First two breakdowns...

After getting the car road legal on Thursday, I forgot that (a) the car is low, and currently lower than it will be once I've set the ride height properly, and (b) the speed bumps at work are very harsh. On Friday I drove into work, and accidentally clipped a speed bump with the sump.

The sump - fortunately - was not significantly harmed (it lost a couple of cooling fins, but no leaks), but the resulting shock obviously moved the engine and gearbox, which had unfortunate consequences for the gear linkage. The gearstick pivots in an arm which runs between the gearbox and the chassis, for the purpose of providing a suitable pivot point - unfortunately, it doesn't have much ability to move and absorb impact, so it snapped instead. I'm going to try and find a way to add some rubber bushing to protect it in future.

Broken one on the left. Note (suspicious) old weld at the top.

Fortunately the local dealer was able to get one in for the next day for only £13, so not a massive problem. I left the car at work overnight and returned, with tools and parts, on Saturday to fix it.

It's interesting to note that the old arm had already been welded by the previous owner, so I wonder if it had snapped in a similar impact before, which might have weakened it?

Anyway, car fixed, I drove home in it with no problems... until the bracket holding a front cycle wing on snapped. Peter had previously mentioned that he'd seen failures with these brackets, but unfortunately he'd just given me some advice on welding it up to make it stronger, which I hadn't got round to doing. The cycle wing survived, but the car is now off the road until I get the brackets reinforced. Fortunately Peter said he could fit the welding in for me before he's off on holiday, so this should be sorted pretty soon.

This happened.

Causing this.

I took advantage of having the car not-really-drivable (no cycle wings at the front means a face full of gravel) to get on with the windscreen today. After an awful lot of faffing about bending and trimming the frame, and trying to bend the supporting brackets (which didn't want to bend on account of being incredibly strong), I managed to get the windscreen fitted in a reasonably neat way. It's not perfect - I over-trimmed the bottom part of the frame, leaving a few mm gap to the vertical part, and the supporting brackets aren't bent exactly as I would have liked, but from a distance it looks good.

The rubber still needs trimming.

Lots of Ackerman. Front numberplate is much too big... it could easily break and fall off. So easily.

The height of the screen seems about right, when sat in the driver's seat. My only concern is that the white scuttle is going to reflect quite badly - I may need to paint it black or something - but I will need to drive it a bit first to see if this will really be a significant issue. Anyway, this should allow me to drive without needing a helmet, which will be a nice improvement.

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.

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.

Mistakes and fixes

Midweek, I took a look at the slight leaks I've been seeing from the diff and gearbox. Last week I wiped them down and put paper underneath so I could see how much was leaking. The diff was still dry, so I think the apparent leak must have just been oil on the diff casing from when I filled it. The gearbox was leaking, so I checked the torque specs for the drain plug, and found that I had indeed tightened it correctly. Crossing my fingers, I dialed up the torque wrench a bit and over tightened it. The gearbox casing didn't crack, as I've read can happen, and there have been no drips since, so I think I've got away with this one.

Emily was away this weekend, so I cracked on with the car. First up, I put the boot floor back, then put some protective rubber trim around the immobiliser as requested by IVA. I thought I'd better check I hadn't pulled a wire loose when meddling with the immobiliser, so gave it a quick test start and... nothing.

A few checks later and it was clear that there was no immobiliser fault code, which was good, but also no fuel, which was a problem. Pretty quickly I figured that I'd accidentally pulled out the plug to the fuel pump when I was putting the tank strap in, so I drilled out all the rivets again and this indeed proved to be the case. Kind of wish I'd used more rivnuts instead of rivets on the panels now, for ease of removal, but it's too late to change without getting all new panels.

Unfortunately, the package of bits from Peter (mainly containing a modified headlight bar, indicator mounts, steering column bracket) hadn't arrived, so I couldn't do any more things needed for IVA. Since I still had a quick rack waiting to be fitted, I decided to fit that and play around with steering setup and see if I could locate any stiffness which might be hindering self-centering.

