build diary

October 3, 2004: It's hard to type.
I just came in from a long drive in the little beastie and I'm a little overstimulated. Yes, I have a set of plates for the weekend (honestly, this is legal!) and I've been doing little but driving for the past two days. On the road, the Seven is all full of little zings, rattles and vibrations. They're particularly bad right at 3500 rpm on a light throttle, which is actually pretty common in the city. A sharp impact on the suspension is fairly crashy. Give the car its head, however, and it just comes alive. The engine note hardens, the vibration goes away as the revs soar, the suspension goes all fluid and it's just gear after gear after gear. When playing on the back roads - and we have some fantastic back roads here - it's amazing how much speed the Seven will carry through a corner without even trying. There's always more acceleration. At the moment, I'm quite happy with the amount of power the car has as it's all very accessible. On a Miata with this power/weight ratio I'm always more aware of driving a bit of a missle while the Seven seems to be a better balance of power and chassis.

So it should be fairly obvious that the engine is in good health. It needs to be tuned as we were trying to compensate for the low fuel pressure before and it runs quite rich up top. It also has some bad pinging if I load it up below 2500 rpm or so. There were also a few small problems. Crimp connections. I suspect my crimping tool is not as good as the one I've used at work as there are a number of intermittent connections. It's just a matter of hunting them all down and finding them. I think there's only one left by this point. The screws on a main wiring terminal had also loosened up causing a bit of intermittent running.

How about the results of my research? The Colorado state code is pretty clear - all vehicles must have a windshield made of an approved shatterproof material and it needs wipers that can be controlled by the driver. There's one exception: cars on collector plates. If I can register the Seven as a replica of a 1963 Lotus, that might do the trick. I'll call the DMV tomorrow and see if that will be possible. All my driving around this weekend did point out that a windshield wouldn't be all bad anyhow, so I might go ahead and make one. I have an idea for a legal wiper system that would be removeable (well, not legal at that point of course) or perhaps I can adapt one from an old Land Rover. An interesting note from this weekend - after arriving at a local restaurant (a little sideways), a fellow came up to me all excited and asking about my car. This isn't unusual, but the fact that he had his own little homebuilt Seven with a V8 was. He wanted to know how I could register it without a windshield as he wanted to do the same. We talked a bit about collector's vehicles. He thought mine was a Caterham - I'm taking that as a compliment!

I sure have a lot to say today. Those following Heikki's build have seen the new diff mounts from CMC. Hmm. I think they've avoided the actual source of the problem. The diff is trying to go nose-up quite enthusiastically and it's rotating around these two bushings. The nose is what needs to be tied down. Steve has told me they have a PPF substitute but I haven't seen anything about it yet. This solution will definitely reinforce those bushings better but it's still a rubber bushing and is designed to flex. Stiffening the bushing (as I did) would help, as would shaving down the top of the metal sleeve through the bushing so that the differential is mounted solidly to metal. Sure, more NVH but that's unavoidable in a Seven anyhow. 14mm bolts are a requirement instead of the 1/2" that I believe have been used - that's an easy mistake to make because the holes in the end of the factory mount are smaller than the hole through the bushing and the stud is designed to match. It seems that my setup is more effective than some of the others as it's surviving quite well despite the fact that my engine is making about 40 hp more than most 1.6s.

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