More Fiddlin'

 The first 2023 road trip is fast approaching & I've been fiddling with the car.

Thing 1 - It's never boiled over, but on the rare occasions that it sits in traffic the temperature goes up to 100 deg & pretty much stays there until I move off. So I got onto the good people at Car Builder Solutions & ordered a larger fan & a switch with a slightly lower temperature, they were fitted & when tested, the new fan came on at 95ish instead of 100 & actually cooled the engine & then went off.

Thing 2 was a more permanent solution for powering the nose camera, I'd established that the remote control would still work even through an aluminium bulk head, an engine fizzing with sparks & an aluminium radiator, but I'd just wrapped insulating tape round the wires & tyrapped it on to the radiator mount. Now I drew up & printed a polyurethane boot for each end & a "saddle" for it to sit on, so now I know the system works, it all looks a bit more permanent.

There is still a little tape & a tyrap, but it looks a lot better & is much more secure. I've just been on a little test run (to the Hogs Back Brewery if you must know) & it all worked just fine.....

.....Except - Thing 3 - the bonnet release was VERY stiff when I got back, which was a worry. It opened in the end, so I set about investigating it's stiffness. The latch itself seemed free enough, but the pull handle was grating. I disconnected everything & the handle seemed much freer, so it's the cable adjuster at the latch end then.

This has been a bugbear several times on kit cars, people don't seem to understand how a simple Bowden cable works. In this case the builder had gone to great lengths to drill a 2mm hole right through the length of an M6 x 30 bolt & used it as a cable adjuster - but while that stops the cable outer, it doesn't hold it in the right orientation, so it pulls sideways & binds up.

I was going to look in my box of bike spares, but even before I opened it, I found just what I was looking for lying on top, It was a proper cable adjuster & even threaded M6!

The cable outer was a little loose in the adjuster socket, so once again the 3D printer got fired up & in 3 minutes flat I printed a sleeve that fits over the cable outer & inside the adjuster, holding the cable outer in line & now the bonnet release is all smooth & nice.

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.

ILLness!

Yes my Girlfriend & I have been ILL.

Not merely "ill", but most definitely ILL. We came back from the west country & started feeling rough soon afterwards, started off like a cold, but it has been evil! My girlfriend has suspicions it may have been bronchitis as she had that a long time ago. I wouldn't be surprised. The previous time we stayed in a Premier Inn we came away with covid.

But I am now on the mend, albeit very slowly. So it probably wasn't wise to spend all day in the garage working then, but that's what I did & have succeeded in adjusting the nearside door quite well & the off side one a bit, as well as more-or-less making a new near side side screen. Being ILL (did I mention that?) I'm perhaps not quite up to par & cut the hole for the cockpit vent too big, yes I did measure it twice, still loused it up. However a grommet printed in clear polyurethane adapts the hole size as well as stopping the vent rattling & making the opening action feel far more positive, so no harm done.

This it pretty much a straight re-make, the old ones are a strange sort of clear plastic, they were originally bolted to the doors - which is standard for the kit, but I took them off so I can swap them for small deflectors, but they are heavy, getting a bit clouded & have never fitted the soft top particularly well. Since the photo I've trimmed the top & rear faces & just need to drill a few holes for the "furniture" - the latch & the ball mount for the control arm that opens the window with the door.

Then I'll make it see through. I've always considered that important in a window.

A Trip to Bristol

 My girlfriend & I are collecting Concordes, not to keep you understand, that would be - inconvenient. It started when we went to Brooklands on our first date & we have now been aboard four.

To accomplish this we went to "Aerospace Bristol", it looked a bit "corporate" to me from the website, but it was actually very good, telling the story of the Bristol aircraft company from before it made aeroplanes (under a different name obviously) until we as a nation gave up on making stuff & just bought it from other countries.

The first "room" covers up to the end of the first world war & has - as you can see a Bristol Fighter & hanging above it, the wooden structure of a Bristol Fighter for comparison, there are lots of displays on making wooden propellers & the other paraphernalia of aircraft production, then as you walk through to the second room there is a model showing the flying controls of an aircraft which is animated as you move them. What I found interesting was that the plane looks like a '30s model of a plane called "Britain First". It was designed for the then owner of the Daily Mail who could see that other countries were developing monoplanes & the UK didn't seem to be, so he asked Bristol to design him a six seater airliner - it was faster than the RAF's fastest fighter & was developed into the Blenheim.

