Leaderboard

With Caffeine and Machine owners having now opened their pub, The Knockerdown, we really need to go and have a look at it. They have been refused planning permission for a full on car themed cafe but the pub is open and serving food from midday. So we can meet at Quackers, refresh ourselves, go for a run out and finish up at The Knockerdown. Who wants to join us?

1630 is how I remember it, a slightly over bored burton engine from memory. It’s mot history has big gaps so I wonder how much it is getting used. I remain hopeful!

Another 👍 for Chloe and APlan. Bit of a rocky start when she said my premium was going up significantly over last year but after a bit of digging and discussion she was able to reduce it down to slightly below last years premium. Great and pleasant service as always.

Check out the FAQ

Not having a go Bernie but that nurse must be wrong if she thinks that she has to throw away all those dressings. They come that way so that they are then decanted into the various trollies that are used. If she is not wrong then someone in procurement has got it badly wrong ordering something that way. As for the Transport, yes Taxi is cheaper than an ambulance however once again why waste so much money? You had transport arranged and was willing to wait but when it was offered you took it, the nurse just have said nothing. This is part of the problem of waste, again not having a go at you, but some see that the ambulance service is a "taxi" service for everything they want, should it not be the patients responsibility to get to hospital if not life threatening and home? I know some will have no one but I bet if they got charged up front many would suddenly fine ways of getting there and back. When I was a kid I broke an arm and often had deep cuts from playing with knives and chisels, that needed A&E, we went on the bus as we had no car, it was not expected as people back then remembered what it was like not to have an NHS so did not abuse it. We can sort this out if everyone in the NHS starts to think and question everything. One example was adult nappies, when my wife was looking at one contract the costs were obscene, so she got several quotes from outside suppliers which were almost half the cost they were paying. This was brought to light and the cost from the original supplier tumbled, I would never have dealt with them again but procurement were happy with the company so they carried on. Again if that was me I would have insisted every single item they supplied was benchmarked as clearly they took advantage. Anyway hope the op went okay Bernie

😭makes 3 of us 😭 at least we’ll keep the country going 🤣

Should be OK for this!

Meeeeee. Yippee. Meeeeee. Happy days!!! Meeeee!! Might bring Pete if he is nice to me. I’m coming. Meeeeee!! 🤣🤣🤣🤪🤪😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😎😎😎😎

Hello everyone, after many years in the wilderness I am trying to locate my old Westfield that I built. It was an early post lit narrow body SEi fitted with a crossflow. Black with carbon fibre wings. I would add photos, but I cant seem to find the option! (maybe because I am new). I would dearly love to find its whereabouts, and hopefully one day manage to own it once more. A lot of blood sweat tears and late nights in the garage where put in to create it and was I think one of the earliest cars to go through the SVA. (first time as well!) ADVthanksANCE Matthew

Welcome Mathew, well it's taxed and MoT'd which is always a good sign! As a trial member you can link to photos hosted elsewhere, but as we own the server we host the forum on, and thus have to buy our own storage space to hold photos, uploading directly is a members only perk.

Please see photos of tonneau. It is for a single hoop roll bar and I have put a tape on to indicate height of seat bulge. I’ve lost count of enquiries, so sorry it’s first come!

And also the one on bodywork if you don’t have a tape measure to hand.

Ha yes, I feel alot of the caterham crews are a little up their own A++es

Thanks for your kind donation Barry!

Thank you kindly @fatblokestu

My Westfield SE at Abingdon sprint. 2L C20XE producing 235bhp 210nm torque Great venue.

I think this is the WSCC speed series entries, based on the e-mail I got. Hopefully nobody minds me sharing this. INV19 - Westfield Sports Car Club Speed Championship David Birch Mazda MX5 1999cc 2007 Road Car S.12 Normally Aspirated Mark Bishop Westfield SE 1600cc 1990 Road Car S.12 Normally Aspirated Mark Claxton Westfield FW SEI Zetec 1988cc 2020 Road Car S.12 Normally Aspirated David Smith Westfield Sport 250 1999cc 2018 Modified Car S.13 Turbocharged John Bradshaw Westfield SEiW 2100cc 1995 Modified Car S.13 Normally Aspirated Adam Phelps , John Phelps Westfield Megabusa 1441cc 2010 Modified Car S.13 Normally Aspirated I can drop an e-mail after the event.

