April 14th/15th - Day 13/14 - Fitting De Dion and first roll-out...

A very satisfying weekend.  Followed the AG and it all went together very well.  Hardest part is sorting throgh and finding the right fixings.  Threr were no instructions for fixing the calipers together.  A plus was that bending the brake pipes seems to have got pretty straightforward.  Took the opportunity to spray Dinitrol inside the de Dion tube.  So late on Sunday afternoon out rolled my new Caterham into the fresh air for the first time.  Seem to have come on much quicker than I anticipated - although there's lot of stuff still to do.

Time to fill in the SVA forms.  Despite the cost I'm leaning towards letting Caterham collect the car and deal with all the Post Build Check and SVA stuff .  Aiming to have it readiny in the next month or so - which I believe is thye current time it takes to get a SVA date at Gillingham (only 170 miles away)!

Day 12 - Weds 11th April - Diff Fitted

This was the bit I'd feared.  First of all I prised the flanges off the diff - pretty straightforward - simply leverage off with metal chisel tapped with mallet. Figured out the without theses it would be less of a weight to lift (or drop).

With the help of two of my teenage sons (after inserting the prop shaft we jacked/hoisted the diff into place (tied a rope round it and attached to the rollover bar) fitted the two front bolts and pushed two screwdrivers through the top mount. Then worked out that I needed 3mm each side to centralise the diff. Then tightened the bolts and then tried to fit the big long bolt. Once I fitted the required washers/spacers I really had to hit the big bolt hard to encourage it to move through the location points - but once I worked up the courage to use the hammer in the bolt it was pretty straightforward.

Also fitted the headlights/indicators - just takes a while to feed the five wires through the mounting into the car - had to tightly wrap the sleeve to make it feed through. Oh, and I fitted the handbrake cable (Which has to cross-over and attach the adjuster to the bracket on the diff cage - not the chassis as it indicates in the AG)

Easter Weekend (Day 8-11) 6th-9th April - Cooling, Wiring & Exhaust

After a busy week at work and a week on hols with the family we returned on Good Friday.  Down to work on the cooling system.  A bit of a mystery as my combination of alloy radiator without bleed pipe and heater didn't match any of the pictures I had or the AG.  Still a question on Blatchat and a call with Ian provided most of the answers - and it turned out I had far too many pipes.  Key was to use the t piece and create a link to the heater and expansion tank.  Fitted most of the wiring and tidied up with the wiring as well as fitting the far too long throttle cable - fitted by bending the throttle peddle about 2 inches by bending with screwdriver - crude but effective (but why don't CC supply a shorter cable?)

Also fitted airbox (almost) as the bobbin mounts were missing.  In the meantime fitted the steering column - very straightforward apart from fitting the top bush which took a lot of pressure and silicone lube and the bolts on the Q/R steering wheel where the wrong sort - a call to Sean had the missing parts in the post..

Fitted the exhaust headers and cat - very straightforward - just need to figure out how to secure the lambda wiring under the car as there's no obvious fixing.

At the same time another Supersport builder (Mark) brought our virtual team to 3 and made pooling questions/solutions easier and quicker - we're getting quite a catalogue of photos and tips from Sean.