Monday 21 July 2008

It's been another of those breaks....

Where we haven't really got much done on the car. We seem to have been doing loads of other stuff, I'm just not sure what. Certainly we went to Bruntingthorpe a couple of weeks ago with Ron's car - it was a kind of a mini-show weekend that didn't really live up to its billing. It was the weekend of the British GP, and the crowds weren't great. It hammered down with rain first thing, which didn't help. Ron also had a gearbox failure on his Blackbird engine, which meant we didn't really get any track time in either.

This weekend just gone, we met up with some of the other MNR owners in North Yorkshire, a bit of a trek for us, but it was good to put some faces to names, as most of them we only know through locostbuilders. There weren't any spare seats on the run out around the dales, so we took ourselves off around the moors for a few hours and found a nice pub for lunch. We met George again, who was picking up his kit when we came to order - I didnt' recognise him as he was sick when we met him first time (and we were quite excited). He's been keeping up with the blog and progress, and it was a bit weird, feeling like we've been internet-stalked. Good luck with the rest of your build George! :)

It has given us a bit of a wake-up about how much we have left to do, and so while watching the GP yesterday (well done to Lewis for a great drive!) we set about figuring out a list of which jobs we have left to do. There's quite a few! We also put time estimates against them. Hopefully being a bit more organised will help out a bit, as when we have a free evening, we can go out and just do the next job on the list.

The first big thing is going to be getting the engine running. We've a few jobs left around this, so we need to crack on with them. Once the engine is running, we can fit the bodywork completely and then build the suspension up! then put it on its wheels..... :)

We've done a few small jobs recently, we've been working on the routing for the coolant pipes, and angled the oil cooler back slightly, to make sure the pipes didn't foul on the rad. We've done the brake MC to resevoir piping and made a bracket for the res. Ron also looked at the cooling pipes where we'd placed them in, and didn't like a high-point we'd built into it - after pulling them apart and putting them back together again, he couldn't come up with a better way of doing it, without the pipes having to have cut-outs for the steering arms! The high point is in the bottom hose, so I'll put the fill from the header tank here, and any air which collects can vent back up to the header. The top of the system is already vented.

That's enough of an update for now, hopefully more to come soon (with some work actually completed!!)