I trial fitted the rack without springs, but the cycle wings were (just) hitting the bodywork, so I dismantled both racks, and transferred the springs over to the new rack. These limit steering travel too much, I think, so after IVA I'll replace them with a suitable number of washers - but for now they solve that problem (if a bit too much) and may assist self-centering, so I'll keep them on for IVA. Note to people doing the same: if your rack has the large round bit that is hard to grip when dismantling, I recommend doing as I did and grinding a couple of flat bits on it so you can get a spanner on it.

The hard to unscrew round bit.

The new rack has one immediate benefit: it permits far more toe-in than the old rack. The old one maxed out at about 2º of toe in each side, by my crude measurements; the new one goes far beyond that, which may help me get self-centering.

Toe measuring setup

To measure toe, I taped a couple of broom / mop handles to the wheels, then measured the distance between them at different points. A bit of simple trig then gives toe = sin^-1(((w₁ - w₂) / 2) / d) where w₁ and w₂ are the two width measurements and d is the distance between them. Modulo the inherent inaccuracies in measuring angles of a few degrees using broom handles (although it did seem reasonably repeatable), I currently have about 3º toe in and will see how that goes.

After this, I took a crack at measuring camber (the amount the wheels lean inward), which was harder. Eventually I used the iphone to measure wheel angle and ground angle, and established that one wheel was at 1º (which is probably about right), and one is at 4º (which is too much). Fixing this involves removing a ball joint, which did not want to come out. After battering the end of the ball joint with a hammer, it was still stuck, but with a damaged thread preventing the nut from going on. Progress of a sort. Things being a bit desperate, I got the dremel out and managed, eventually, to cut the end off which left just enough thread remaining to get the nut on properly, and left it at that.

Fuel issues fixed?

The current theory on the very poor fuel economy is based on the observations that (1) the temperature only gets about 1/4 of the way round the dial (I'd expect it to sit about halfway) and (2) the fan comes on, a lot, even in just-above-zero temperatures. In other words, this points towards the engine not getting up to temperature because the fan is on too much, and therefore using more fuel (apparently fuel economy drops considerably on these cars if they don't get up to temperature). The only flaw in this theory is that I'd expect the thermostat to close, so the fan being on shouldn't be an issue because water wouldn't be flowing to the radiator - but it's a start.

I boiled up the fan switch in a saucepan today and found that it switches on at 87 ºc, and off at about 79 ºc, whereas it should be switching at 97 and 105, so I've requested a new one from Peter. Hopefully this will sort the engine temperature and fuel economy - if not, then I'll have to try replacing the thermostat in case it's stuck open, which apparently occasionally happens even with new thermostats (which mine is).

Peter also tells me that he's sorted the steering column bracket and will post it tomorrow, and plans to get the IVA people to look at his new headlight bar design towards the end of the week, with a view to getting mine modified and returned once he's happy that the new design will pass IVA requirements. We're still not sure how the indicator position problem is going to be solved (they need to be slightly further outboard), but we'll think of something.

With these issues progressing on Peter's side, I took a look at the fuel lines issues raised by IVA. They felt that the fuel lines were chafing against the tank, so I removed the boot floor to address this. They also weren't happy about the earth to the tank (they wanted photos), and the lack of a tank strap securing the tank (they couldn't see the bracket holding it in on top of the tank).

Once the panel was off, I took a bunch of photos for evidence of the earth and the brackets, then decided that actually I might as well just fit a tank strap and make 100% sure that they're happy with it rather than hope that they're OK with my photos of the bracket arrangement. Thanks to Jason for the strap.

Strap in place. Note earth lead on the right.

I also found time for an extended and long-overdue garage tidy - I can actually find my tools now which helps.

I've noticed that I'm seeing a slight leak from both the diff and the transmission (by slight I mean a very, very occasional drip from the drain plug). The ideal solution would be to get new gaskets and replace the plugs, but that would mean (another) oil change, which is annoying. I'll have to start by making sure they're properly tight and see if that helps.