Mike Bees

Q8 claim 98RON for their Super, against everyone else's claim for 97. It was nearly 1ukp a litre last time I bought some. Mike

Squonk - getting the cooling system right is important with a K (and with any other engine of course). Your best bet would be to find a K-engined Caterham and have a look at the layout. Mike

Perfect for takeaways - ah yes, the umbrella handle sticking out of the dash of my Renault 4 was perfect for hanging your Indian takeaway on, and guaranteed no spillage. The car was incapable of generated sufficient longitudinal G-force to slop a chicken vindaloo, and whilst the doorhandles were scraping on the ground going round the corners that magic be-handled brown paper bag would simply swing to whereever it felt comfortable with the combined result of Regie's cornering forces and Mother Earth's gravitational pull. Mike Edited by - Mike Bees on 16 May 2001 08:35:11

Peter: "In re-siting the breathing from the catch tank to the cam cover you haven't really achieved much." - the point is that the scavenge pump is no longer working against a vacuum, it's circulating instead. I take your point about the filter not being required - a secondary catch tank would be more appropriate. "Is it because they can get away with it, despite ignoring good practice in a number of areas?" - I guess it's because it works and that's good enough. "What did your purple-pumped dry sump system do about breathing?" - Dave has answered this one. It's horrible, because if you overfill (how do you know you've overfilled) then any excess is shoved up from the belltank into the head, so you're chucking unfiltered oil straight into the head. Dave: "It now has a sealed cam cover with a breather from the bell tank to the catch tank . This is without a tower." I assume you're still on the purple pump? I switched to the gold pump without a tower ('cos I didn't know it existed) and it simply threw all of the oil out in very short order. "Whats the best option ( comprimise ) then" - it depends. Bear in mind that problems with the system only came to light with the VHPD. Prior to that the 1.6K race cars ran the purple pump system without any problems (not all of them ran it, it was an option). It seems that the engine-running-out-of-oil-because-it's-all-in-the-head problem is linked to sustained use of high rpm (and possibly high G-forces) - the SLR/VHPD race cars run slicks & 8000rpm. If you think you're likely to fall into that category (not likely on a hillclimb/sprint car) then switch to the gold pump & conning tower and blank off the tappet bucket feeds, this will bring you to the same 'standard' as the VHPD race cars. Even if it's not a brilliant piece of engineering it does seem to work. Your oil capacity with the purple pump could be increased just by fitting the conning tower, since it's propensity for blowing oil out of the top of the belltank is reduced. Me? At some point I might unblock one of the cam cover breathers and put a dinky little filter on it - at least it will stop it clucking like a chicken, but then that would take away a source of amusement from all the start line marshalls in the world... Mike Mike

Hmph, I've tried advertising on here for exactly one of those several times, but with zero success sad.gif Mike Edited by - Mike Bees on 15 May 2001 16:56:13

I'm told that the Touring Cars tend to run sealed systems. What about closing the loop from the catch tank to the head, so that the scavenge pump provides circulation of gases (be they air or whatever)? You would need to (a) run the catch tank sealed (connect it's breather to the cam cover), (b) ensure that the catch tank had sufficient capacity to avoid any unfiltered oil being sucked back into the head. Trouble is I suspect that running the complete system sealed would be a bad idea since there would surely be a build-up of pressure from blow-by? Maybe a very small filtered breather on the cam cover would suffice. All gold-pumped-K's run the sealed system, e.g. all the SLR (VHPD) race cars. Mike

Nig - my tunnel-top handbrake works very well without very much effort (unlike the old under-scuttle one which was totally useless). Maybe getting married has weakened your arms wink.gif Mike

No direct experience, but I do know that Caterham use high-flowing converters so the losses are very small (like less than 1 bhp so they say). It could be worth putting the cat pipe in to preserve the converter for MOT time. Mike

All you care about is whether it can deliver enough fuel in lbs/hr or whatever units you like, pressure is irrelevant. Mike

Yup. Except that the race chassis still have them fixed ('cos they're based on a chassis which predates the removable diagonals...). Mike

If it's the Juno one with the blade on one end then it's infinitely adjustable (within 2 limits...). Just think about what happens to the stiffness of the blade as you rotate it. Mike

I got my ali silencer made by Force Racing Cars (Bill Chaplin) - www.forceracingcars.co.uk. Not cheap, but very effective. Mike

There might be some small improvements to be made, but the value is questionable. The ECU you have has already been mapped to suit the engine. There's only really any point in changing it if you're going to make changes to the engine which require remapping. Mike

