Steering colum sorted

The past week has mainly been taken up with trying to figure out a solution to the steering problem. The reinforced bracket for mounting the steering column arrived from Peter, so I stuck it on the car. The reinforcements eliminated 90% of the flex that had concerned IVA, but the bigger issue was that I couldn't find a position that gave satisfactory clearance from engine, chassis and exhaust.

After a lot of struggling, I could find a position that would give me about 2 mm clearance in each case, but I had to space the bracket on one side so that it was quite twisted to achieve this, and in any case, now that I was thinking about clearance, I wasn't really happy with this (I think it's about what I had before IVA).

Much time was spent fiddling around, and eventually I figured that I would need to move the bracket inboard a little, which meant cutting a notch out of the side of it. This was done without issue, but unfortunately that removed some of Peter's reinforcement and left me with a fair bit of flex; and it still gave very marginal clearance.

The options seemed to be: a redesign of the steering column; chop a corner off the engine; chop a chunk out of the chassis.

The former would be a big help - there's room to rearrange the lower shaft in such a way that would improve clearance everywhere, but obviously this is quite a bit of work. I'm not keen to chop bits out of structurally important bits of the chassis, so that left the engine. Comparing notes and photos with Jason (many thanks to Jason for all the info and help here) showed that the M52 engine I'm using sticks out a little bit more than the S50 that he's using, which perhaps explains why he didn't have the difficulties I've been having. The protruding bit seemed to just be a bit of plastic rocker cover and a bolt to hold the rocker cover on, so I removed the bolt and used a hacksaw to trim back the rocker cover.

Trimmed corner of engine.

That done, I finished bolting in the column mounting bracket, but felt that it still had an amount of flex - not enough to actually be an issue, but since IVA didn't like it, I wanted to eliminate it completely. Most of today was spent making up a couple of supporting brackets, which have now completely eliminated play in the bracket.

Supporting bracket 1.

Supporting bracket 2.

I think IVA should be happy with both clearance and lack of movement in the column, so that's another item ticked off.

Remaining to be done:

• sort out headlight position so they don't obscure the driver's view - the new bar and headlights have arrived, so this should be straightforward
• move indicators - I will probably mount these on the cycle wings for IVA, and then move them back to the headlight bar afterwards. This should just be a case of knocking up a suitable mounting bracket.
• sort out steering self-centering. I have some ideas which may help here; now the steering column is back in place, I can start to investigate this problem.
• Trim - a few sharp edges to cover up with rubber trim, about 10 minutes work most likely.

So, plenty still remaining, but one of the tricky bits is now sorted, which is a good step forwards towards being road-legal.