IVA Test 2... PASSED!!

So I have taken over a week and a half to post the good news, the car passed the IVA!! This super good news was marred somewhat by the fact that the DVLA were stumped when I tried to register the vehicle later that day, they really had no clue what was going on and as a result I am still in the dark as to the progress of my application. Either way the second test went far better, the noise level came in 1db under at 98db, a heart stopping moment as we saw the sound level meter creep up. The emissions were miles under as it turned out that I had not plugged the cut servo assist line and that was the cause of the weird mix, silly really, I think I even made a mental note to do that way earlier on in the build and just forgot. And the other little odds and ends were solved with the appropriate stickers, trim and other miscellaneous garage stuff.

The pass did mean that I could finally make those changes that I had been wanting to make, like my nice wooden steering wheel. I fitted it only to find that it does foul on part of the column but after a little work with the dremmel it moves fairly well, I may still go back at some point an put it on the lathe to make it perfect. Either way it is all looking good and now I am just waiting for the reg green light from the DVLA. Apparently they will send someone out to inspect but it is not so much a test as a check to see it is what you said it was on the form. A bit of a pain but it can't be helped. Should only be a few weeks now.

IVA Test 1...Fail... But could be worse

Now if you had asked me before I went whether my car would pass the IVA I would have told you that the chance of success was about 5%. Still, when I struggled out of bed yesterday morning at 6.45, having got two hours sleep, I must say I had my fingers well and truly crossed.

The day before I had taken the train down from Nottingham and I had intended to do a few finishing alterations before the big day. It was about 7.30 in the evening when I removed the Rear RHS wheel, with the intention of bleeding the brake system, only to find, to my immediate despair, that the wheel had been rubbing on the back of the rear light assembly. It had almost worn through the back of the casing and it had torn into the wires that supplied it with power. To make matters worse the rear wishbone assembly was for some reason loose. I must say I was the nearest I have been to panicking since the temperature sender incident. I phoned Paul my old DT teacher who very kindly turned around midway through his journey home to help out. I was going to have to do some real work on it to get it fixed so I was going to need to drive it down to the  other garage, because, as you may remember, it was currently in storage in a friend's garage. We drove in convoy and Paul stayed until 11.30 helping out. We redesigned the light housing and vacuum formed a new part bringing the light further out from the rear wing cycles. My Dad brought down some food to sustain me through the night. Paul bled the brake system, and I fitted the lights, the wishbones just needed a little tighten and were good to go. At about 3.30 I packed up and headed home to get the necessary papers together and as much sleep as I could fit in. Crisis averted.

Old Setup

New Setup

I was already late when we got down to the garage. However, the greater concern at that point was not my tardy arrival but that of my hired tow truck. A breakdown in communication when making the order meant that he arrived at quarter past, rather than quarter to seven. At that time in the morning we reckoned the journey to the test centre was going to take about an hour and this relatively small mistake had the predicted implications, we were 15 minutes late rather than early. To make matters worse our tester had clearly woken that very morning with mindset similar to that of a stubborn mule and an attitude so negative that it would have made Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh seem like a cheery fellow. Moaning about the fact we were late he strolled up to the trailer and began to pick faults.

He failed it before it had been unloaded from the trailer, on design "faults" that were not even written on the IVA inspection guidelines. However with my severely battered morale hidden beneath the best facade of happy go lucky nonchalance that I could muster,  we unloaded and began the test. And quite soon the faults that had been frivolously thrown around upon arrival seemed to become disproven or of very little significance, sure there were a number of failure points but these I had been expecting and the torrent that preceded had somehow been quelled leaving a trickle of very manageable and justified fail points. Some were as minor as the need to tighten a nut slightly, or a missing split pin.

The test ran its course for 5 hours and at the end my initially miserable instructor and I were on quite good form. The list of errors fit onto a page and it was time to head home.

Below is the list of failures:

-Noise Level too high. Test requirement is sub 99db, mine was 100.8

-Petrol emissions too high in Hydrocarbons and CO2 (needs tuning)

-Rear Number plate screws line with fuel tank

-Steering column touches engine mount

-Interior mirror is too sharp

-Sticker indicating brake fluid filler missing

-Air intake too sharp

-Wishbone bracket too sharp

-Side repeaters too sharp

-VIN plate missing

-Fog lamp tell-tail light not visible from driving position

-Wires need grommets in certain places

-Design weights were underestimates on the application form so certificate of weighing is required

-Fastening nuts on wishbones need tightening

-Castle nuts on steering assembly needs a split pin

There was also some talk of fixing other sharps around the rear of the vehicle but there is no note on the failure form. All in all its not too much of a disappointment.