FWIW I've found that the wider lower-profile tyres (like 195x50/15) work better with less camber than a regular 185x60/13. Obviously the requirements vary from tyre to tyre but I'm talking about boring road tyres rather than fun sticky ones. Mike

Graham - 3 figures is a possibility: http://www.budgetraceparts.co.uk/ Mike

CMC - that advice is more relevant to heavy tin-tops I'd say. Mike

Junking the ECU because the operator doens't know how to set it up is a bit drastic. You could have installation/setup problems with anybody's kit. Simon - you mention a vacuum tube. It sounds as though the ECU is using a MAP sensor to determine engine load - I was under the impression (perhaps wrong) that using manifold pressure to determine engine load doesn't work particularly well with throttle bodies. I would have thought that the ECU could be told to ignore the MAP sensor and map against the throttle pot only. Have you or the operator tried talking to QED or Lumenition? I wouldn't give up on it yet. Mike

Trail-braking is the art of staying on the brakes as you turn into the corner - not *hard* on the brakes (you'll spin) but just a *little bit*, and gradually bleeding off the braking as you approach the apex. Under braking you get weight transfer to the front wheels, so braking into the corner gives you more front end grip and less rear-end grip. It's more useful in tighter slower corners, the nature of the corner will determine whether it works and how quickly you need to bleed off the brakes. Adding power isn't the *correct* way to fix an inherently understeering chassis. If you've got a big (19mm?) front anti-rollbar and no rear anti-rollbar then you have a big imbalance in roll stiffness. Front anti-rollbars are quite cheap (especially if you can find a secondhand one), try changing to the 0.5". Mike

Stick with the plastic Rover part - it's lighter! Works perfectly well on my humble 235bhp K-series smile.gif Mike

As a rule of thumb adding roll stiffness at one end of the car reduces the grip at that end relative to the other end - so he's right in that adding roll stiffness at the back will help to cancel out the understeer. It might not be the best way of doing it - it might be better to reduce the roll stiffness at the front (smaller front ARB wink.gif), or to raise the back, or, or, or.... Was it understeering in the fast corners (Madgwick & No-Name)? Any car can be made to understeer into Lavant. Did you ride with the instructor? You'll get more understeer 2-up because the back sits lower & hence the steer effects of the DD-tube move further towards understeer territory. What was the instructors driving style - was he braking hard and then jumping back on the throttle at the point of turn-in? Getting back on the throttle early takes weight off the front wheels and hence increases the tendency to understeer (Lavant is a really good place to trail-brake up to the first apex to avoid this). Mike

It's almost certain to need some new valves. Of the (small number) of K cambelt failures I've heard of they've all bent valves (difficult to see how it couldn't be so given that whatever the crank position when the belt gives way there will be some valves sufficiently open to be clouted by the piston coming up). Mike

If your thermostat is stuck open then the gauge might be telling the truth, and it'll be using more fuel 'cos the ECU will think the engine isn't up to temperature. Mike

The 1.8K was designed with supercharging in mind (hence the rather large big end journals on the crank), but a supercharged version never made it on to the market. Whilst the crank journals were well up to the job some other bits weren't - look at the list of mods BBR make to beef it up for blowing. Mike

I don't think slackening off the handbrake will help. There seem to be 2 potential sources of excessive travel in the brake pedal, (1) the std master cylinder can have a lot of slop - movement of the pedal required before it starts to do anything with the piston,(2) the std. rear brakes. In my case the problem was all in the m/c, in Peter's it was in the rear brakes. You don't have to drain the entire system if you're changing the master cylinder, but obviously you'll lose what's in the cylinder and need to rebleed. Might as well treat it to fresh fluid if you're splashing out on the m/c. The AP clutch on the K-series seems to need a lot of travel to fully disengage. The pedal has to be set very high to get enough movement. I don't particularly like it - having a long travel is excusable if it's light, but being excessively heavy and having an excessively long travel is taking the p***. I sat in an R500 last year which supposedly had the same clutch and it felt completely different, very light indeed. Strange. Mike

Jon, I have K-series dry sump setup with the temp. sensor in the bottom of the tank (silly place - it's not going to tell you anything sensible there). The only time the oil gets up to the same temp. as the coolant is either thrashing it round the track for a good few laps or sitting in a traffic jam in the summer. On a cold & frosty pre-dawn drive down to Gurston from Cambridge a couple of years ago the oil temperature barely crawled to 40C on the whole trip. Or, in short, your answer is (b). Mike