Day 16 (Completed!)

All I had left to do today was to fit the nose to the front of the car, tidy up a bunch of the wiring in the engine bay, fit the bonnet and then get round to fitting all the IVA bolt covers etc to make it compliant for the test. I've still not heard back from VOSA yet about whether or not they are going to give me my suggested date of the 1st October. Either way, its booked to be picked up by Caterham on the 23rd so I needed to get it finished.

I had originally intended to fit all of the weather gear to the car as well but I've since been told by Caterham that they'd simply remove all of this ahead of the IVA anyway so I've chosen to leave the fitting of this stuff until the car is back with me.

Nose

I'd had a read of the Assembly guide the night before to see what it said about fitting the nose to the car.  Strangely though I could find no information on this whatsoever. As it happens its pretty straight forward, there are four Dzus fasteners already attached to the nose and the brackets that they do up into are already fitted to the car. Its simply a matter of fitting the nose to the car and then doing them up. Just before I fitted it, I was sure to stick the new style Caterham badge onto it. There are actually some bolt holes pre-drilled in the nose to take the badge but the new ones simply stick on so the holes aren't actually needed.

New Style Badge

Nose is on!

Bonnet

Again this was very straightforward, the bonnet simply needs to be lifted in place and secured to the car using the various fixings that came pre-attached to the chassis. One thing I did do before I fitted it though was to run some self-adhesive felt along the edge of the nose and along the main chassis rail that runs the length of the engine bay on both sides. This will hopefully stop it rubbing against the paint work whilst on the move.

Bonnet in place

I also ran the car up again quickly to make sure that all of the various instruments were working correctly. I'd noticed earlier in the week that the horn wasn't working. As it happens, on closer inspection of the front of the car around where the horns are mounted, I found 2 stray wires that weren't attached to anything. These were a purple & purple/yellow combination. Thinking that perhaps these were in fact the wires for the horn and not the ones I currently had fitted, I swapped them over. Sure enough the horn then started to work and oh boy is it loud with the bonnet off! I've since double checked with Caterham about the other wires and apparently these are no longer used. They used to be used to power some kind of fan and still form part of the loom but are not required on the SuperSport. I've now taped them up and cable tied them out of the way.

Correct wires for the horn

Adjusting front wing alignment

I'd also noticed that one of the front wings looked a bit wonky. It was centrally aligned with the tyre correctly, it just didn't look like it was located correctly in terms of the horizontal alignment in relation to the tyre. I'd remembered that the guide had mentioned the potential for some adjustment to be needed to the wing stays to get this spot on so I decided to remove the offending wing with a view to revising the alignment. With the wings now held in place with cable ties to the BigHead fasteners, this proved very easy indeed. I cut off the 4 cable ties, moved the wing aside and then gave the wingstays a couple of good whacks with a soft faced hammer to 'reconfigure' their positioning. 4 cable ties to hold it back on and it now looks great. The whole thing took no more than 10 minutes so I'm chuffed that I went with the option of bonding them on.

My only gripe now with the Cycle wings is that the repeaters do look rather crap. I think I might remove those at some point in the future If I can but they will have to remain on the car until after the IVA. I think they look particularly garish on a White car but c'est la vie!

Finished!

And that's pretty much it done for the moment. Think I might give it a polish later in the week but other than that it's good enough to be sent off to Caterham. I'll update again once I hear about how the post build check goes and whether I eventually get my requested IVA date off VOSA.