1968 Singer Chamois (Yamaha R1 Powered) LPV433G

Today's update... I decided that I needed to go around the car to figure out if there's anything left to be ordered. If it takes a week to arrive it doesn't give me a lot of time to do anything with it. Not finding anything obvious, except I'm still missing a rear brake caliper?! An actual MX3 one is up for £75 on eBay! To hell with that. I know the MX5 MK2 ones are very similar if not the same so I won a pair for £12.90 plus postage. I need to buy some new pads as they are slightly different but still use the same 251mm discs. When they arrive I'll check the adaptors I've made but I don't believe the bolt spacings are different.

Next up I started to look at the exhaust manifold. As previously pictured, my stainless manifold bought for bends finally got hacked up into individual sections. The R1 primaries in standard form wasn't going to work as they were simply too long and didn't head in the right direction. It would be abit ugly to correct all this with the secondaries.

I started off with the best intentions by colour coding the individual sections of each primary with the intention of keeping the, together to achieve the equal length primaries but just reformed into a new shape that suits the Imp. After a bit it was quite obvious this wasn't going to work and I ended up forgetting about equal length primaries etc and choosing to make something that works with the materials I have available. In the long run I intend to turbo this car so the manifold I make now isn't that critical. So long the exhaust gasses go out the scilencer I'm happy haha.



About an hour in we put up an awning to keep the sun off.... I was boiling my nuts off!















Believe it or not but this took all day. The manifold is all welded up now and I just need to sort the routing under the diff up to the scilencer. This should be abit more straight forward.

Tomorrow morning I need to finish off setting the diff and get driveshaft lengths sorted. All being well we should be making driveshafts tomorrow evening at my dads mates place.

Its amazing how time disappears when you are tackling any job when you have cut, trial fit, fettle, trial fit again and again.
A great job with the headers and how they turn around the engine.
Saves putting them underneath and using up valuable ground clearance.

Col.

Eactlty what I was saying when planning this ordeal! #LoveRoadkill

Tuesday was driveshaft day, moving the shocks out of driveshaft sweep has turned into abit more work than expected. I've not got any photos of this so far but they are going in the locations of the original springs, the shocks are going to poke into the rear seat area. I've only started hacking the one side out so far... pictures to follow next week when I get back on it.

Recap on driveshaft set up, RX8 inner pot joints to MX5 outer CV's on to imp stubs.


Tuesday evening we went to go see my dads mate Rory. Big thanks to Rory for helping out, I'm really glad I didn't try and do this work on my lathe. Joining the MX5 CV to the imp stubs was the first job.

My dad and Rory in their natural habitat. Haha





Joggled together to ensure concentricity.





The RX8 shafts are much thicker then the MX5 ones so we bored the RX8 ones by 25mm deep and turned a 20mm long pin on the MX5 shafts. The pins are now in the freezer and we will press and weld these together next week.





Wednesday... The MX5 CV joints are still slightly too large. I could knock off the abs sensor ring but I want to keep this just incase I want to fit traction control or something's in the future.... unlikely but you never know. It was easy enough to cut a slot and knock it in with a hammer and weld it back up. Simples.





The CV and imp stubs are now welded up, we put them in the press and clamped the CV and stub together to make sure it didn't tip as I welded. With the welder on max 250amps to achieve maximum penetration we blatted them together. The rest of the day was spent hacking rear stunts as mentioned and moving the car out of my dads way haha.



Moving onto today, Thursday, I made the rest of the exhaust system.











I then moved on to the coolant system because then I can run it up to temp and check the engine over a bit more. First thing was I needed an expansion bottle. I went "shopping" and stole one off this fine cinquecento parked many years ago to reshell my brother class 5 autograss car.



However after messing about trying to locate it somewhere that looked ok we decided it was curse word. It didn't look nice and we were pretty sure it would just blow up anyway. It's had years of UV light and was brittle. Push comes to shove, we'll bleed the system and just put a bolt in the expansion tube. Ain't no body got time for that....Not for the gathering anyway.

Moving onto the front mount rad. We have already cut out the horns etc ready for the radiator. I needed to make some brackets to mount it in with. I used box section to make some U shape cups.



Lined with abit of foam they will support the rad nicely.



Next I mounted the fans to the rad. I trimmed up the fan cases to make sure they sit flush against the rad face.





Using the mounting kits this was all pretty straight forward.



I had to trim down the bonnet release arm as it's unnecessarily long...... I nearly died hahaha.



I drilled two holes in my brackets so I could bug weld them to the floor. I thought this would look much nicer than zipping down the sides... not that anyone would ever see these or care.











I can't work on the car until Monday now as I'm at Silverstone helping my dad out for the weekend racing. Customers testing tomorrow and two lots racing Saturday and Sunday. Not ideal I know but the deal is my dad will help me with the Imp all next week until the show. Still lots left to do but I'm still optimistic!

Looking really good!

Wonder how one of those Fiat Abarth 850 TC front air dams would look on an IMP?

.... sink or swim? How's it all going?

Oooooh and I had a fiver on this not making it - looks like my assessment was way off base

Good to see the 850 will be there! The starions getting a bit touch and go... MOT on Sat :s

This morning we had a go at beading the tyres. My tyre cannon didn't even make them blink... utterly useless. The tyres have pretty stiff side walls so we switched to plan B. We put inner tubes in and blew them up, the first one was a rear and we got to 70psi and the bead was still about an inch off the rim lip. We let it sit for a while and started on another. Meanwhile the first one went pop and beaded however it also ripped the inner tube. The tubes are meant for up to 175R13 tyres... were using them on a 235 tyre. We chose to change to 14" tubes (all in stock from our autograss days). Trying different things we lubed them up, particularly inflated them and let them down to make them settle as best we can etc before trying to bead.. but still we ended up popping all 4 tubes in the tyres. They are looking pretty cool but the rear tyres a way too much stretch for my liking... never mind! The kids will love'em. These have been left until Saturday because the car is still a long way off being finished.



As mentioned previously I welded up the driveshafts and we built these up today.





Dad started building the rear arms and looking at the rear brakes.





Mean while I was figuring out any reaming items that need to be welded to the engine frame. I sorted the gearshift cable and the clutch slave location. I was going to use the standard bike clutch cable with a seesaw to convert it to hydraulic. With this set up I could change and control the amount of travel for the bite point. Time permitting I have gone straight for hydraulic slave pushing on the lever.





Two days build time remaining.....!!







We hit a big time killer this evening. The bolts in the right rear arm bushes haven't been greased and did not want to come out. We could get the nuts off but couldn't get the bolts out of the bush pins. We ended up hacking both the heads and tails off the bolts and splaying the flanges on the rear beam.





Once the arm was off we could get the pins out. Now we needed to press the old bolts out of the pins. It took 5 tonnes of pressure to make it move... no way we're we going to get it out with just a hammer.