Tunnel Top

Work on the car was interrupted for most of January and February since the car was at Minister trying to sort out an engine power issue (long story for another time). Its back now however and there has been a bit of a rush to get the various outstanding jobs completed prior to the first race of the season in the Intermarque series at Brands Hatch on March 15th!

One of the changes in the off season was an upgrade to a six-speed Caterham gearbox from the five speed the car arrived with. Of course a new alloy 6-speed gear-knob was also 'required' and rather than just swap this over, I cam up with the idea of removing the existing tunnel top. This goes from the boot wall to the scuttle - the entire length of the cockpit meaning it weighs in at 1.4kg and I decided that a homemade lighter version would be in order! 

Thus a trip to a charity shop led to the discovery of an old black leather jacket and with some sewing support from Liz and some aluminium strip later I had new gaiters for the gearstick and handbrake.

As first generation versions they are a bit rough, but being very cheap and easy to fabricate they can be refined later. The pics show the 'standard' part and my replacement version. Given much of the tunnel top is covered with aluminium anyway, my gaiters only need to cover small sections of the tunnel.

Free Child Friendly GMail with your own Domain

So with two young daughters wanting to use the Internet more and more and being a professional in the IT space you'd think it would be easy to set up things like safe email for the kids to use...

We tried things like KidMail which while having plenty of features and being reasonably priced just ended up being too fiddly to use, the chore of having to login each time meant that 'unknown' emails would sit in the approval box for weeks before we got round to checking them. The biggest issue however was that we could not use our own domain - everything relied on using one of kidmail's (albeit extensive) domain names.

The solution, in the end, like all good things ended up being incredibly simple.

Having a domain based GMail account (instead of using xxx@gmail.com our registered domain chasey.co.uk is used, but otherwise its pretty much identical to gmail) I could set up email addresses for the children.

The next step was to setup the user account to allow POP3 access.  This enables any standard Mail program to be used to access the email, and more importantly in this case, means none of the settings online can be altered since the account password is kept private by me.

Next is the  setup of the white label filter. The filter is designed so that anything from any email addresses not recognised gets forwarded to my gmail account. If it is a legitimate email and from a trusted source I can then login and add this account to the white label list. Alternatively I can just delete and/or take appropriate action. Since email arriving in this manner still gets caught by the normal GMail spam detector a lot of this work is done automatically.

The initial filter I used was '-@chasey.co.uk'. The '-' represents a logical NOT and the @chasey on its own means any email from that domain. So the filter captures any email not from our domain, deletes it and forwards it on to the email address of your choice for checking. Multiple terms can be used on the filter list, so I can just add additional addresses and/or domains as required.

The end result is an email account under our own domain, which I have full admin control over, and can track all emails to and so feel pretty confident over its use safely. Plus it's using the existing GMail system which I use anyway so I don't have the hassle of switching to a different service and best of all it's free!

Car of the Year

The Caterham R500 is on Top Gear two weeks in a row, this time winning the Car of the Year award!

I expect we'll see a lot more of them on the road next year after this...

Not real weight saving this weekend, although time was spent cleaning behind the seats where I couldn't get to when the Tillets were in and contemplating the dash layout. I'm considering moving the battery cut-off switch from the side of the car to the centre of the scuttle, so it can be easily reached from either side of the car, plus the switch protector would then be redundant, meaning it can be removed. There is also a big lump of metal that the wiper assembly was mounted on that could be cut off with an angle grinder...

I've also uploaded a small version of a pic Fergus took of me at Lyddon Hill earlier in the year, you can check out his other images on Flickr. 

Tillet Seats

As mentioned previously I will be removing the existing Tillet seats and replacing with a custom made foam seat. After some research it appears the foam is very susceptable to temperature during the mixing so won't be making up the new seat just yet, but have stripped out the Tillets, saving 4kg for the passenger seat and 5.6kg for the drivers. The extra 1.6kg was for the adjustable seat runners on the base of the drivers seat, which I never used anyway and has a tendency to seize on a Caterham from all reports.

Removing the seats means that accessing the harnesses is now much easier which gave me an idea. I has been planning to keep the passenger harness since I want to be able to easily take out friends and family and bolting in/out the seat and harness is just too much hassle. Getting the Tillet seat out of a Caterham with a full cage on is also a combination of Tetris and Jenga.

However now that foam seats will be used the mounting positions are easily accessed. The standard Caterham harnesses are bolted in place, but the other option is to fit eyebolts and have a harness that can clip onto these. Perfect for the passenger belts that will only be required from time to time. So that saves another 1.9kg for the passenger harness! A massive 11.5kg saved this evening, breaking the 500kg barrier.

Car total weight: 496.5kg (494.5kg race trim)

Top Gear

So the 50-year old design of the Caterham beats the Bugatti Veyron round the Top Gear track with a time of 1.17.9! The Stig apparently had real problems getting heat into the tyres because it was so cold when the lap was timed and he felt it would have topped the Power Lap Board if it had been a warm day...

More Lights

My parcel from SVC arrived in the week which means I can start this weekend on my lighting project. The purpose of this is two-fold. First to reduce weight where possible, the second is to make it quick and easy to remove the front headlights for racing.

As well as the (small) weight advantage, the same incident at Lyddon that caused all my windscreen chips had a similar effect on the lenses of my headlamps. So being able to remove them for racing will definately increase their life and also will give a small aerodynamic help (the Caterham is enough like a brick at highspeed that this will be minimal!)

The normal Caterham headlights are a real pig to install partly because the wiring goes through the mounting bolt and you end up with a partially dismantled headlamp and lots of cursing in order to get all the wiring through correctly. So on the lookout for alternatives I spotted this image of the MEV Rocket that SVC supply the lights for. The indicator is mounted on top of the oval headlight which is neater than the pod below the lamp that the Caterham uses. Also with the indicator high above the wings it means that the side indicators are redundent. Finally the headlamp is attached with a single bolt to the existing headlight stanchion, but the wiring exits the rear of the headlight, not through the centre of the bolt. While this is not quite as visually neat with all wires hidden, this means that removing the headlight is simply disconnecting the eletrical plug and undoing one bolt - perfect for racing.

Moving to the rear of the car, I also took the opportunity to replace the standard rear light assembly most of which consists of a heavy rubber wedge to project the lamp at the correct angle on the rear wings with a LED version, also from SVC. Given the rear wings are so easily knocked during racing however I measured up and found that the rear lights would actually fit in the old position of the rear fog and reverse lights, removed earlier. This means that should I lose a wing, I won't have to potentially replace a light unit also. Some fiddling with the number plate position is required, so will move to a stick on square one. 

Finally the weight calculation:

New front light and indicators saved 1kg.

New rear LED lights saved 0.6kg.

Number plates 0.4kg

Car total weight: 508 kg

Car race trim: 506kg (headlights off)

Wheels

One of the things that I did earlier in the season was to change from the CR322 'ditchmasters' that were mandatory in the Caterham Academy to the much grippier CR500s. My car was originally weighed when equipped with the 322s, and I was wondering how much lighter the CR500s were. The CR500s came in at 10kg each (including rim) and the CR322s 12.8kg - 2.8kg each!

That brings us down to the 510kg mark!