All Activity

Hey thanks. The S3 version is a little skinny for my SV and likely a little skinny for me. 🤣

Understood, and thank you. Will inspect the grounds.

Waiting for transport. Both going to Josh at Rocky Mountain Caterham. The HPC for sale and the r400 for the diff.

The loom was essentially a crossflow loom with a custom engine harness for the zetec. I bet this is a bad earth somewhere. John's comment on LEDs exposing bad earths is spot on.

Damn right. Do your homework on who you are sending a car to. I have been known to ship projects out west as it is MUCH cheaper than using a specialist on the east coast plus I can tap into a deep network of very knowledgeable people with extensive collections. In the dumb cost awards, did you know Land Rover Brooklyn in NYC area charges $500 per hour for a mechanic to work on your trusty Land Rover or Range Rover? Even the local Ferrari dealer repair shop is not that bad. Fuggeddabutit. It was also good to break down at Tom Carlin's on my road trip in 2021 as there was a convenient specialist nearby in a little town who knew his stuff and even owned a sister car to mine. He also had a large collection of Lotus/Loti which reinforced my faith. For a Caterham or Birkin, I believe a good race mechanic will work wonders as the cars are similar to many space frame race cars they work on. Always make sure you source parts for them - thats an expensive soak of time that you can do yourself. Always provide a copy of the manual or technical bulletin and educate them - simplify their learning curve as that saves substantial time. In an ideal world I would have time to do the work myself but I don't. Between work, work travel that keeps me out of town 7-8 months of the year, family sagas, and my own home saga, I don't have time to come on here and cause mischief to @Vovchandr

True, really exotic cars take a lot of money. Run of the mill 8 cyl Ferrari should have a maintenance (not repair) account set for $%,000 annual. Could be worse. I have a copy of a guys receipt for 20k Km. service on a Porsche 959 back when. First you drop it at a European dealer. They put on truck to the factory. Factory disassembles it, including trans, diffs, engine, then sends the estimate. By the way, you need a set of wheels because the hollow mags are prone to rot. Final service totals $53,000 US. I took a F-40 for a couple thousand mile oil/service. $900, back the same day.

I don't know how the loom was set up in those days. I wouldn't expect it to matter, but it's always possible that the grounds were daisy chained and the connection at one of those missing points failed (e.g. they crimped those grounds together to complete the circuit and the crimp weakened over time). My understanding is that because LEDs draw far less voltage, they tend to expose weak grounds earlier than an incandescent bulb. I'd start by replacing the incandescent lights one at a time to see if the issue persists or goes away as a means of potentially narrowing down the location of the issue. You may get lucky. If not, then start methodically checking and cleaning all the ground connections in the circuit until you find the culprit. Don't forget to hit the grounds at the switch and relay.

Got one ordered, thanks for posting!

Good to know. One of the original tail lights was working intermittently before, so I will start looking around there. Any idea if missing reverse and fog lights might have something to do with this? Yep, I did. The car already had an LED relay, and I also tried JAL's relay to be sure.

Did you swap the flasher relay for an LED friendly one too? (JAL sells one I think but they are very easy to source anywhere)

I had something very similar happen with the Westfield many years ago. It turned out the ground on a rear taillight was bad.

Good news! The fuel has stayed in the tank since the Autocross, and what was dripping didn’t smell like fuel, instead some sort of glue or residue in the underside of the aluminum shelf. Since cleaning the shelf and the tank as best I could this hasn’t returned As far as overall fuel smell, it is much better. I only smell the breather doing its job when I slosh the tank on a spirited drive and it subsides after some cruising. Decided to do an LED swap with tail lights and indicators from Just Add Lightness, and headlights from Summit Racing. The headlights leave a little bit to be desired in their beam pattern but it’s decent. The tail lights are good and bright as needed. The indicators have not worked well so far, and cause all the lights to panic! With only one indicator on, all of the car's light flash, including the gauge lights. If I turn the lights on, then the buzzer is constantly on and the indicator bulb is lit. That’s a first. I tried disconnecting the tachometer to test the theory that the telltale could be the cause, but no dice, and not really sure where to go from here. This issue only happens with the LED indicators installed. Here is a video of the behavior with only the right indicator on: Another interesting new quirk is that while driving with the lights on I can hear the buzzer and see the indicator bulb light up intermittently as I hit bumps. This is making me think there is a bad ground somewhere.

I have one. Located in southeast Pennsylvania USA. It came out of a 1995 S3. If you're interested reach out and I'll send pictures etc.

I actually like that quite a bit

To you its THE car. To any regular mechanics its just A car that will be more pain in the ass, more scrutinized and pay the same or worse than others for the time invested. There's just no business sense for regular shops to care for special cars. Special cars need to go to special mechanics which will demand special pricing for special treatment which isn't a lot of people are willing to accept. I will venture a guess and say @Croc knows quite a bit about that with the amount of specialty vehicles he deals with and outsources the work on. This is why I do pretty much all my own work on it. You should hear the stories that real exotic car owners have to deal with. There are as much as 5 and as little as 1 person in the whole country who can do certain work and you have to ship your car to him and wait for availability. That's just the name of the game.

I love this one as it shows the clam shell style fenders.

Caterham Seven Miami Special Edition .pdf

Bravo, Speedwagon. Therein lies a good point. The local mechanic has invested in tire changing tools, and some others I can't afford or rarely need. Farm out those jobs. Why he can't bring himself to buy even a torque bar for that demolition wrench is beyond me.

Looking for a pair of Caterham Fiberglass race seats to replace my leather seats. Long shot but figured I would ask.

Blipshift, a "Crowdsourced car shirts, apparel, and accessories" site has a 7 shirt available for the next few hours. The way blipshift works is that people submit designs. Chosen designs are made into swag that is available for a limited time, usually a few days, and the artist gets a cut of every shirt made. Blipshift had had multiple 7 related shirts in the past, and this one is currently available for the next 17 hours. https://www.blipshift.com/products/yeehaw-2

It's up for a spanner check. The best time to have done that would have been BEFORE hearing new noises. Second best time is now, right? On the plus side, look forward to a checklist of bolts with wrench sizes and torque specs soon... Also, I brushed a metric tonne of bugs out of that radiator, and ordered a straightening tool, let's see how that goes!

It was out!

Raining pitchforks and hammer handles today. Rainy days and Mondays. Well at least it IS Monday and nobody was planning on autocrossing around the Twin Cities. Probably tomorrow I will look into replacing that battery in the Birkin. The easiest way would be to get the same size battery. Would have to be an AGM to mount it the same way, as it is lying down in there.

Yeah, the fictional TV show was different, They were out in the countryside somewhere. DIdn't even talk to the guards, just ran it at high speed. Another actual escape was folks who manufactured their own balloon and flew out of the country.

An actual event during the Cold War. https://www.hagerty.com/media/car-profiles/this-austin-healey-sprite-escaped-east-germany-twice/