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Session 13: 16th November 2020
Session 13: 16th November 2020
This session was mostly exploratory and preparatory, all for the wont of a grommet and a pre-drilled hole being too small.
The next thing on the list is the heater. It's a relatively simple piece of plumbing (another radiator and another fan) that has the feel of something that's a 60s original. It sits right at the top, right at the back, right in the middle and plugs what would otherwise be a hole in the firewall between the engine and the passenger compartment. It draws fresh air from a grille in the bonnet, heats that using the same feed that goes to the main radiator at the front, to a temperature that's set using a bimetallic strip and adjusted using a bicycle-brake off-cut, and into the passenger compartment via a fan with two speed settings (one of which is "off").
The heater sits immediately behind the battery. That'll have to move then.
In case you thought I was kidding, the heater thermostat is the brass trumpet off-cut, and temperatures are set by pulling and pushing on this section of bicycle brake cable, which links to a toggle in the cabin.
The dashboard of a Caterham is a bit cramped for space. There's not a lot of it and compromises had to be made to get everything to fit. As a result, one of the duties of the co-pilot is to keep an eye on the fuel gauge because it's all the way at the extreme end and there's not really any hope of the driver being able to monitor it whilst driving. That is how cramped things are.
The only hole in the dashboard that I was aware of was for the steering wheel. So, where's the heater going to go? Investigation was required.
Step 1 in this was a partial undressing of the car. Apart from hunting down the keys, I'd not really looked inside thus far. Frankly, I was short of storage space and didn't want to have to relocate the wheel arches and nose cone from their as-supplied home in the cabin. So, I pulled at some poppers and folded the roof back. "That was simple. But the door's still in the way..." It turns out that the door hinges are two pins and the door slides straight off. So much for security, but I knew this when I bought the car.
Access gained, exploring could happen. It turns out that the heater assembly has its own dashboard. Behind the dashboard that you can see, there's another, and its on this secondary dashboard that the heater controls (ha!) and vents sit, along with the fusebox and something that I'm assuming is the windscreen wiper motor.
Easy access for maintenance is one of the advantages of having your passenger compartment supplied by Millets...
Left to right, aperture for passenger and driver heater unit, ignition, steering column and hole for heater controls (ha). Plenty of space for additional customisation later.
kay, so the passenger side isn't quite so elegant, what with the wiper motor, a bunch of fuses and ancillary wiring.
There's something that I find amusing, if slightly childishly so, about the configuration here. Heater controls are normally right in the middle of a dashboard. They aren't mission-critical, so don't need to be on a sight line. Sometimes, the passenger might have an opinion about how warm or cold things should be, so access is equal. Not so here. The passenger can control their vent, but the temperature setting is at, approximately, the driver's right knee and very clearly for the driver to determine.
Work stopped on the heater at this point for the reasons that I led with. The hole for the temperature toggle was slightly too small and the tool to fix that was (of course) at home. And the heater has a cable that passes through the firewall, and that needed a grommet which didn't seem to be anywhere, so a grommet kit became this session's Amazon order.
That job blocked, I moved on to looking for other things that I could do. We're very close to installing the engine now, so starting to rig things and hunt down parts is sensible. There's a number of things that need to be removed from the engine before it can be fitted. The engine mounts, starter motor, alternator and plenum all need to come off to make the engine small enough to fit into the hole in the chassis.
Except that, as you can see from any of the photos, the engine mounts weren't on the engine. I couldn't recall seeing them on any of my explorations of the boxes, but if they weren't here, that's a pretty big "oops" from Caterham. Surely they were somewhere; or, at least, if they weren't, then I'd need to have made a thorough search before calling them and asking for new parts to be shipped.
I opened every box. Every box. Genuinely, the very last box, in the bottom, in the corner, was one labelled "starter motor" that I hadn't investigated because every other time I'd opened a box labelled e.g. "wing mirror" I found a wing mirror. With hindsight, it ought to have been a clue that the starter motor is on the engine already. No, this was the one time that they'd repurposed a box and shipped 20-or-so random components in whatever they had to hand. Including the engine mounts.
It was in the midst of this exercise that I eventually landed upon the Miscellaneous Pack that Caterham had been claiming should be there and I couldn't locate.
Also, this exercise prompted me to open a box labelled "air box". The pleasing thing is that this did, indeed, contain an air box. The confusing thing is that the manual makes no reference to the air box, as it's one of the things that, according to the manual, ships pre-bolted to the chassis. So, I've got a box of parts and no instructions as to what to do with them. That'll be another email to Caterham then!
The final thing I attempted was to break out the engine hoist. I Don't want to release the retaining straps without an alternative form of support for the engine. So, whilst it won't be in the air all that much, I'd rather use the hoist to move the engine around.
It's not quite at the point of wondering why they bothered to assemble the engine prior to shipping, but it's not far from it.
The engine, as shipped, without its engine mounts.
The engine has hoisting loops that are bolted into the block. The load balancer is designed to bolt directly to the block. But (obviously...), the design of the brackets clashes with part of the engine and so needs to be modified. So, I packed up the brackets and headed home to machine them there.
Rearranging the garage in anticipation of this job was definitely the right call. Without this much space to manoeuvre the hoist, I'd be in a lot of trouble.
Session 14: 17th November 2020
Session 14: 17th November 2020
Modding the load balancer brackets ended up being the work of five minutes (sometimes owning every single possible Dremel bit has its uses) and Amazon had brought the grommet kit I'd ordered, so I headed back the following day to continue with the heater and engine prep.
The heater dropped in relatively simply. There was a brief pause whilst working out whether the manual was right or wrong regarding the orientation of the faceplate (conclusion, probably right, because whist the protruding tabs look odd right now, they seem to mate with the end of the transmission tunnel cover). It was slightly fiddly getting it behind the umbilical up to the dash (an odd piece of placement if you ask me, but you'll only see it if you're sat head down, legs in the air) but otherwise the unit dropped straight in.
The themostat is presently dangling in mid-air pending feedback from Caterham regarding which of three pipes I should be cutting to make the connections, but other than that, the heater's in.
That slightly odd tab on the left, and the heater temperature control toggle on the right.
The heater in place, awaiting the return of the battery.
Spot the two missing sections of pipe...
That job done, it was back to prep for the engine and gearbox installation. Now that the hoist was usable, this meant that the engine could be moved away from the wall to provide easier access. Not that the hoist was the easiest thing to move, especially with more than 100kg of engine hanging from the end of it, but it was movable.
This was a slow process, because there were some electrical connections that needed to be unmade, and it quickly became clear that no two bolts were the same size. A pleasant discovery during this process was a machined badge plate bolted to the side of the engine. I say discovered, because it was behind most of the ancillary wiring including one of the larger connectors and basically impossible to see properly, and that's before the engine gets dropped into the car.
The biggest component that needed to come off was the bellhousing. That was a bit of a fight, but yielded in the end. With that, I declared it quits for the day. There were some other things still to come off the engine, but it'll be at least one more session before the engine is ready for insertion so this was a reasonable point to stop.
Another very nice touch, and a completely wasted one. No-one's ever going to see this!
It's starting to feel like there's too much stuff everywhere. Yes, the chassis moved again, because I needed access to the left hand side to fit the heater thermostat. It's also further forward than it could be, which doesn't help with the sense of crampedness. I'll have to move the chassis back into the corner before attempting to attach the gearbox.
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