The New Westfield Project - one year on......

[fatbaldbloke]

It's then business as usual wet laying the carbon, but there is a bit of a knack to get the carbon to flow nicely into the bulge over the column without bridging or bubbling.

Anyway, here's the final bit trimmed:

And fitted to the car

And that, I think, is more or less the build thread complete. I took the car to a huge classic, sports and kit car show at Knebworth on Sunday and a few people said some nice things, which makes it worthwhile.

[Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman]

Nice work getting the carbon to "sit" over the bulge. :yes:

[Cleggy the Spyder Man]

terrific the car really looks mint

[Speed Freak]

amazing work, and an amazing build thread. Many thanks for sharing all your knowledge and tips. Its great to learn new tricks, and with build threads like yours, many can profit from your skills. cheers

[Nick Algar - Competition Secretary]

Great to see it looking so good, not sure it looked that good 12 years ago when I built it from new parts

[alexander72]

Nice one FBB - a credit to you. James

[fatbaldbloke]

Great to see it looking so good, not sure it looked that good 12 years ago when I built it from new parts

I bet it went quicker when you had the supercharger on it though! Should be at Stoneleigh next year, see you there.

[fatbaldbloke]

Having pottered around a bit over winter bedding in the rebuilt engine I decided it was time to get the Power Commander set up on the rolling road, so a session was booked this morning with Troy at NMS.  Like many before me, I thought the car was running beautifully and there would be only a few tiny tweaks to make......and as with many predecessors I was wrong.  It soon became clear it was running very rich, off the scale of the analyser in fact.  Also the throttle min and max values weren't properly calibrated.  So we went through the full set up from scratch:

 

 

The bottom line when all was done was 162hp at the wheels (184 at the flywheel).  I mention the wheel hp because the car has an electric reverse (there are some details earlier in the build thread) that doesn't sap power from the drive train like the mechanical box.  This is a standard 'busa with the exception of the Pipercross filter and a large bore exhaust.  It also has 100 torques at the wheel (109 at the flywheel).

 

Usually the real benefit of a rolling road though is not the max power, it's the driveability (and economy) through the normal driving regions, and today was absolutely no exception.  However, the biggest change by far was in the clutch.  It's always been a b*gg*r to get off the mark, either letting the clutch in at idle revs, or giving it full beans being the only options.  Anything in between just resulted in stalling, and I'd put it down to the wet clutch and just learnt to live with it.  It looks like the real problem was being over-rich at around 3500 rpm that was causing it to stall as soon as any load was applied.  I can now pull away with confidence in front of traffic at any revs, it feels like a car clutch, it has so transformed the driving experience, which to be honest was quite "interesting" when pulling out of junctions or onto roundabouts and had me thinking whether I wanted to keep it.

 

I am such a happy bunny.....

[Nick Algar - Competition Secretary]

That's a really good result Ian. Interesting about the throttle pot, until you think about it. Suzuki will have set them up with a standard voltage at idle, so makes a lot of sense if they were moved it would put calibration out.

[fatbaldbloke]

The good news is the Power Commander allows for resetting the throttle pot max and min in the software, so  no need to touch the mechanical bits, it only took a minute to rectify.  

[alexander72]

Ian, I called into NMS today - sorry I missed you and sounds like u had a good trip mate, TTFN