Good News and Bad

Good news and bad news today. The good news is that I have had the VOSA paperwork approved and have been given a test date. The bad news is that it was not as soon as I had hoped. It's on 18th May. Now this is bad for a number of reasons. The first is that my first exam is on the 26th and given the chances that I will probably have to undergo a retest (the test is very hard), and the fact that there is still DVLA assessment to get through after this, it all means that I will probably not be able to have it on the road for my first trip back up to Nottingham. The late test date also means that I will probably have to move the car from the school as it is a little too long to keep it there. All bad times. But ahh well at least its progress.


Ill keep you all informed as to its progress and how the test goes.

Waiting on paper work...

Busy, Busy, Busy

Busy, Busy, Busy! And I've been working at a cracking pace even if I do say so myself. This is what I have been doing over the last few days, not particularly interesting stories so I will list the parts and show the pics:

Front right hand side body panel

Rear central body panel

Coolant hose holder (holds it away from the alternator fan)

Fabricated the metal front mud guard holders (they still need to be powder coated)

Started mounting the mud guards themselves but only managed to get the left one on so far

Fabricated the bonnet and cut the hole for the carburettor air intake

I also fitted an adjustable bolt that holds the clutch pedal in position when not in use.

I did have one glitch making the bonnet. I had forgotten that I had removed the bolts holding the dash on so that I could work on the dials. When I made the template the dash was therefore loose. I did not see this though and as a result continued to make the bonnet itself, it was only on the final fit that I saw it was different to how it had been at the start (it was moving a little bit every time I bent the metal). So having realised that I had to start again trimming bits off my aluminium sheet. Luckily I had cut it too big rather than too small in the first place. I would have been far less flippant about the situation if I had had to buy another sheet of ali, but in the end it only cost me about 3 hours more work, oh well.

Kit Parts Direct! Great company!

Ok, so I have done more to the car but I wanted to give a separate post as a quick shout-out for anyone who is interested in building their own car or wants some parts to bling their own car up a bit, or wants to buy any car stuff and is looking for a good, HELPFUL, part supplier!! As you have seen and hopefully read, I have used a few different sources to get parts but as I am now nearing the end of the project I can quite definitively say that none have been quite as down to earth and helpful as the good people at Kit Parts Direct. They are one of the few suppliers who have a grasp of the build as well as the parts they sell and as a result can offer some really useful advice when purchasing from them. I put in an order yesterday morning for trim and fog tell tail lights and sure enough they arrived this morning, this was such a pleasant surprise as I am hopeless with waiting around for stuff to arrive.

Either way I just thought it needed to be said, so thank you to all the people at Kit Parts Direct and keep up the great service!!!

http://www.kitpartsdirect.com/

My rear end and a speedo test

Well I gave an update yesterday but kinda skimped on the photos and video, so today I took my camera down and so as to shoot as much multimedia as blogspot will let me upload (almost).

I started today focusing on the rear end more specifically the tail lights and one of the top body panels. I had finished last night by putting on the rear wheel covers on and this morning the next obvious step was to fit the last two tail light clusters. I cut the holes out of the GFRP with a dremel, and although I had seen that in some kitcar magazines people had opted to drill or saw these holes out, the dremel worked a dream. In fact I would say that if you are doing the same thing then invest in one, it makes life so much easier and makes it almost impossible to crack the gel coat layer. With the Holes cut I simply held the light boxes in place with a few spots of glue gun on the outside and with them positioned as desired put a full bead around them under the wheel arch. Then wired them up and tested.

I got a shock (not literally) when I found one of the wires was not working but it simply turned out to be a blown fuse. Stupidly, I only discovered this having tried about 3 different bulbs and traced the wire half way back through the car looking for a brake.

The next piece fabricated was the top left boot panel and there is not much to say about that, all went in fine. I did manage to damage the passenger seat ever so slightly when drilling a hole but it was just where the side of the drill chuck rubbed on it. A bit of a pain though.

