It’s 11th of january, almost midnight. The start for a long shopping weekend in the UK. Luc , Bart and myself leave for Calais together with our long shopping list.
There is still a lot of grinding and milling to do despite the fact that all tubes are bent and laser cut at the factory. Especially the junctions where multiple tubes are connected to each other consume a lot of time and patience. The only way to do this is using a pneumatic grinding tool and check bit by bit until it fits perfectly.
Slowly but surely it starts to look as a cage.
After 1 Saturday of puzzling the first tubes were installed…
In the meantime Carl nested himself in the trunk for a few hours, armed with a welding torch and a few pillows to ensure some comfort.
As a result, the suspension supports are in place now. Overall it gives a solid impression, so we are happy. On the exterior side (wheel guard) we have welded a small plate to drain water and mud. All with all this took some time, but now we can continue on the roll cage.
Our aim is to finish this before the New Year.
Because the springs in our rear suspension are positioned over the shock absorbers, we needed to strengthen the original shock absorbers supports. We also used this opportunity to raise them about 7cm in height.
By doing this we have a longer suspension travel.
For the exhaust we did not dare to take too many risks because with a good design you can gain some power, but the reverse is equally true. Before you know it, you will lose 15-20 hp. Since the courses thermodynamics, physics and mathematics are not so fresh in our memory anymore and especially because we do not have the necessary test facilities, there was only 1 good solution … buy a good exhaust.
The first item on our shop list, the roll cage, turned out to be the easiest. In any case, we opt for a welded instead of a cage. So there weren’t many alternatives left.
We saw 2 possibilities. Either we let a recognized installer fully assemble the roll cage, or we go for the Custom Cages roll cage. The latter is a bit ikea-style, although the building kits are better documented there.
As mentioned earlier, the intention is that we will develop all electronics ourselves. ECU, display controllers, power controllers, ignition/coil drivers,….
To reduce development costs, we try to test as many concepts as possible with evaluation kits and test platforms (sample boards).
Perhaps the most counterfeit S14 part with as a result also a very different quality. Since finding an original Wethje airbox is looking for a needle in a haystack, unless you have a fortune for it, we were also forced to turn to the fake versions.
One of the first choices we made was the suspension. We not only took the quality of the product into account in our elimination, but also the availability of support and the distance to the manufacturer.
At first we looked at Reiger but due to the high price that was not feasible with our budget.
Only Proflex and Intrax remained. Both have a large number of satisfied users spread across different disciplines. Intrax is in any case the most chosen on track while Proflex has long earned its spurs in the rally event. Nevertheless, Henk was able to convince us to be a guinea pig with us.
So it has become the Intrax 4 road system with black titan coating.
