Author: Dirk Verhaert

It took some time before we knew what material we were going to use for the floor plates. It needed to be mechanically ok and should look nice.

It is possible to buy carbon pre-manufactured plates but we did not like them because they did not seem strong enough. This meant that we needed to construct something ourselves. This was also a good moment to test Luc’s inventor skills.

We made a mould in cardboard and made a drawing starting from that mould. We made some files and went to the laser guys. To decide whether we needed a 3 or 5 mm plate Dirk did some jumps on the plates and we decided to go for the 5mm version.

It was nicely cut out and we needed to do some bending at home to get it into the BMW. Because we don’t like unpainted aluminum we decided to go for a red anodized color. Inside the car there is a lot of black and white and the red fits perfectly and is also one of the R-Box colors.

Hate it or love it…

We are probably not going to win a special art award but this strange thing in the trunk is holding the spare wheel.

It has a quick release belt to fasten the wheel and it does take almost no energy to position the wheel. (once lifted over the edge of the trunk..) The petrol tank and the fillercap are also fixed with this strange object.

We now only need to find a jack to lift the car when we need to change a wheel on a stage.. We are not sure we’re going to find one in the store so probably we’ll build it ourselves.

The first panel containing a CCC-Box, a PWR-Box and a MCM-Box has arrived from Romania.

Dirk immediately started with the CCC-Box. It is always a special moment to power a board for the first time.

We only encountered one mechanical issue and a stupid shape error (both from designer Dirk). After one night of debugging the board came to live ! Dirk was very proud since it is not the easiest print.

We also want to thank GDM electronics for the nice job done. Despite the manual interventions they delivered a flawless print, the quality from the PCB and the assembly are immaculate!

In the previous news item you can see some pictures from the Romanian factory.

The next coming nights wil be dedicated to the software. We are soon going to make a you tube movie from the first grafical moments on the TFT.

More specs can be found on the product page in the “electronics” section

to be continued …

We are not going to win some Weight Watchers medals but a 210 diff is much more robust then the original 188 version.

The red colour was choosen in a weak moment we now presume…

A support at the side of the cover still needs to be drawn and made.

We needed to develop a big radiator because we did not choose a traditional oil cooler but a Laminova heat exchanger (oil-water). This means we also cool our oil by means of the cooling water flowing through the radiator.

We bought a custom made “high efficiency” net and we needed to make the rest of the radiator ourselves. It is not finished yet but it only needs some final welding.