In the second section it's all about the '30s to the '60s, so we have this. In the thirties an awful lot of the worlds planes flew with a Bristol Jupiter, the tubes running from the centre casing to the end of each cylinder house two push rods, each of which operates two valves - four valves per cylinder - the mechanism is exquisite.

We think we're clever these days? Try designing that with only a pencil & slide rule. You'll have to compensate for heat expansion in different materials, different cooling, design in a mechanism for adjustment, while keeping the engine diameter as small as possible.

Moving on from the Jupiter, we come to this, it's a Bristol Hercules (all the Bristol engines were named after Greek or Roman myths), the thing about air cooled radial engines is that their diameter tends to control the shape of the aircraft, so how to get more power when you can't just make the engine bigger? Well for a start there's two rows of cylinders, but also, no push rod tube up the front, because this is a sleeve valve engine.

Sleeve valve engines put the piston inside a sleeve inside the cylinder, then move that sleeve such that holes in the sleeve uncover & close holes in the cylinder, letting the exhaust out & a new charge in, a little like a two-stroke. To do this the sleeve moves both up & down & rotates around the piston. As you can imagine, this is quite complicated when the cylinders are arranged in a circle & there's two rows.

In this photo of a sectioned engine the timing wheels that move the sleeves are in a ring just ahead of the removed cylinder - the sleeves are painted yellow.

Why do all this? As I said, a radial engine tends to control the shape of the aircraft. Taking the valves off the top of each cylinder means the cylinder itself can be bigger with no increase in the overall engine diameter.

The 1920s-30s designed Jupiter would make around 500 bhp, the 1930-40ss Hercules around 1,700. There's also a supercharger built in the middle of that & as I said, designed with pencil & slide rule. No wonder they knighted Roy Fedden the designer.

In the far corner is a cut away front fuselage of a Bristol Beaufighter. I can't imaging this is recent, surely no-one's cutting chunks out of a Beaufighter these days.

We then went for a short tour of the restoration hanger where they are rebuilding a Bristol Bolingbroke (Canadian built Blenheim) & a Bristol Freighter. These were used to fly cars  two at a time with their passengers from the south coast to France.

Surely you'd have to suffer very badly from seasickness to even consider that?

Back in the main area, was this Bristol 173, there was only ever one of it, intended to be a "heliliner" for moving people between cities. None were sold, but it led to the Belvedere which was operated by the RAF.

 

There is also an example of the finest aircraft known to man.

I used to work in there installing all that stuff.

But onto the main event, The Concorde (G-BOAF) sits in it's own hangar with commendably little stuff around it. The website had promised a video playing on the aircraft side, which sounded disappointing, but in fact was technical stuff about the aircraft, so when talking about the aero-heating around the nose, the nose was coloured yellow, fading to red, fading to blue to demonstrate & every few minutes it stopped so I could take photos.

Analogue. I like analogue, this is the flight engineer's station, looking forward to the pilot's positions.

So, Aerospace Bristol - it's a good thing, there's lots of toys to learn how stuff works & it's well laid out.

Exhaust Fairing

Today I sallied forth & made the front panel for the exhaust fairing. Like the rear section it's made from the old boot floor from my girlfriend's Tiger which being 0.5mm aluminium had given up the ghost after carrying spares, petrol, jump leads & all sorts of other essentials on innumerable road trips.

So, starting with a paper pattern, I rough cut the sheet & rolled it to more or less match the sill (over my knee if you must know).

There was then a lot of to-ing & fro-ing, matching the shape & dressing a flare into the rear edge to match(ish) the exhaust can & stiffen the panel a little, also to make sure it covered up the holes in the body punched by a badly located exhaust clamp. Once I was happy, I drilled a number of 3/32" holes & jig-pinned it in place.

I polished it up a bit, though not too much, the rest of the car has many many stone chips, so the "patina" of the second-hand sheet is a good thing, after that it was just a case of opening the holes up to 1/8" & riveting it on - it doesn't need to be removeable like the rear one as the silencer comes out backwards. This is as far away as I can get in the garage, when I get a dry day I'll move it outside.

Bodywork

 I've always shied away from bodywork, in theory I know the principles of tin-smithery, but having a car made of GRP meant I never had to bash anything into a different shape.

