More Spare Parts

I am very aware that the car is actually quite old.  Although it was bought in 2005, the engine dates back 1995-8 and the majority of the parts came from the Ford Sierra and Ford Escort of a similar period, and these are becoming rarer and rarer, even in breakers yards.

Update:   30 Mar 2014

Bought 2 more unique items

A Spare Starter Motor.  Completely unobtainable now.

And a set of front 'shockers'.  Again, unique to the car,





More to come !!

Sunday Run with Hot Start

Went for a fairly long run to Barnsdale Gardens (Geoff Hamilton of Gardeners World fame for those old enough to remember).   Lovely weather and lovely country roads. Even managed to get Ruth in for the drive.   And everyone out walking waved as we went past.  This is what motoring should always be like.  

The car had always struggled to start when hot, with a very slow cranking speed.   A full description of possible solutions is at "Engine/Chassis Earth Strap fitted"  On this trip had a chance to try a hot restart and the problem seems to have gone away, so the earth strap was obviously the answer.

Lincolnshire Inaugural Meeting

As the brand new Secretary of the Lincolnshire 'chapter' of the Robin Hood Car Club my first task was to arrange a meet.  So I decided the best thing to do was a Sunday lunch outing.  And we went for a mid-location at a pub near Newark right next to the river Trent.   I also invited any other member who lived close to Lincolnshire.  As the day approached the weather suddenly turned glorious and on the day an incredible 30 people turned up (including 9 wives), driving 7 'Robin Hoods', a GBS 'Zero' and a couple of 'Sprites'.

Still couldn't get Ruth into the car so we arranged to car pool with a couple who live near and as it turned out we 'wife-swapped'.  I took his wife as a passenger while Ruth went with him in his 'normal' car.

Here are 5 of the 'Hoods' lined up, mine is the farthest one, just before the Range Rover.

This one was hiding behind the Range Rover

A new Great British Sportscars (GBS) 'Zero'

This beauty has been fitted with a 4 litre V8.   Apparently you can 'burn rubber' in 4th gear if you aren't careful.  Astonishing.

Us !!

And one of the Sprites.  A great favourite with quite a few of the Club members.

And everyone enjoying the company.

And discussing the important things in life.

A great time was had by all.   Now they are all asking what I am going to arrange next !!

Fit New Front Wing

Having made the decision that I could not get a satisfactory finish on the repaired front wing I started looking around for a replacement.  There were plenty of 7" wide and 8.5" wide ones available as that is the size used by the Caterham and Westfield kits.   But my Superspec has extra wide tyres and I needed a 9.5" wide wing to fit.  These were difficult to source and those companies that had them did not do them in Oxford Blue.

Eventually I tracked down a Company that would build me a one-off pair in Oxford Blue for the surprisingly low price of £55.   Another advantage of a kit car, I suspect new wings for modern vehicles would be a lot more expensive that that.   The only problem was that their mould produced wings that were slightly shorter than mine, but I decided that I could probably cope with that.

When they arrived I found that I could not mount them on the existing support struts because they were 2" shorter.  So I had 2 options:

a).   Get the support struts remade or bent to fit.
b).   Use an auxiliary support plate that would mount on the existing struts and bolt to the wing.

Option a) would have precluded any later fitting of a full size wing and would have to be done at a machine shop.  So I decided to go for Option b) and add an auxiliary plate.   As an initial experiment I decided to use a piece of 5mm rubber to reduce stress on the wing.

So here it the rubber block bolted to the support strut and then 3" above, the wing and mud flap is bolted to the block as well.

I also took the opportunity to rubber mount the front of the wing as well, to avoid excessive stress on the fibreglass.

Here is the whole thing mounted on the car

And with the wheel on, job done !!

I decided to put off doing the nearside wing until I find out if the rubber mounting works.  If there is too much vibration I will just replace the auxiliary mount with a piece of of steel.   

I also need to see if I have to replace the mud flaps with some more that are  2" longer.  Not difficult as they are simply made from 2mm rubber sheet.  

The difference between the 2 wings is not that noticeable unless you actually go looking for it, so there is no rush to fit the matching nearside wing.