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The bearding is complete

Two beards a-bearding. Cleggy (left) & Colin (right)

So after a years worth of track days we had quite a list of things to do on the Juno. We booked a November date for a shakedown run, giving us 3 months to get it all done.

First things first, we set to the clutch. This has been nagging us for a while and when we broke the bleed nipple we were doomed to have to take the back off the car to get to it. Which turned out to be a blessing, as when we had it in bits we found that the clutch itself was well and truly foobed. It seems one of the plates had parted company from it's sprocket. So we were just running on one. That coupled with a lot of wear on the remaining plate meant we have replaced both and the guides.

hmmm, that's not right...

Another issue we were having was that the corners of the engine cover were lifting at speed and popping out of their tongue and groove style attachment. We'd been sealing them with gaffa tape on the day, but we needed to come up with a more secure fixing method. Inspiration came from Westfield and the stud and hole system that they use on their bonnets at the front. We've shamelessly copied that and it seems utterly solid now. Time will tell.

While we've had the car almost completely in bits, the front splitter has also been off and Colin has been repairing that. We've been grounding the car more than we thought so we've raised the ride height also to combat that.

cosy....

Next there's the seating. We'll probably continue to mess with this over time, but for now it consists of a bead seat for the driver and a foam one for the passenger. The drivers seat is the one that came with the car that we've hacked up to fit the pair of us. The passenger seat is a very thin expanding foam thing that we did. I suspect we may have to make a thicker one in future, but we'll see how this one goes for now. Also a channel has been cut out of the interior bodywork (as per the driver's side) for the passenger's arm. Now both Colin and I can get in the car at the same time and though cosy, it seems workable.

Cooling has been another issue if you have queue in a pit lane or anything like that. It means that you have to shutdown and restart as it gets too hot without airflow, and we don't like to restart on the internal battery too often (we use a helper normally). So after discovering that the rads are from a Ford KA, we've got a fan, plumbed it into the aux rad and wired it to a spare switch on the dash. That should help at the very least or indeed cure it.

A bit of lateral thinking has led to an unorthodox (we're good at that) solution to the rear view conundrum. The side mirrors are only usable when you're entering a corner, otherwise all you really can see is wing and off to one side. When we've tried a rear view mirror all you get is intake and wing. On the newer bodywork the wing is lifted and the intake has moved so I suspect this isn't an issue. For us it very much is. So we've fitted a reversing camera. The camera is fitted on the rear bodywork and the camera just in front of the shifter (which is easier to see than you'd think). It works surprisingly well in the garage, it'll be interesting to see what it does in actual use.

As I say, it was a fair old list and there were other odds and sods dealt with that haven't been mentioned too. All done though now and with a month to spare!

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