(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.