Brake Light Broke

 I was on my way to visit my girlfriend in the Stylus a few days ago, I pulled up at a red light & a black BMW pulled up beside me & rolled the passenger window down. I was expecting a "nice motor mate" or "is that a Ginetta?" but instead I got "Your brake lights are stuck on mate".

Oh good, the brake lights again.

On the road trip last year they weren't working at all to begin with (my own fault) & I'd recently had some problems making the pedal switch work properly. I found somewhere to stop & disconnected the pedal switch - the hydraulic switch works fine, the pedal switch is there because it comes on faster & is in theory more reliable.

The pedal switch was a standard microswitch with a roller that should trigger as the roller rolls off of a mushroom headed bolt in the footwell roof. But if I was gentle, the pedal wasn't quite moving upright far enough to switch it off. Come smartly off the brake & it was fine.

I ordered a new microswitch with a long flat "blade" & drew up a block that could bolt to the hole the mushroom headed bolt had screwed into & trip the switch a slightly different way. Then when I got home I measured it all up properly, changed the design to suit the real world & printed the block. It all appears to work fine, there's a few things to consider, obviously my foot shouldn't catch the block & neither should the pedal, the wiring to the switch shouldn't be able to short out on anything etc

So there it is - the picture shows everything except the car. The grey angle is bolted between the pedal & the footpad - which is alloy, the microswitch screws to that as does a black polyurethane buffer which is just there to protect the wiring if I'm bleeding the brakes so the pedal is going to the bulkhead & the blueish bit is screwed to the footwell roof by the orange bolt & has an edge to trigger the switch. So far it works, but if it all goes wrong again, I can just unplug it.

When I started measuring the real world I thought I had a problem, the riv-nut for the bolt is M6, an M6 bolt head was too deep to let the pedal pass below it. Then while rummaging through a tub of bolts I found a furniture bolt that was M6 & the head is only 2mm thick. Problem solved & god bless Ikea!

Windscreen Fixed!

When I bought the Stylus, one of its issues - one of its many issues - was a chip in the screen. I didn't worry about it, it's an Elan screen, so easy to get & now available heated, I had a heated one in the Fury & it was worth the extra.

There was a large chip with a couple of small (8 - 10mm) cracks radiating from it & a couple of smaller chips. It'd been like that for 5 years of my ownership, but I decided to do something about it.

There's a whole load of kits out there, some very cheap, some so expensive that they're nearly as much as taking it to Halfords & having it done professionally - I say professionally - it's Halfords.

I wanted a kit with multiple suckers to hold the plastic jig in place, there's a few Chinese ones with instructions to match, but I went for the same thing branded as "Rain - X" because the instructions seemed to be better & it was only an extra £2.

I suckered the jig over the chip, screwed the "resin chamber" into it & looked from the inside, it was a bit "cocked", one of the suckers hadn't sucked, a bit of water sorted that out. I put some resin in the chamber, screwed in the plunger & looked from the inside.

Nothing.

I put some more resin in & screwed the plunger down again.

Nothing.

On the third attempt the chip kind of vanished & most of the cracks did too.

I added a little more resin & it got slightly better, so I left it for the stated time & warmed the screen a little, then took the jig off & put one of the thin plastic film sheets provided over the main chip & the two small adjacent chips, adding a little more resin as I did it.

After that it was just a case of opening the garage door & wheeling the car out into the sun to let the UV cure off the resin, I left it 15 mins or so.

After a well earned coffee I went outside & bravely peeled off the film & yes the resin appeared to have hardened, so I left it another few minutes before using the supplied razor blade to scrape off the excess, which came away nicely.

The end result was that the chips are filled, the cracks are mostly filled & hopefully stabilised & I haven't got the stress of trying to get the existing bonded in screen out & sticking a new one in - in the short term at least.

Time will tell if it's "fit & forget" but for now I'm pretty pleased with the repair, the damage's all but vanished & in theory shouldn't crack any more.

It's gone to the extent that my phone really struggled to focus on it & that's good enough for me.

Boot Straps

 The Stylus has a boot. It's not a large boot. It's almost as wide as the car, but shallow, perhaps the oddest thing about it is that the aperture is almost - but not quite - wide enough to fit the soft top in.

In order to maximise the space I decided to collect all those bits & pieces one needs for a kit car road trip into defined areas, I haven't been able to do that before because the things would move about while travelling & stop the boot hinges opening and if I can't open the boot, there's no need to take the stuff that's stopping the boot opening (sigh).

So anyway - there's a bunch of good people called Church Products UK who sell all manor of straps & clips, so I put in an order for some clips & 2 metres of orange strap, then drew up & printed some clips to fix it all to the boot sides.

The point of this is that there are bits of boot where the roll bar comes through or where the tail lights are, or where the hinges are that aren't a lot of use unless something is the right shape & contained.

So the jack, the tyre pump, the puncture repair kit & the emergency tyre goo aerosol went right up in a corner, with a couple of straps to hold it all in place.

In a similar location the other side is the jack winder, a bag of nuts, bolts, wire, connectors, fuses, tyraps etc with enough spare strap to put the spare fuel pump in for the really long trips.

The orange is good 1/ it's orange & 2/ these are dark corners, so it helps to see what is strap & what is buckle. The bag is also good, I have several, they are American Airlines goody bags from when I used to travel business class. the family had the bottles of moisturiser / girly stuff & I had the robust zip up bags.

While rummaging about in the back of the car I started looking at the boot release, it's never been good & in due course I'll buy a new one so I can make the route much better, but when I pulled the release, it came a very long way before the latch opened - EEK!

