More photos

Some photos from Sunday, when I drove to a BMW show up in Gaydon to exhibit the car on the GKD stand. The car went down surprisingly well with the BMW crowd - I'd expected people who are into fast big saloon cars not to be that into a 7 style car, but most people liked it and a few seemed reasonably interested in building one, so a day well spent.

The car performed well on the way there and back, but fuel consumption was, predictably, awful. Peter is sending me some new rear calipers as we suspect the problem may lie with broken calipers, so fingers crossed that will sort it.

Stripes!

Testing on the new engine continues, with no issues other than fuel consumption, which is still poor. More importantly though, the new engine has great compression numbers (205-220 psi, i.e. a difference of less than 7%), isn't consuming oil by the bucket load, and isn't smoking heavily or running rich (no popping and banging on the overrun, which is good, although I do miss the noise). So it looks like I got lucky with a good engine this time round, fingers crossed.

The fuel consumption is a bit of a puzzle though. Clearly, it's not the engine, so it must either be a fuel leak or rolling resistance. I've thoroughly checked for fuel leaks, and found one (the pump wasn't sealing into the fuel tank very well), but fixing it (with plenty of Hylomar Blue sealant) had no effect on fuel economy, which seems to be varying from 44 mpg (pretty sure this was a bad measurement - probably still a high number, but 44 seems ridiculous) to 17 mpg, with 22 being typical. Driving style doesn't appear to be a major factor in these numbers. I've noticed that the rear brakes are dragging - I've tried grinding back the pads, centering the callipers on the discs, and bleeding the brakes, but this hasn't helped at all. Grinding the pads did sort out the issue I was having with the rears locking up first though (probably because I ground them so unevenly that the rears aren't very effective any more) - this has improved stopping distances no end. It looks like this will be an ongoing problem.

In between trying various things to sort out fuel consumption, I picked up the tonneau and fitted that. It doesn't work well with my harnesses (they need to unclip to zip the passenger / driver cover onto the boot cover, and mine aren't the unclipping type), but otherwise it is very good and greatly improves the look of the boot area.

Once that was fitted, I could finally get around to the most important feature of the car: stripes. This took longer than expected, but the results are very much worth the time.

First stripe going on. This one had to come off again as I wasn't very happy with it.

Emily gets to work on the scoop.

Stretching it round the dash. This wasn't at all easy. The hairdryer helped a bit.

Stretching over the dash. Notice the Look of Concentration.

Rear view: stripes, boot cover and M3 badge.

Front view. The numberplate seems to have fallen off.

I also stuck a couple of badges on: the GKD badge on the nose, and an M-sport badge on the rear, so that people in expensive cars know what just overtook them.

Looking forward to getting some nicer wheels on the car - some black wheels will finish it off nicely, but they will have to wait until my bank account is a bit healthier.