Another evening in the garage. And not a massive amount to show for it, although it was all bits and pieces that needed to get done and I can now tick off the list.

I started by removing the incorrect trim I’d put on the side panels the day before. I remembered seeing a roll of trimming in another bag and then it clicked that I’d used the wrong type. The riveting was tiring and painful at times! But it’s done now. Penny and Carole were troopers this evening and took it in shifts to help out.

Once the trim was all in, I had found some nylon washers that the manual says are used in race car builds on the rear A-Frame bolts… as this is a race car, I figured I’d put them in! It wasn’t massively easy to get the bolt out and it was far harder again to get it back in. However, in it did go and despite not being able to get a socket in to tighten properly, it went on enough and the manual says to leave it lose ahead of fitting the dampers.

Final job for the evening was to fit the two catch tanks to the bulk head. A job complicated by the fact that you have to drill backwards into the dashboard compartment and straight towards a tonne of really fine wiring… I ended up putting cardboard and a stip of wood up behind the wiring to try and prevent any accidents. It worked a treat and I’m glad I did it as there were at least a few wood shavings in one of the holes!

The catch tanks have the added benefit of giving the impression of the bulkhead now having boggle eyes!

First off, you may have noticed the return of the time-lapse! Now, I’m not willing to divulge how I solved the camcorder problem, suffice to say, if you only carry out one half of a very famous IT troubleshooting catch phrase….

If I’m that stupid behind a wheel of a car, then we’ve got real problems.

This morning we aimed to get the seats in and and exhaust on. However, as we’re missing the cap head bolts needed for both the damper and the radius arm, which means we can’t put the seats in permanently as they block off access.

However, we were able to attach the seat rails and i fitted the crutch straps of the harness.

We also made a start on the exhaust. Fitting the collector/cat was, frankly, a right pain in the arse. It started off innocently enough, but getting the spring hooks into place was extremely testing! In the end, use of cable ties was good for one hook and a little grinding and the use of a screw driver to lever the loop into place worked on the other side. It’s a job I never want to have to do again. Ever.

In the evening, I managed to get back into the garage and fit some trim to the front suspension openings and also fit the heater blanking plate. The trim was as awkward as you might expect and I didn’t end up with a result I was particularly happy with. Still, it’s done and ticked off the list.

An email to Caterham is now in the offing to get the caphead bolts sent so I can complete the rear suspension. That will mean the interior rivetting can be completed, the seats can go in and I’ll be well on the way towards first engine start!

We’re at the weekend again! Plenty of build time available! The morning was spent finishing off the headlamps and dry fitting the rear de-dion tube so that the brake lines could be added. The holes that the rivets go through need cleaning out with the drill to be able to accept the rivets. My brake lines didn’t quite fit as the manual suggested but it’s not a difficult job to gently persuade everything in place.

The most difficult thing about the dry fit was figuring out how the calliper and ears go together. The manual suggests that you should read the section on fitting the rear suspension and work it out from that – but it seems that someone was having an off day when they go to the rear suspension section and it doesn’t really offer any good advice about fitting the suspension and certainly doesn’t make it clear what bolts to use!

Eventually, with a mixture of trial and error and luck, things started to make sense. There are two screws in the brake calliper box that are essential to putting things together and as soon as I found them, it began to come together more!

After the dry fit, everything has to be removed again (apart from the brake lines which are now riveted in place) ready for the de-dion to be inserted into the car. As my Dad departed for the weekend, Mark and Jeremy arrived to offer the extra hands you need when working on a Caterham!

They arrived to see me laying into my differential with a claw hammer and lump mallet. All very sophisticated. However, this turns out to be the only way to remove the flanges that are supplied inserted in the diff but which are not used by the Caterham drive shafts.

If you, like me, look at your diff initially and are not sure what needs to be removed, if you gently turn the prop-shaft, anything that you can see moving on the sides of the diff needs to come off!

Insert claw hammer under flange, hit with lump hammer several times, rotate prop slightly, repeat – and eventually it will pop out. The prop shafts went into place easily enough.

