Kutuka

kutuka-north.co.uk

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KUTUKA MOTORSPORT

WEEK 2

22-29 June

CHRISTINE

Injury of the week – liver damage. It’s very hot, you have to drink a lot of cider to cool off.

On the garage DVD player – Two and a half men series 4. It's not very good, bring back Kandi, we liked her, she's purdy.

Helper of the week – Nobody, it’s still just us.

The shell is delayed at the blasters, so we turn our attention to the parts of the job we’d usually do later.

Paint prep for both doors, boot and front wings. All sanded back to bare metal, or in the case of the boot, fibreglass. Primer, filler, dust. Not fun.

Front skirt takes its modifications, holes appear all over it, scoops and ducts for brake cooling, then a flat and paint, it’s the first part to get gloss. No shell to hang it off of course, but it’s done. Stainless steel mesh added, we usually use alloy, but Andrew’s car took a stone through the rad at Oulton despite the mesh so we’ve decided to spend extra and have stronger stuff.

It is venomously expensive though. By the time we’re done adding scoops and mesh etc the front skirt has swallowed another £50. That’s £50 just for the mods, our desire for that slightly different appearance and extra cooling isn’t cheap.

Doors and boot take longer, they’re not perfect and the bare-metalling lost all the remedial filler.

We’re also preparing extra pieces to fit to the new car. With a pipe bender and some care, extra pieces are made to strengthen the front end of the shell. Using the red car’s carcass as a template we can experiment at our leisure and the conclusion is you could do a lot to a car you build as class E from scratch, a LOT. We’re not going completely crazy with this one, we’re saving that for the next car. With bent pipe and swaged steel pieces littering the garage it will be a relief to get the shell back to weld them to. A car takes up a lot more room in pieces.

We’ve also turned our attention to ventilation. The old red car had a duct from the o/s headlamp all the way to a single diffuser aimed at the screen, and a 12v cheap fan clamped to the roll cage for the driver. It wasn’t brilliant.

Nowadays the hole in the window is big enough to keep the driver happy, but in wet conditions the car is still going to struggle. We are therefore putting some weight back by adding blowers. Not Jaguar stuff, obviously, it weighs a ton. By mating the old Jag diffuser plenum thing with a Transit double-fan blower we construct a powerful but lightweight air feed, the whole assembly comes in at 3.4kg. Worth every gram if it rains though, it does shift a lot of air at full speed, and we’re not wiring it to do anything else!

The steering gets a tinker too, the Bear is an accomplished fiddler with a lathe and a nice new set of solid aluminium rack mounts appear as if by magic. Actually, about 4 sets, he does get carried away.

Radius arm on the n/s of the red car looked a bit crunchy, so we salvage a set off the outgoing car, and press in new bushes.

The fuel tank let go in the crash, it must have been on its last legs, so the tank from the road car is carefully inspected, wire-brushed, primed and painted again. The foam that traps the water underneath them and rots the spot welds is discarded, a few thin strips of rubber are bonded to the underside of the tank instead, they don’t absorb water and still offer a hint of vibration absorption, and drain holes will be added underneath the tank.

A careful read of the regulations and we plan ahead for revisions to the shell when we get it back. 0.1 square metres of inner wing holes is quite a lot, allows us some freedom with ducting for the brakes, and the front skirt mods are done with that in mind. Also the fact we’re running a narrower aluminium radiator will allow the ducting to pass either side of it without crushing it to the point of being useless. With a louvred bonnet and the full exploitation of the rules we think we can run the bonnet flat, ie not raised at the rear edge, which will look much tidier, the raised appearance looks very bodged.

Just wish we had an actual bodyshell to weld something to. The shell returns 3^rd July, 28 days before test day. Now that’s a lot of work to do. Damn.

We didn't really take any pictures that are relevant to this week, so here instead is Megan and her murderer. Only kidding John, this stuff happens!