I thought I would include some pics of how it looks at the moment as I have not done so in a while so here is front back left and right views of it in its current state. You will notice we now have a silencer!!

Finally today I managed to attach the speedo cable. This was a complete b**ch of a job as the cable attaches to the gearbox at right angles to it, right underneath where the gearstick is. The space to work in the drive channel is so small that I almost crippled myself contorting my hand into a position allowing me access. However I did get it done. The other end required a different attachment than the sierra's in order to attach to my new speedo. I did not want to buy a new cable or a converter. So I used what I thought was a fairly novel idea, which was to attach the cable terminator to the thread on the speedo by moulding polymorph around it. This is a smart material, specifically a low melting point thermo polymer that becomes workable at about 80 deg C and sets quite hard as it cools. Its unlike a glue as it does not have any real adhesive properties at these temperatures but it does take to the relief of the two parts very well, basically making a custom connector. At this point I needed to test it and what better to do so than a quick drive up and down the road.

It worked and I managed to make it up to 40mph as you can see on the dash if you look closely and don’t tell anyone. Rev counter is also working. The bottom three dials I am not so sure about at the moment, oil pressure is playing up and there is not enough fuel in the tank to check that one, as for water temp I am too scared to run it long enough to check that one.

Keep checking in for more progress updates.

I'M BACK!!! And let me tell you what has happened since the Summer...

So the end of the summer went true to the last blog post and the car was not finished before my birthday. In the 5 days after that blog post a fair amount got done, but it had been a long summer and therefore not as much as I had hoped. So I went back up to Nottingham car-less and with a busy Christmas holiday ahead. I was pretty sure that I would not get that much done there, what with presents, mince pies and hiding from carol singers. This did lead onto a problem however. In my absence over the Christmas term the car had acquired some damage, which I suppose is inevitable when you leave a half finished project in an area of the school where students can get their hands on tools or more notably drop them having got their hands on them. Either way this damage, and the clearly obvious fact that the school needed for  more space for their automobile society, meant that I was evicted, and had to be out of the garage by the end of the Christmas holidays (about Jan 5th).

Now you may remember as it was not too long ago, that Jan 5th in London in the year 2010 was quite white, in that there was a thick layer of snow covering everything. This meant that people were panicking about their new year commute into work and subsequently I found that this manifested itself in a sell out of 4x4 to hire. In order to transport my car and move it from the garage I was going to need a 4x4 and trailer and all of the hire companies simply could not help me until far later on. With the beginning of both the school term and the university term fast approaching we had to take drastic action.

I was very lucky to have a friend who's father had a garage nearby, no more than a mile up the road, and he very kindly said that we could use it over the period of the Easter term. So on Sunday 10th January at first light, I drove my very noisy (no silencer), fairly naked (very few body panels on it) car up the road through the snow. I drove in convoy with my father in his car in front of me, and my brother in his car behind. We made it without a hitch and ironically the one car that did not struggle with the snow was my half built one, with the others slipping and sliding in front and behind.

It was clear that my Dad was not totally happy with the fairly illegal exploit and this presented itself three months later when he decided it would probably be best to pay a vehicle removal company to take it back down to the garage. We organised this return for last Tuesday. The day after the Easter bank holiday and the company we used was very helpful, charging a reasonable £51.50 for the move. I paid this with a slight feeling of regret, aware of the fact that it would be far cheaper and a lot more fun, if a little illegal, to drive it back down, but I suppose there is no point in tempting fate, especially having come this far with the project.

So with the car back down in the garage I have spent a very full three days working away on it, and the progress made, after a break that gave me time to plan and rebuild by enthusiasm for the project, has been far better than I had hoped for. I will endeavour to put plenty of pictures up over the next couple of weeks as things move forward.

The plan for this holiday is to have the car practically finished in the next 2 weeks, take it up to Rotherham to have it checked over by Martin Keenan for the SVA (look at the beginning of the blog), then have it tested in Nottingham. Assuming all goes well and I pass, I should just have to register and insure it and I'll be on the road in no time!!! Let's see how this goes then...

PS Cheers to all those who have asked after the progress of the car over the past 9 months, it is really nice to see people take an interest, and does help me stay motivated and stick with it.