310 Encore Build (Colorado)

[jmaz]

Hi All,

 

I'm in the early stages of assembling a 310 Encore.  After reaching (and passing) retirement age, I figured it was pretty much now or never to scratch a long-time itch of owning a Seven, particularly if I was going to do the build myself.  The 310 had always felt like the best combination of power and balance for my needs, so when Caterham announced this summer that they were planning a limited run of 25 new 310's, I decided to take the leap after some discussion with Josh Robbins at Rocky Mountain Caterham.

 

The build has gone well so far, with no new issues encountered that haven't already been discussed in the various build blogs and forums.  I'd like to thank everyone who has taken the time to document their builds and to help with questions and problems that other builders have run into.  It's scary to imagine trying to put the car together using just the official manuals.  Along with using Josh R. as a resource, my main go-to blogs so far have been caterham420detailedbuildblog.co.uk and 310build.com.  I'll then check several others (cat310s.wordpress.com, www.caterhamr500.co.uk, purplemeanie.co.uk, among others, along with some of the instructional youtube videos such as Caterham 7 Diaries and The Caterham Cave) to help fill in some information gaps.   All of them have additional bits of detail and tricks to offer.   I'm sure that, so far, I've spent way more time reading than I have on the actual build.

 

Yoram's Yellowjacket build posts here on usa7s proved particularly valuable for suggestions on dealing with the initial hurdle of the crate delivery.  Since I couldn't be sure that the delivery truck would have a forklift that would fit in my garage, and having 3 (4, as it turned out) big crates sitting on my driveway in the middle of winter wasn't ideal, I'd followed Yoram's suggestion and construction plans to build a dolly for the chassis crate so that it could be pushed into the garage.  I made a second dolly for the engine crate.  The delivery donkey lift did in fact turn out to be too tall for my standard-height garage entry, so the dollies saved the day.  The tall crate was too high to allow use of a dolly, but the lift operator was able to nudge the crate far enough into the garage.

 

Again following Yoram's suggestion, Once we'd pushed the chassis crate into the garage, my helper (son-in-law) and I used the engine hoist and lifting straps to move the chassis off the crate base and onto jack stands.   (Here's a hint from "should have realized that" category:  remember to unbolt the chassis from the crate bottom before trying to do the lifting.)

 

I mentioned 4 crates.  One of the crates was intended to be delivered to RMC but was left with me by mistake.  

 

The chassis is an S3 with lowered floors.