I’ve not forgotten about this, it’s just there’s not much visible progress to show. I’ve reached the point of the engine bay wiring so other than crimping on lots of terminals and taping wires to various tubes to get the best route there’s nothing very exciting to look at and from a fleeting glance little change. I made up a small section of aluminium panel to mount the master switch so I could hold it in the right position to get cable lengths. The lower body will eventually need to be remade.

You know the wheel chairs and walking frames that do not leave the hospital are serviced and used again. What would happen is the same people who do this in hospital would do exactly the same for those returned. Same as Oxygen bottles and trolleys, when people die as the bottles are rented, they get picked up and refilled and reused. It is not that hard where there is a will. Alternatively we can keep on buying everything new and just throw it away because it is beyond the wit of someone in the NHS to sort this out.

I've just popped this on my blog but thought it might be better served here to generate some well mannered lock down debate. Or name calling, any kind of interaction will do nowadays! It will possibly be a bit patronising in places as we already know what Westfields are like, so apologies for that. My thoughts on owning a ‘big power’ Westfield With a few years of a 340bhp Westfield under my belt, I’ve found myself more and more hinting others against such levels of power. I did have the word “advising” rather than hinting in there, but that’s not fair as I don’t think a big power Westfield is a bad thing. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s just a very different thing to when it was a middling power Westfield. Given that I’m strongly considering a rather dramatic change of direction for my car, I thought it best to write down my thoughts on what it’s meant, even if just for my own benefit. I’ll approach a few of the more popular themes when someone mentions a rather silly bhp for a Westfield “It’s a handful on the road” Well, I suppose if it’s a track only car, which mine has been for a couple of years, that doesn’t really matter. However, when it had an MOT, it was a fantastic road car. I never had to change gear to find a higher speed, just ride the massively flat torque curve. It’s a ridiculously docile car which, aside from a slightly grabby clutch (more OEM feeling ones that handle the power are available), could probably be driven by just about anyone. It’s about the furthest from a handful that you can get. What you can’t do, however, is work it on the road. It is far too quick for us mere mortals to be aware of hazards, correct the car over any bumps, change gear, process what’s going on around you, have to change gear again and even by the time you’ve read this, you’re significantly above any speed limits or indeed speeds where you’d survive and accident. To that end, it does stop being a Westfield, and become the world’s smallest GT car. Great and smoothing out the corners and cruising up to the next one with the gentlest of squeezes of the throttle. Thoroughly dangerous when deploying all of the horses. This is not a bad thing. In some ways it’s positive because you tend to drive slower and smoother, and you already know that you genuinely are the fastest thing on the road and have nothing to prove. The person with a 150bhp Westfield accelerating hard for 15 seconds between corners might be having more fun though. “You can’t keep it cool” More power, more heat. More revs, more heat. Can’t really escape that one. A Westfield also doesn’t have a lot of ways of getting rid of that heat. The bonnet opening is filled by a radiator originally specced to cool a 1.0 Polo. Now we’re trying to use the same area to cool a power output a comedy factor more than said Polo. This is where you spend your money. The radtec radiator/intercooler combo was the single biggest investment in the turbo projects and it’s fulfilled its role beautifully. These are the coolant and intake temps recorded over a track session that must have had 26 minutes of full speed work. That was on one of those rare summer days with actual sun as well, so mid 20s plus the sunshine baking the tarmac. Those peaks are within 1.5 degrees of each other – to handle that for all that length of time is particularly impressive. Though of course, I deserve more praise for staying out there that long. I’d say one of the benefits of having a large amount of power is also that you can afford to lose some. My engine runs a tiny bit rich precisely to provide a little bit of