That turned out to be the cable outer slipping at the tee handle end, I superglued it for now, but that started me thinking, how would I get in the boot if the latch failed? It turned out I'd thought of this already some years ago when I fitted the latch. there are hidden bolts on the outside of the car that release the whole latch / bracket assembly - trouble was I'd forgotten I'd done this & when fitting the new number plate light I'd tyrapped the wiring to the bracket so my cleverness would've been all in vain. Obviously I've sorted that out now. Whether I remember how to gain access should I ever need to remains to be seen.

Axle - AGAIN!

 Yes again I'm afraid. It had been leak free, but then I took it to Peterborough & there was "evidence" when I got back. So I had the axle in bits again & put in another of the 2mm cross section O-Rings & this time ran a file round the edge of the axle to make sure there were no burrs in it, covered it in "Hylomar Blue" & pressed it in very slowly.

It cut a sliver off the O-Ring.

"Perhaps the Hylomar will hold it" I thought - no, it didn't. When I put it on I read the instructions "allow the solvent to evaporate off before assembling" OK, any clues for how long? Not long enough as it turned out. it appeared to have dripped a single drip, but it had dripped.

I ordered more O-Rings, this time 1 1/2mm cross section, then looked up the Hylomar wait time on the internet - 10 - 20 mins. I dry assembled the 1/2 shaft, I put an O-Ring in the groove on the bearing & dry assembled it, I put an O-Ring at the far end of the bearing rebate in the axle as well & dry assembled it making sure that didn't put load on the bearing retainer plate.

I put a bead of Hylomar round the bearing & the O-Rings & pushed the 1/2 shaft in - then pulled it out, ensuring the coating was thin & even. After 10 mins I pushed it back in & bolted it all up.

(sigh)

It's been out a couple of times since & no leakage yet. The jury is still out & my fingers are still crossed.

In other news I've been ferreting away at cameras again. I have a camera mount right in the nose cone & I really like the low view it gives, but up to now using it has meant stopping, moving one of the cameras into the nose & setting it going on battery, driving for a bit & then swapping it all back. As my lovely girlfriend gave me new cameras for Christmas, it occurred to me that one of the old ones could go in the nose, but experiments with battery life suggested I'd not get much of "the good stuff" if I set it going before I got in the car. I considered powering it from a USB but a hole in the case would mean it would fill up with water in the inevitable showers.

So what to do? I had a matt black GoPro case that I'd not used because it had a large rectangular hole in the side for putting a USB cable in through, so I drew a box to fit snugly in there, then a round open cylinder with "bead" on & printed it in rigid plastic. Next, a conical "boot" with a matching recess for the bead printed in rubbery stuff. Having glued the rigid part to the camera shell, I can plug in the USB & pop the boot in place & it's waterproof & operable from the remote on the dash.

It actually looks quite techie. What would I do without my 3D printer & On-Shape?

The boot in 1mm thick 90 shore polyurethane is just right & stretchy enough to force the pug through a 4mm hole so it seals against the cable outer, it's a simple thing, but my videos should be a bit more interesting & I won't have to stop & re-arrange the car to achieve it.

 

MoT Time

 ...Well Almost.

While looking around the car as the MoT is coming, I noticed the rear No. Plate light was dead. 

It was just a little thing I knocked up myself out of three white LEDs & a 3D printed housing. This time I thought I'd spend some actual money, so arranged for the excellent folk at Car Builder solutions to send one of their tiny lights the same as I used on the Fury. Again I've put it in a printed housing. When I got the car it had a standard "Lucas" lamp, so I got rid of that & fitted mine up under the boot lip so it's invisible, the new one fits the same way.

It lights the No. plate "sufficiently" & there's no clutter on the back of the car.

Vented

The Stylus came to me with three "shark gill" type vents on each front wing, they are rakishly angled to the front, but to give the vents some depth (make it look as if the holes were flanged inward), the original builder had glued MDF to the inside of each wing, cut out the holes & sprayed it all blue. This probably looked great at the time, but 25 years later the MDF has cracked & doesn't look good at all.

So what to do. When I bought the car I just got rid of the mesh that was falling off the inside & replaced it with the small weave stuff you can see in the pic & not really having a clue beyond that, I left it. Shark gills? I had bigger fish to fry.

It was a similar story with the tail lights, but then I thought of re-setting them inside the body with a 3D printed silver lip, I've been astonished at how well this has worked, so it started me thinking & what I thought was something round the vents to match the tail light bezels.

So I drew something using "OnShape", a free cloud-based CAD system.

Then, because I wasn't sure & because I can, I tried out three on a representative background.

I liked it, so I printed a prototype, tested it, made a few changes & printed three for the near side of the car, with three very thin polyurethane gaskets to sit between the trim & the paintwork, I did this with the tail lights & while they hardly show, they make the thing look far more "finished".

With the prints done, one was a good fit, one fitted nicely at the bottom, but swung out at the top, one was loose, so I needed a way of holding all three in place while the glue cured. As is so often the case, two bits of wood &  ratchet strap worked rather well.

So the passenger side is all blinged up, the trims for the driver's side are on the printer even as I type.

Double Glazed

I'm still ILL, but getting a little better each day.

But I have made it out to the garage & the Stylus now has two new side screens, which are see-through & fit quite nicely, Testing is still to be done after the end of the month when it gets taxed, but they should be fine. I'd like to make new deflectors as well, but that may have to wait a little while as I have things to do on my Girlfriend's car before the touring season starts.

I also managed to re-align the passenger door a little further forward & further in, so it lines up with the body contours better, then I rolled it outside & gave it a wash!

When it's taxed I need to:-

1. Drive it.

2. Check the axle isn't leaking.

3. Test my new cameras.

4. Drive it.

5. Touch up some of the stone chips.

6. Polish it.

7. Drive it.