But the Stylus has an embarrassing personal problem which explains why the huge majority of the photos I post show the driver's side.

When Jeremy Phillips designed it, he made the sills big enough to take a silencer, so builders didn't need to spend money on big expensive stainless jobs. However, as you can see, a previous owner on my car did just that & chopped a huge hole in the side to fit it. It's ugly & it looks naff, I've always hated it. Also it pointed at the ground & any car following me got covered in dust from the gutter, blown into the air by "the wind of my passage" (ahem).

So what to do? A number of ideas had suggested themselves over the years, But I have now taken action!

The first thing was to bend the silencer bracket so the silencer sat parallel to the body & the tailpipe was nearer horizontal - easy enough, I can bash things about, then I cut a hole for the tailpipe out of a sheet of paper & taped it on the side, marking where the edge of the new fairing panel should be.

The next job was to cut some thin aluminium sheet to match(ish) the paper template & form it to the curve of the sill. I also knocked a flange into the free edge a/ to make it stiffer & b/ because it looks cool.

After that I had to fiddle & faff with it, cutting some away here, changing the curvature there until I was happy with the fit.

Then I took a brave pill & drilled the body!

I also bonded on a tab at the top front to the inside of the body to bolt the panel to, here you can see the panel's jig-pinned on.

After I was happy with the fit I put riv-nuts into the tab & installed more into the GRP (I slightly squeezed them with tigerseal in the holes as pulling a proper squeeze on riv-nuts in GRP doesn't really work).

So here we are - I can't get far enough from the car for a long shot & I'd like to do something similar at the front, so we'll see how that goes.

There will be "development", I may have to enlarge the tailpipe hole if heat expansion moves the tailpipe back, but I'll deal with that as it happens.
 

Airbox - Yes Again!

The airbox on the Stylus has been an ongoing story - not a story of woe I hasten to add, just a story of ideas superseding ideas.

In the beginning the car had sock type filters over alloy trumpets, it works but it means the engine is breathing hot engine bay air, so I got some foam, cut it to make a male mould & made an airbox drawing from a cone filter next to the radiator.

To connect up the hose I used an alloy connector that came with the filter glued into the end of the airbox. It was fine, but after a few years the glue failed & the alloy connector was rattling about.

I hit upon the idea of 3D printing a circular seal which was basically N cross section so the outward facing groove would fit into the edge of the box & the inward groove would fit over the connector flange.

AND IT WORKED!

But (you knew there'd be a "but") the connector sticking out of the angled end of the airbox put the hose very close to the edge of the bonnet aperture & the underside of the bonnet - it looked awkward & I don't like awkward.

So then I thought If I re-designed my seal / retainer, I could have the connector angled downwards, which would make the hose route straighter & take it away from the bodywork.

It looked good, but then I thought - the alloy connector is now swinging off the end of a rubber thing just hooked into a flexible composite box, why am I using it at all?

Back to the drawing board.

The next iteration did away with the alloy connector & just put a bead on the end of the printed thing. I would be using the harder polyurethane, so the hose would still clamp on & yes, a little weight saving, less components, less airflow disruption - marginal improvements I'll grant you, but better is better.

But then I thought - why take the air in through a curved pipe? normally that would be good, aligning the airflow with the space I'm putting it into. However, the trumpets take up a lot of the depth of the airbox, a straight pipe would "aim" the airflow at the trumpet mouths, again marginal, but as I was printing something anyway, why not?

Back to the drawing board again.

So here is the final version, it's a simple shape, so I fired up the printer with shiny black 95 shore hardness TPU & just over six hours later I peeled this off the printer bed.........

I put a "break" in the bead as you can see so a/ the spiral wound hose screws on (ish) & b/ so there was no "support" required for the overhang & the print finished sooner.

Getting it into the end of the airbox was a bit of a trial, but warming it up made the flanges pliable enough to twist into place on the box end wall & it is a tight fit, so isn't going to wobble itself out.

It just remained to wrestle the airbox back over the trumpets (it has to be navigated round the trumpets, the bonnet hinge, the suspension rockers, the fuel pressure valve ......) & connect up the hose.

As you can see, the air hose now runs nicely along with plenty of clearance with the body work. It's tucked nicely out of the way, it could rotate to point a little further down, but I think where is is is the best place.