Saturday - less than 90 days to go.

Worked till about 3 in the morning yesterday wiring up the car.

As mentioned earlier, replaced the ignition switch with flick switches, no key needed.
Looking at the wiring diagram, actually only Ign 1 is really required. I think I just went overkill on the cable gauges. Oh well, at least it ally's the nightmares I have of the car catching fire.

I need a new battery box.

The battery box will be moved from the car to next to the driver. Hopefully better weight distribution, I think.
Will it really make a difference? I guess I'd like to be able to retain the passenger eat to give ride.  Yay.

Pedal box.

Did I mention earlier that the car will have a pedal box? This one I bought from OBP - Optimum Balance Products. It was reasonable and was supplied with Master Cylinders etc.

The advantage of the pedal box? Braking. This unit comes with 2 brake master cylinders, one for the rear and one for the front. Connecting the cylinders to the pedal is a balance bar which allows one to control front/rear pressure with a turn of a knob.

This is a floor mount unit, and will eliminate the brake booster - which means direct feel straight to the calipers. Never having used one before, I'm going to need some time to get used to this.

Mounting.


Started drilling holes in the floor plan today to mount this. The positioning is going to be awkward but I opted to position it such that I can brace my right leg to the side of the seat while being able to accelerate.

Tools

One of the most useful tools I've bought to date is this cheap MIG welder. While my welding quality can be hit or miss, this has allowed me to do stuff to the car that uhm, only a welder can. Oh well.

Just make sure that you cover every exposed parts of your body or suffer from UV light burns as I have in a previous post.


Finally,

I thought I'd revisit somethings else that was done to the car. To keep the weight of the car down, I replaced most of the windows with Lexan. Lexan is tacked onto the frame which means you can't wind down the window. "Race car" means that there's no airconditioning in the car.

And believe me, it gets very hot in the car. So, we then include NACA duct vents that hopefully will give sufficient ventilation with little drag.

Late Night

Just completed wiring up the Ignition Switch.

Tired. Need sleep - post pictures another day.

Took a day off from working on the Car

Didn't do anything on the car today, instead just vegged out in front of the TV and watched Eli.

Anyway, had tyres on my mind, and did a quick seach on EBAY.

While I'm almost certainly settled for Toyo R888, which are cost effective, not cheap but cost effective.

http://www.toyotires.com.au/all-tyres/proxes-r888

Another Tyre popped up, the Nitt0 NT01.

Supposedly from the same factory as Toyo. Did a quick search on this tyre and reviews seem to have it outperform the R888. Hmm something else to think about.

http://www.nittotire.com/Tire/nt01

Control Panel

Quite tired so will make this a quick one.

First, you'd have probably seen the ugly brackets holding the Defi control unit yesterday. I cleaned that up.

Also completed the centre console control panel.

On the bottom row, we have the kill switch, ign 1, ign 2 and acc

Top row, probably one will drive the defi gauges, another reserved for driving lights, one for strobe lights and one for ..uhm, have to think about that one.

Tomorrow I'll wire it all up.

Setting up the office

Gotta love Defi units. They make wiring it up so easy with their colour coded cables.

Mine was given to me from a very good friend, so here's a plug to his business.
http://www.naroop.com.au

So what do I have, a Defi Boost Gauge and Advanced ZD. Trying to keep the gauges to a minimum and really, what I need is just a unit that will alert me when certain parameters are met - e.g. Too high water or oil temps!

Here's a quick look what was done today.

Mounted the Defi control unit and also a control panel.

With the Defi unit, I previously had in under the dash, which was a pain to access. So anyway, I've bolted it now to the dash, both for easy access and also to make the car look more racy (I hope..  :-p)

The centre console holds the Boost controller, hardzard light switch, the Defi switch unit and 4 switches, that uhm, at this time don't do squat - just makes it look serious.

I'm actually pretty proud of the centre console, its held on by 2 dzus pins at the top which makes it easy for remove and access the wiring.

So whats next.

Well, the ignition switch has been removed and in place of it will be a couple of switches to turn on Ignition and ACC, and a push button start.

This will sit next to the driver for easy access when harnessed in.

Oh yes, and a kill switch as well.

I'll start work on that tomorrow.

Smelling Oily

Yup. I spilt lubricating oil all over myself. Note to self, remember to uncap the bottle before squeezing. Not doing so can result in extreme pressure where the whole cap explodes out.

What was I doing with the oil? I was lubricating an air tool which I was using to trim the dash so it wouldn't rattle against the windscreen. Anyway, it didn't work and so I snapped the bits off with pliers.

Anyway, got myself a nice (NOT!) UV light burn on my arm. I usually wear long sleeves and long pant while welding (Since the last UV burn on my legs at least) but I simply forgot. So, ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch...

I got the dash in tonight as well as cleaned up some of the wiring...well, clean is relative. And no, I'm not using masking tape in place of insulation tape.

Kinda miss this view...

The Office Part II

Completed the seat bracket today.

Mounted the seat, and here's a sneak preview of what the office is going to be like.

The Office - Part 1

Using a pedal box requires changes to all the braking lines especially when the ABS system is being removed from the car.

Initially I was going to re-do all the hard lines, from front, the rears, the whole hog. However, as I was stripping the ABS, I just had a thought, why not leverage on the existing hard brake lines and all I had to do was join up the master cylinders to the existing hard line. I could quite easily get all the parts from Ebay(!!) or Earls.

Then I kicked myself real hard. I needed front non ABS lines and only about 5 days back, I sold the existing lines I had for $40.

SOLD!!!

So I weighed the option of having the front as braided lines. Speaking to Earls, they advised that it may mean a longer pedal compression, some people liked it and some don't. So I decided to try and get the hard lines from the wreckers.

But before that, Goodies from Earls.

Anyway, headed down to a known Honda wrecker in Smithfield. Showed the guy what I needed. Now taking off the hardlines is easiest done with the engine out however, none of his civics/integras had the engine out. Which means a great deal of work.

He wanted $100 for the lines. No way Jose!  The next wrecker I went too didn't even know what I was talking about and kept showing brake calipers.

Finally, hit up Pick and Payless here in Sydney. For those who don't know, Pick and Payless is a wrecking yard where you bring your own tools and dismantle what you want. You can get a bargain for bits and bobs.

A whole yard full of treasure

From the lot, I picked my target.

With a trusty size 10 spanner, I got what I needed.

and all for just $18. Phew. Saved a bit there.

So just a couple more little things and I should be able to commence work on the brake lines.