I wasn’t expecting that to be an especially tricky task to get the de-dion in, but it took 3 people 10 mins to finally work it out. We tried all sorts of approaches but the best one was to insert from the right side of the chassis, initially head down below the differential with the end of the tube (being careful of the exposed ends of the brake lines) then, gently twist the tube to tease it above the chassis bar on the far side of the differential and also up behind the differential at the same time. It doesn’t give the impression it’s going to be possible but it does eventually fit.

At that point, it would have been a wise idea to fit the A-frame that holds the tube centrally in the chassis, and I would recommend that anyone building does so… Instead, we went on to fit the ears, hubs and discs. This process wasn’t helped from a far from useful section of the manual. Part of the issue is that there are several different bags of fittings and the manual makes reference to bolts that don’t seem to make sense to either of the contents of these bags. In the end, we tried using brains to work through which bolts went where. I hope that we’ve made the correct choices, I’ll have to get Caterham to double check at post build.

When we did eventually fit the A-frame, it was heavy to move everything around into position and the A-frame itself is a fiddle. It’s another case of fitting spacer washers to make sure that everything is central in the chassis. Again, the bolts did eventually go in with all the spacers in place but it takes time and patience.

With all that done, the next item we wanted to get done was the spring damper. However, this is another rabbit hole of associated tasks that need to be done. To get the dampers in, you need to have fitted the roll-cage. To get the roll-cage in, you need to have fitted the knee trim panels. To fit the knee trim panels, you need to fit some trim piping.

The trim wasn’t hard to get in place but the knee trim panels resolutely refused to sit in place and line up with the pre-drilled holes. Eventually, I made the decision to simply drill more holes through the panel. Self tapping screws are then put in place to hold everything together.

We also took the opportunity to fit the front brake hoses which had been posted out to me by Caterham.

Onto the roll-cage fitment. I had slight alignment issues on the front shoe mountings and the bolts that attach vertically upwards into the mid mounting points were tricky to get started. The main tip is to be patient and to fit everything loosely so that there is still some flex available.

While the cage was going in, we also fitted the hood sticks to the car. As I didn’t have a hood specified, I wasn’t going to put these on the car, but speaking to Grubby (http://www.sevenracing.co.uk/), these are apparently not an optional fit! They also sit on top of the boot ridge and therefore alter how the boot cover fits the car – so it’s just as well as otherwise I would have fitted the poppers in the wrong place.

So, after all those diversions, it was finally time to get back to the rear spring dampers! Sadly, this didn’t last long! I haven’t got the required bolts to go through the top bush – you need a cap head/allen key bolt, but i look like I’ve been given hex bolts. Another part for Caterham to supply. I can also see that it’s going to be a hard old job getting the dampers in. Because the de-dion tube sits above a chassis bar, the dampers are going to have to be compressed heavily to get them in place. I may have a read around the forums/blogs to see how people approached this.

The cars now really beginning to pick up character. It’s got it’s eyes and hat on now… and with the front and rear hubs visible, it’s starting to look like a car now.

Tomorrow, we’ll be onto seat and exhaust fitting.

Unfortunately as far as car building goes, work rather took over on day 8 and there wasn’t any time to get any spanners out. However, Dad made some more progress on the headlamps and indicators.

Because of where I had put one of the grommets earlier in the build, I had to remove the front headlight bracket so I could remove it again! Now, that’s one of those jobs that sounds simple, but in order to take off the bracket, you have to remove the top wishbone bolt. The anti-roll bar sits in front of this bolt and the radiator its in front of the anti-roll bar! However, rather than go the full hog and remove all that, we decided to try and remove the anti-roll bar mount bolts on both sides and just slide the bar down the front of the car so we could get a socket onto the wishbone bolt… there was just enough movement in the bar to allow this!

With the headlamp bracket off the car, it was a much more reasonable job to get all the headlamp/indicator wires through the stalk. Still far from easy of course! The only other complication is the grommets that go into the holes to stop the wires chaffing. It’s not possible to get the wires through with them in place, so you thread one onto the wires before insertion and another one once the wires have made their way into the engine bay. Once everything is where it should be, you can then insert the grommets to finish the job off.

If I were building from scratch again, I would certainly get the lights done whilst building the front suspension. Although it would slow progress building whilst putting together the nice big bolts of the front suspension, it would have saved some frustration and time undoing bolts further down the line!