BB June 4

About time for an update I think. Since the crankcase change the engine has been
runing smoothly with only one minor scare. After thye second run I noticed black fluid
running down the "tail" of the block, Fortunately the smell told me it was EP90 gearbox
fluid not engine oil. I had obviously over filled the gearbox and some had escaped past
the seal, which is a scroll type. The leak didn't happen again so I'm not worrying.

Having got the major engineering work out of the way, I could start some of the other
jobs that had built up. I was away last weekend and took the steering wheel away with
me so that I could re-string part of it as the string had come loose and was sliding
around. This didn't take long, and I put some double sided carpet tape around the wheel
so that the string was held laterally by that as well as the proximity of the next loop.
You can see how dirrty it has got on the phot as the re-strung section has a mix of
colours where the previously underside of the string is now on top.

The next job was to mount the lights vertically so that the turning circle could be
reduced - when horizontal they can foul the roadwheels when turning a corner which
knocks then out of alignment.

This is something that I wanted to do when I built the car, but couldn't work out a
neat and solid way of doing it. When I visited Ralph Colombo last year he had
cracked it and kindly showed me how he did it whilst I was there, so the credit for
this goes to him, not me.

The mount is made using a 2 way electrical conduit junction box made of metal (the
type that you generally see in offices where the wiring is run in round metal pipes).
The outlets have to be opposite each other, and you'll need one brass gland nut per
box. Don't buy the seperate lid as it isn't needed.

Uisng an angle grinder or saw, cut each box diagonally so that from the side it is
wedge shaped and file/trim the edges, then drill a suitably sized hole through the
centre of the circular face. Screw the gland nut tightly into the remaing hole (the
other was removed by the diagonal cut) and then bolt it to the light bar using the same
bolt that was holding the light to the light bar - attach the light to the new mount and
Robert is your mother's brother

Being a berk, I forgot to take before and after photos, so you'll have to be happy with
just the after ones.

An update that involves very little mechanical work - this is a good sign that with the
engine sorted I can just get on with using it. On Friday I drove it into work as I'd
been away and wanted to get some oil around it. A colleague had also decided that the
weather was nice enough, so came in on his Harley V Rod, so we christened it Boy's
Toys day, made a few calls and soon some other interesting machinery was turning up.
Lightened an otherwise busy day.

On saturday was the village fete and I'd agreed to take the car along as something for people to look at.
Interestingly, the first question was generally "how old is it?", rather than what is it. There were a lot of the
usual questions about how long to build, where did I do it, and did the bodywork come like that? When you
tell people that it comes as flat sheets of ally, they tend to look surprised.

Before the fete, the post arrived with my latest purchase, number plates. I have been
through two plates since getting it on the road as it hangs so low. I have been trying to
make up an aluminium plate that sits either side of the alternator cover but is secured
where the new one is above, but getting the right sized letters is a challenge since the law
changed, and I was concerned about it blocking airflow to the cylinders on the move. In
the end I had some "signs" made up - not strictly legal, but I'll go back to full size if the
local council remove all sleeping policemen around here