Day 1 - Arrival Day!

A day I'd been waiting to arrive for quite a while! The Caterham delivery driver had been given the wrong address so it took him a while to find the place but he still showed up just before lunch. Apparently I wasn't the only one interested in the presence of a Caterham lorry as it soon had some of my neighbors that I'd not met yet coming out of their houses with an offer to 'help out'. Who was I to argue though, I'd have probably done the same!

Unloading took a surprisingly short amount of time given the extra help and the chassis was soon tucked up neatly in the garage. I must admit that I was worried that the garage would be too narrow to work on the car effectively being a rather narrow single garage but it seems to fit perfectly well. I'd made a point of purchasing some mobile axle stands (with braked wheels) with a view to making it a bit easier to move the car about in the garage to make best use of the space. I'm pleased to say there are fantastic and I can already see they'll be worth having forked out for. If anyone is looking for a similar set, take a look at CJ Autos which is where i bought them from (£200 ish for the set)

Not much time today to make much of an impact on the build but I did make a point of doing some of the initial prep work to protect the side panels ahead of the steering rack and front suspension being added. Whether it proves to come off nicely remains to be seen but I opted to use some Scotch Blue masking tape from 3M to protect around the holes in the side skins. I also went to B&Q and bought some pipe lagging from the plumbing section to protect the parts of the chassis likely to get knocked when the engine goes in. So far so good, can't wait to get the build started.

I was lucky enough to get a set of tools thrown in with my kit order courtesy of Draper Tools who are Caterham's current sponsors (more on the tools in a later post). The pick of the bunch for me is this little beauty which I'd never have thought to purchase if it hadn't come included. Its a handy little rubberised and magnetic bowl which sticks very nicely to any of the steel parts of the car. Can see it coming in very handy when trying to get sets of bolts, washers, nuts etc together ahead of building certain parts of the car.