Fully road legal

Having passed IVA, the next step is to get through the DVLA process, which is, if anything, an even more daunting task. Theoretically it's just paperwork, so you'd think that you could just hand over the IVA certificate, get a tax disc and a numberplate, job done, but of course government agencies are not really geared up for that sort of efficiency.

I first drove up to the DVLA (60 miles away in Peterborough) straight after the IVA, but missed their opening hours by five minutes. I went up again on the Thursday, handed over the impenetrable forms (which are extremely hard to fill out as they cover importing vehicles, registering new vehicles, etc, as well as kit cars, and therefore have many irrelevant fields). They took the forms and told me to turn up in a week with the car on a trailer so that they could inspect it (i.e., check the VIN which was already checked at IVA).

On Tuesday I took it up to DVLA on a trailer (thanks Simon), which blew up various fuses on my car - I blame the trailer, Simon blamed my car. I suspect he's right. DVLA had a look round the car, and then sold me a tax disc to start from April 1st (Tuesday being March 29th - hence getting a tax disc from the start of March would be a bit of a waste). As they pointed out, they couldn't give me the tax disc there and then, obviously, despite the week's notice, so they'd have to post it anyway...

The numberplate details and tax disc arrived today, dated to start from the start of March, bit of a waste of money there. I drove to Halfords and got them to make me up some plates - they were a little thrown by the letter Q, which they didn't have, but they did their best to make one out of an O and a straight bit. It looks rubbish but it will do for now.

There was a little bit of light left, so I went for a quick drive. Filling up confirmed I was getting about 22 mpg, which is poor. Otherwise, the car performed well, and drove very nicely (and quickly). I need a stronger neck, or a windscreen though - 100 mph wind buffeting a heavy helmet is hard work.

When I got the car back home, I plugged in the laptop and found that it was reporting a lambda sensor error. Not a big surprise, I'd seen this intermittently before, and had already ordered a new sensor with the intention of replacing the one that I hadn't previously replaced. I popped the new one in; hopefully this will sort out the fuel consumption (apparently it's quite possible for bad lambda sensors to wreck fuel consumption on these engines, so this is quite plausible).

I also tried plugging in my old dash, and discovered that the reason that it was displaying low water temperature was because the new dash was mis-calibrated - the water temperature was in fact exactly where it should be - given that I'd replaced the thermostat I'd expect water temperature to be spot on, but it's good to have it confirmed.

Looking forward to the summer now.

IVA passed

Happily, I passed the retest today without issues. I had a much more civilised 12:30 appointment, so set out around 10 in (intermittent) sunshine, which was pretty nice.

Setting out.

I had to stop pretty soon to take the steering wheel off and put it back on again as it was far from straight - fortunately I'd brought all the right tools so this didn't take long.

Wheel back on. Thanks to Ben for the lend of the helmet.

The process was very smooth - the inspector had a quick look at the list of failures from my prior test, looked around the car for a few minutes and ticked off a few obvious ones. Fortunately, this included the forward vision issue which was the one thing I was most concerned about - he didn't bother measuring the headlight height, probably because it's quite a faff to do, but just said "that looks fine". Indicator position was right on the limit of acceptability (the outer edge of the indicator was exactly 40 cm in from the outermost edge of the car, which is the maximum permitted), but the rules say 40 cm, so he passed that too. Finally he had a quick drive around the block to check self centering. Unlike last time, he didn't have to spend a few minutes doing circles on full lock - obviously he was satisfied by just going around the block, which was as expected as the car was self-centering quite nicely on the way there.

Waiting for the IVA inspector to finish his lunch break.

Fortunately it didn't snow this time.

I got the certificate and went off to Peterborough DVLA office to get it registered and taxed, but sadly got there five minutes after it closed, so that will have to wait.

The car car drove very nicely there and back, the only issue being the fuel consumption which (mostly a steady 70ish on a dual carriage way) was not more than 20 mpg, a fair bit worse than expected. I think a new lambda sensor may help here. If not I'm not totally sure what I will do about this...

(Mostly) ready for IVA

With Emily away at a hen weekend, I managed to get a full weekend in the garage. The biggest and most troublesome task was trying to get self-centering working, so I started with that. Happily, it was sunny on Saturday which meant that I could put the car on the drive (which is flat, unlike my garage which slopes too much to set up geometry) and mess about with ride height, toe and camber.

I started with ride height, but quickly gave up after it became clear that no matter what I did to the front spring platforms, the relative height remained unchanged with the drivers side about 10 mm lower (due to the engine position). This should be fixable, and I will get it properly corner weighted at some point, but for now it's not urgent, so I set a reasonable ride height and cracked on.

Having eyed up camber gauges on Ebay, I decided that they were a massive rip-off at £100+ and bought a magnetic digital spirit level instead for £30. I'm not convinced it's totally accurate, but it will do. I followed Peter's instructions to use about 1-1.5º of camber and a few degrees of toe-in. Setting camber was awkward, but eventually I got somewhere in the right region. Toe was pretty easy (for the benefit of other builders, I found that turning each side of the rack a half turn added about 1º each side).

A quick test on what I will describe here as a "private road" showed that I had no self-centering at all, so I decided to try a bit of toe-out. Another quick test, and it self-centred fairly well. I'm not sure how much toe-out I have, but I am certainly not going to touch it until after IVA. Afterwards I'll experiment with proper setup.

That done, I considered the next most serious issue, i.e. the indicators. Their position under the headlights (see the photo at the top of the blog) wasn't acceptable to IVA as it was too far from the edge of the car, so the only real solution was to mount them somewhere else. I considered putting them on a bracket on the cycle wings as a temporary get-through-IVA solution, but in the end decided that they might fail it as an obviously temporary bodge, so went for motorcycle indicators on stalks coming out from the nosecone. I'd been worried this would look rubbish, but in fact I think it looks OK.

I also mounted the new headlights, which are smaller, and sit on a lower headlight bar, to improve forward visibility (another failure point). These look good, a big improvement on how it used to look. The only issue is that I appear to have two different bulbs (of different brightnesses), so I'll need to sort that out.

New indicators and headlights. Toe-out looks quite extreme here.

Now that the front end of the car is basically sorted, the only remaining issues are a few sharp edges. I sorted out the centre tunnel issue:

Adding rubber trim to the edges on the centre tunnel.

I think this actually looks better anyway, so quite happy with this.

A few minor trim issues remain, but other than that I think all the IVA issues have been met and it's time to book a retest. I'll also need to raise the driver's seat slightly to improve forward visibility, but this is just a case of sticking 20 mm of spacers under it.