cooling assistance. “Turbo engines are laggy, peaky and difficult to drive” You tend to see these comments from the older generation, and that’s fair enough… they’ve driven 80’s turbos and, frankly, they’ve earned that opinion! None of it holds true nowadays though. The very modern turbo engines are impressively responsive. I think the only criticism you can throw at them nowadays is they don’t tend to rev that high anymore. My car sits in the middle of those two extremes. It’s not laggy, it’s not peaky and it’s easy to drive. It also revs to 7.4k and makes power all the way there. But it’s not as responsive as something like an EcoBoost when lower in the rev range. Fine on track, but I do think it would be a bit frustrating on the road. Then I suppose, we’ve already decided that the throttle is to be used sparingly on the road. Also, is it any worse than an N/A engine with cams aimed for top end power? Back to throttle response on track, it’s fine. You don’t wait for the power to come in. You don’t wait for the boost to build. It’s all there if you ask for it. Take the following graph of throttle position (blue), boost (red) and RPM (beige?): This shows the entry into a chicane, balancing the throttle through it and powering out of it. The throttle has been off for 4 seconds before this, suggesting I’ve caught a car up and it let me past on the exit. You can see the first input into the throttle produces an instant response from the turbo, and this is from 3.3k rpm so reasonably low for track work. This tracks the throttle position until the second application, where by the turbo responds again but is held back once it reaches the actuator level. Here, because the RPMs are in the mid range, the boost level is reduced to manage that massive lump of torque turbos like to give. Perhaps the reason they’re often described as peaky. The boost is now following a rising limit to keep the torque curve as flat as possible. At the gear change, the throttle is off 100% for 0.5 seconds. The boost follows this, taking 0.6s to achieve 21psi again. Which yes, is higher than it was originally set but crucially, not higher than it has been mapped for. Either way, I think that’s plenty responsive enough. So what do I think? Big power doesn’t ruin a Westfield. I’m 100% confident in that. What it does do though, at least for mere mortals, is change it. I’ve found that corners on track are mere obstacles to be cleared ready for the next application of power. Get the car slowed down (no mean feat!), turn in, get it roughly near the apex, balance the throttle, wait for it to straighten out, then deploy the power down the straight ready for the next corner. It’s made me lazy in many respects. On a sequence of close together corners or chicanes, I won’t be taking stabs of throttle between them. Just a gentle squeeze to smoothly get me to the next one without arriving too quickly and giving myself too much to do. Quite the difference to when I had 150-160bhp on throttle bodies. I suppose in that respect it’s ironically safer on track as you don’t tend to go hunting for those extra tenths. You don’t need to. It’s probably quite telling that since fitting a turbo, I’ve never spun on track. I’ve gone straight on at corners more than once! But never spun it. There is only ever one thing quicker than me on a track, and that’s a lighter, less powerful Westfield/Caterham. They’re usually on slicks, so a more serious effort than mine, but typically 100bhp or more down on me. And if they’re quick enough to catch me up despite the deficit on the straights, it shows how much I waste through the corners by not applying the throttle or pushing the car. Which isn’t speed I’m wasting, it’s fun and personal reward. I’ve had a lot of fun with my Westfield, and I don’t regret any of the options and even at my most modest I think I’ve done a really good job of breaking the 300bhp barrier in the right way. Even if I never actually meant to. But I’ve had my fun now, and it’s time for a change. For a long time now I’ve wanted to build another, knowing what I’ve learned over the last 7 years. So I’m going to rebuild this one, with less power, and more revs, and less weight, and more noise. Goodbye gentle beast. Hello bl**** idiot. That’s an RX-8 231 engine. It’s going to rev to 10k+, it’s going to breathe fire, it’s going to drink fuel like it's a water wheel and confine me to the noisy step on track days… and every now and again… it might even work!

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.2271291,-0.910059,3a,75y,134.24h,78.09t/data=!3m5!1e1!3m3!1spPcaxXROOhEAAAQY8Cgq9A!2e0!3e2!6m1!1e1