protect it from the up and coming GRP resin.

3 layers of wet CSM matting latter and we had a pile of sick on a bonnet.....

A few hours latter and a bit of trimming we had a mould for the bulge. After some prep and further trimming of the bonnet this will be temporarily attached to the bonnet and a couple of layers of fibreglass laid from the inside of the bonnet to create the bulge.

Another job i needed to do (and another reason not to start the wiring) was to fit a cat. I had an unused cat and sleeve of Tim Cheeneys in my garage, and he said that i was welcome to use some of it as long as he was left with a usable piece aswell (thanks Tim!!). I simply cut it in half to produce what is shown below.

I drilled 3 holes in the sleeve and used steel pop rivets to attach it to the end of the exhaust. I can quickily and easily drill these out to inspect the cat at race meets if i suspect the cat is failing or blocked with wadding.

It is getting desperately close to only having the wiring left to do so i was scrabbling round looking for mechanical jobs to finish. A new tunnel top was required......

A boss was needed in the top aluminium hose for the water temperature sender....

And the the pressure sensors needed fitting.......

So with dad busy with the fibreglass it looks like i have no choice but to start the wiring next time!

Fury of activity

Up until last week it felt like we were getting no where very quickly and a long way off, but has suddenly all come together. Its going to be a bit of a midge modge of a report as we did lots of bits and bobs, but here goes....

I completed  connecting up the fuel system, incorporating an inline fuel pressure gauge and high pressure filter. I've probably gone a bit over the top with filters as i have an inline one at the rear before the low pressure scavenge pump, the standard filter in the bike pump and then this inline high pressure one before the fuel rail. I managed to reuse the clip on fuel pipe connectors between the pump and injector rail

An exciting moment was the arrival of the carbon fibre spacer plate to enable the airbox to be turned 180degrees and miss the injector rail. I wanted to try and keep the seal between the throttle bodies and the airbox, plus machining off the profile from the throttle bodies would mean a fuel strip and clean of the them, something i really didn't like the look of. It also means that the other than the removal of a small bracket on the fuel rail and one small triangular extrusion on the airbox, the engine parts are completely standard, making replacement easy and also  hopefully ensuring no running problems. The couple of hours spent drawing up, printing, laying the drawing over the profile, then modifying the drawing and reprinting numerous times paid off, and the spacer slipped on perfectly. A nice touch is that the guy who made it for me normally makes the Mclaren F1 chassis's, so now i have a bit of F1 car on my little Fury!! :-)

 I should have made it up in MDF first as per the engine mount as few small modifications to the design would have made fitting the spacer a lot simpler, i.e. making it 5mm larger so that the outer most holes on the throttle bodies and airbox could be used and moving the 2 small holes into a central position, but if i ever have any more made i will incorporate this. But with a little thought and few blunted drills (carbon fibre is horrible stuff to work with!) it was attached to the throttle bodies and 4 holes taped into it to attached the airbox to it.

 

Another small job was some sort of prop catcher, as the prop was higher than before the existing straps couldn't be used. The straps would have also been pretty useless, as by the time the prop has hit them, the reverse gear would have been chopping itself through my leg, so i was keen to have a robust design. Dad had the the brainwave of using the metal support from a centre bearing, so with a bit of grinding and the addition of an aluminium bracket (with curved side just for Tim H ;-) ) a very effective catcher is no mounted as shown below.

 

Next up was thecam cover breather mod. The 5VY R1 has been known to pressurise the crankcase enough to eject lots oil out of the breather, causing the destruction of said engine. The well documented mod is to add a breather to the cam cover, and pipe this into the top of the catch tank, which then has a return line back to the crankcase breather. Some people block off the AIS valves and fit a breather to the came cover, but another way of doing it is to remove the AIS reed valves and use these as the outlet. I liked this idea as it seemed the simpliest and neatest plan. I got the info from HERE. To route the oil back to the catch tank i just used the standard hoses from the AIS system, removed the solenoid valve from the plastic T piece and cover it with an ali plate and the pipe that normally goes to the airbox now goes the catch tank. OK, i could have used a plastic T piece from anywhere, but this one was free and sitting in the garage, plus it pushed the pipes in the right direction.

The catch tank was mounted on the bulkhead just above the height of the crankcase breather, so any oil that finds it way in there should hopefully drain back in. The photo was taken before the return from the cam cover breather was attached

Next up was the plumbing. The oil cooler was pretty simple, reusing one of the hoses from the original install plus a new 6" longer one for the other. The only mod required around the take off plate was the main water inlet pipe had to be bent out and the mounting bracket back to the engine modified, all to allow the cooler pipes to attach to the sandwich plate.

The water pipes were also pretty simple once i'd gathered together all the info of where all the pipes went (see HERE). I only needed an extra couple of meters of hose, 1 x 90deg pipe and some extra aluminium pipe, which i was very pleased about, the price of silicon hose is criminal! There were a couple of places where hoses were required to T into the main upper and lower hoses, so we had these welded into the aluminium pipes.

With all the pipework in place it was time to bolt the exhaust back on, and get the pictures i promised earlier. Its not a shiney stainless system, but its beautifully made, and just slides together

 
A nice touch from Tony Law Exhausts:-

Finally the airbox needs some clean air funnelled into it. The intake of the airbox is under the airbox which is now above the gearbox. The addition of the 15mm spacer helps with the available space, but some kind of 90 deg bend was required to mate the triangular intake and bonnet scoop/air duct. Some hunting around in the garage and head scratching and we were heading towards making a fibreglass mould based on a shaped foam plug. That was until dad scurried off to the bathroom and returned with a toilet U bend

It was the start if a good idea, but i refused to have anything that is designed to have turds passed through it attached to my car!!! We have a famous situation in RGB involving underwear in an airbox, but i'm not ready to have crap in mine ;-) Anyhow it was slighty too bulky, but gave us the idea of using a standard 100mm 90 deg waste pipe with the end sliced off, and attached to the airbox with a fibreglass moulded  adaptor

So while Dad makes that up i'll be refitting and tidying stuff up in a vain attempt to keep away from the wiring! The aim now is have the car running by the end of the month, ready for a mornings test at Mallory at the start of march, and a full trackday at Silverstone 24t March, so i'd better start looking ta that wiring diagram!

Swirl Pottering

I'd been musing over the fuel supply system for a while. If i was starting from scratch i would have had a custom made fuel tank with built in swirl pot and either used the original bike pump or an inline high pressure pump. But i already had a perfectly good fuel tank, and being plastic i couldn't modified it. I'd mused with just using an inline high pressure pump but was worried about fuel starvation so that meant i'd need a swirl pot. I had the bike pump included with the purchase of the engine so it made sense to reuse this and i know it will be supplying enough fuel. So with the help of Bob and his welding man i had a custom pot made that housed the bike pump. The pot is fed from the original blade pump at the rear of the car using the new fuel lines pictured earlier in the blog.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time cutting. turning, drilling and taping various bits of horrid pure aluminium. Pure aluminium is great for welding but rather less fun to machine, the resulting fun from taping the m4 threads  in the base plate resulted in me drilling them out and retaping more carefully with M5's.  The pictures either show a luna landing module or the pot in the question, depending upon who you listen to ;-). 

Initially i wanted to mount the pot infront of the pedals, but it would have been very fiddly to connect up and inspect the pipes so opted for the the more spacious option, just behind the front suspension.