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Enough is never enough.........

THE FIRST DRIVE

After having got the Fury properly registered and taxed, it was time to pick it up from Fishers. The drive back was relatively uneventful, although at first I couldn't work out why people were staring at me in the service station. I thought it might be because I was holding the steering wheel, but when I got to the toilets I realised the real reason - I had 'panda eyes' where my sunglasses had been, and the rest of my face was a mid grey colour from the muck spread about by a gravel lorry I had got stuck behind!

MODS 1

Having got the car back in the garage it was time to undo the SVA bodges. First to go were the foam and gaffa tape strips on the edges of the interior. These came off easily enough but left a fluffy gluey residue behind. I tried a number of different solvents - white spirit, meths, PCB cleaner - without much successful. Fortunately my girlfriend advised me to try Hammerite thinners which took the gunk off easily.

TIP: don't use Hammerite thinners to try to clean gunk off the aeroscreen - it reacts with the plastic and cracks it. This is why I need a new aeroscreen ;-( Then again, it may just be a good excuse to cut down the existing one!

I also removed the silicone sealant from the rear light clusters and replaced the lenses with dark grey lenses and the bulbs with coloured bulbs. Pure ponce, but I think it looks better.

TIP: if you can't find red coloured rear sidelight/brakelight bulbs, get plain ones and paint them red using the special glass paint you can get from stained glass suppliers. I got mine from Lead & Light in Kentish Town. Just remember to use the translucent ones and not the opaque ones!

[pic of rear lenses]

The next step was to put the new dashboard in. The SVA dashboard was a horrible lash-up using MDF, foam rubber and the inevitable gaffer tape. It was OK to pass SVA with but it looked awful. I made the replacement using another sheet of homemade carbon fibre using plain weave 6k carbon laid up using epoxy resin on a sheet of contiboard. I cut the dash roughly to shape and then trimmed the edges. This took ages because I was reluctant to remove the aeroscreen at this stage and this left very little room to manoeuvre between the scuttle and the screen.

The bottom edge of the new dash is bolted onto the chassis scuttle rail. The top of the dash is fixed into place using small ali brackets glass-fibred onto the top of the scuttle with rivnuts in them. I also took the opportunity to fit an oil temperature gauge which wasn't there originally - I'd had a boss put in the sump to fit the sender when I had the sump chopped and the sender was in place, so it was merely a question of fitting the gauge and wiring it in.

I also decided to add an oil temperature gauge. It's a bit of a waste, seeing as I'll hopefully switching to my brother's digital setup soon, but I thought it was important to check that the oil temperature was reasonable.

[pic of new dash]

I also replaced the SVA mirrors (or mirror by this stage - one of them had fallen off!) with some new race-style SPA mirrors. At first these gave an appalling view - well, it was a nice view of the rear arches but I couldn't see much of the road. This was improved massively when I moved the driver's seat forwards (see later section) but I still think I'll need a centre scuttle-mounted mirror as well, especially for racing.

The SPA mirrors are adjusted by loosening a nut on the *inside* of the mounting plate. In order to get access to this when the mirrors were on the car, I drilled an extra hole in the shell behind the adjustment nut, and an extra hole in the aluminium reinforcement plate I made to spread the load of the nuts holding the mirrors on. Happily, the holes which I used to attach the old mirrors were in exactly the right places for the new ones.

[new wing mirrors]

In an attempt to get the engine running cooler, I fitted a much larger oil cooler. The old one was a 115mm 7 row unit, the new one is a 235mm 14 row unit, so its got 4 times the area. This is probably overkill but the extra area doesn't really add any significant weight and I'd rather have too much than too little. If anyone wants a rather tatty 115mm 7 row oil cooler....

[new oil cooler] [old oil cooler]

I also made up a shroud for the radiator. This is made from sheets of carbon fibre (the prototype was cardboard just to get the sizes right) held together with short brackets made from ali angle. It's bolted to the top and bottom of the radiator.

[pic of rad shroud]

With all these mods done, the car was ready for a meeting with some fellow members of the Bike Engined Cars Yahoo group near Guildford.

[pic of car]

More to follow.....

This document maintained by Dan Bromilow webmaster@danstuff.info.
Material Copyright © 1998 Dan Bromilow