lighting looms

Bit of a delay while I am waiting for parts deliveries, so I have spent the time 'motorsportifying' the front and rear lighting looms.

Ultimately I will be re-doing every electrical connector on the car, and I will be doing a bespoke, from scratch, loom for the engine and chassis/dash areas of the car.

To save some money, and because I don't deem it strictly needed, I am happy to use the OEM front a rear lighting looms.

So I removed any unnecessary wires, re-wapped the looms, and added labels (for now - before I replace the connectors for what will likely be LED lights/indicators).

mocking up remainder of exhaust system

Designed and mocked up the remainder of the exhaust system. Planning on using a single large absorbative silencer, and have ordered what looks to be a very tidy, fully stainless design from FOX in Germany. http://www.fox-sportauspuff.de/

Still need to figure a rubber mount for the can itself, shouldn't be overly difficult at all, just waiting on arrival of the bits from Germany....

7075 billet aluminium brace

The rear structure of the car is really coming on now. This weekend my rear upper "brace" arrived and was fitted.

CNC machined from billet 7075 aluminium, with a gold hard anodized coating it is a lovely looking thing:

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7075_aluminium_alloy)

The brackets are fabricated from 6mm aluminium angle to tie the brace into both the longerons and what is left of the original subframe. I've purposely run it as close to the gearbox/starter motor as possible. If it touches under running then the ribs on the outer diff casing can be slightly ground down with no ill effects to give a few mm more clearance...

You may spot some additional M8 bosses on the brace. These are to be used for exhaust system/wing mount/rear clam support...

gear shift fitted (and working!!)

So another day of work saw the lever assembly fitted to the cockpit floor. From there it was simply a case of tweaking the final cockpit rod length in order to get the neutral position perfect.

With everything bolted down tight after a couple of trial fits, I was very happy to discover that I could select every forward gear 1-6, from cold without diff movement! Reading up on F355 boxes it appears that this is not always easy even in the Ferrari, with some owners suggesting it is best to skip 1st until the gearbox oil is warm. I was expecting to need an assistant to rock the output flanges back and forth to help me select gears, and given that I couldn't select reverse this may still be needed.

There is no real telling what the gearchange feel will be like once warm/moving, I may well have to fine tune what I have constructed a lot further. At this stage I am happy enough that I will be able to get gears for some slow speed shakedowns and rolling road mapping when the time comes. 

I saw this as one of the main challenges of the project, and I am really happy with what I have achieved in the space available. From a cosmetic viewpoint the look/sound of the open Ferrari gate is extremely satisfying too, and will no-doubt add value to what will otherwise be a pretty sparse, stripped out interior.

F355 gear lever housing & linkage

Been focusing on gear linkage for the past couple of weeks after finding out from my fuel tank fabricator that the tank is going to be delayed a little due to his excessive workload.

All the traditional Elise engine swaps - FWD derived donors like Audis,Hondas, and Duratecs - have one thing in common. Cable shift gearbox linkages. 

This means that with all the swaps getting the lotus gearlever to work with the new box is child's play, although depending on the donor 'box getting it shifting sweetly can be tricky.

The F355 box is rod change. This has some advantages and disadvantages. 

Advantage No1 is feel, solid rod change linkages tend to have a positive precise feel to them, where cables can feel a little vague and 'stretchy' sometimes. The F355 shift in the Ferrari is reckoned to be one of the best manual open gate gearchanges in a road car and if I can get it 80% as good in mine I will have done well.

The main disadvantage (along with increased weight) is the reduction in flexibility for packaging. In order to get the rod linkage to work you need line of sight, and not only that but if the rod-spans are excessive you need additional sliding supports.

With all this in mind going for the F355 original lever linkage rather than trying to design some custom conversion for the Lotus lever was a no-brainer!

I needed 3 sections of rod, so 4 universal heli-joints. Luckily none of the joint angles were excessive.

Squeezing the rod between through the original cable space was tight but just about achievable. 

For support I used bronze-bushed rod ends as these generally have a ground ID with a good tolerance and surface finish.

To mount the housing in the cockpit I used some 3mm aluminium U channel.

Hopefully within the next week I will find out if it works (with a static engine).

The open gate is an aftermarket "slick shift" billet item with improved quickshift gate angles. The F355 owners seem to rate them so I gave it a go.