Building my Caterham

This site captures my notes and experiences in building my Caterham 420S. As such, and like the car itself, this site is a pure indulgence on my part. I'm not really expecting anyone else to read it and that's fine. No-one keeps diaries any more.

As such, this is a brain-dump of thoughts and images captured as-and-when I have time. This site will probably never be finished. Fingers crossed that statement won't be true of the car too.

Another thing that this site is not is a build manual. I may get things wrong. I may go backwards. I may do things in a hard way, not knowing that there's an easier route. If you're looking for definitive guidance, go elsewhere.

So, the first question might be, "Why a Caterham?" The iconic shape came to my attention via The Prisoner decades ago. The Caterham Seven traces its history back to the Lotus 7, though in truth it's a very different car. The Caterham follows the pattern of the original, but with up-to-date engines and suspension. Having bypassed most of the current safety regulations that apply to "new" cars, it's also a supercar beater for hot-hatch money. I've been thinking about getting one for a long time, but only when doing so wouldn't get in the way of other things. It's a toy, after all.

A next obvious early question might be, "Why build a car?" When I started thinking about all this seriously, that was one of the attractions. The whole process starts with a brand new set of parts and a clear set of instructions, and the whole thing is possible with minimal prior experience and using only hand tools. This is not a kit car in the traditional sense. Most kit cars start with a "donor car", that contributes the engine and most of the running gear, and also contributes any long-standing dents, leaks and hidden problems that come along with it. This isn't that. Every element of this car is factory-fresh, clean and new. There's something pure about being at the start of something.

That question now out of the way, the next obvious one is, "How do you build a car?" The simple answer is that it comes with a set of instructions, just like a Billy bookcase, only much, much longer. That's another attraction. You can get Haynes Manuals, of course, but those start from the premise that something has been built already, and there's now something wrong with it. Through this process, I should get to understand how each part of this car works, how it interfaces with every other part, and contributes to the whole. Most of this is new to me, it's a learning process, and I'm a serial academic.

This site follows the build order suggested by Caterham, which approximately moves from front to back. This seems sensible on a rear-wheel drive car, where all the complicated, safety-critical bits are attached to the rear wheels. I've organised things into chapters that reflect the various stages of the process, with each chapter spread over a number of sessions (a few hours in most cases, a day at most). These are...

For the terminally impatient, this isn't a bad summary of how much work is needed. It's a time-lapsed video made by the Purple Meanie crew. Theirs is a 420R to my 420S. The differences are slight - same engine, and so on. So much of the specification is options that R's and S's meet in the middle. Strictly, R's are primarily race cars and S's are primarily street cars. Given some of the options they've chosen I suspect that the main difference is that mine has a grey stripe up the bonnet.