Back from the Mountains

Back from the Rockies and on with a bunch of small remaining items.

I adjusted the ride height so that I wouldn't keep scraping the gearbox mount on my driveway - I set it slightly lower than the recommended 140mm at the front and 165 mm at the rear (135/155 measured under the chassis rails, after putting weight in the driver's seat/footwell to approximate to my weight when dressed with a helmet etc.). No scraping on the driveway any more! I need to make a camber gauge, so in the meantime I did an approximate setting using a spirit level on the wheels, which showed a small amount of negative camber on each wheel. There is still too much toe-in at the front, but it will do for the time being until I can get it to a shop that can set everything up accurately. The recommended settings from Westfield are shown below:

Suspension set up direct from the factory

I also decided to tackle the gear knob - as other Mega S2000 owners have noted the Westfield gear knob is too large for the Honda gearstick - I addressed this by winding on three nuts to the gearstick then grinding them down until the gear knob would just fit over - I could then attach it securely with the three grub screws. It fits very securely with no wobble that I was fearing.

I was going to cut the gear stick down, as it seemed quite long, but I actually find it is a good height as it is, with your arm resting on the handbrake lever. I also fitted the provided gaiter as best I could, but I am not really satisfied with the outcome - I will have to come up with another solution (it is a little short, and untidy at the bottom):

Funny little gear gaiter

The handbrake gaiter fit much better. I had struggled with this before, but came up with the solution of stapling the gaiter to the rectangular rubber seal that goes over the handbrake, then securing with the metal bracket. A little untidy, and it wouldn't show if I was fitting carpets, but this being a track car I am not. Anyway, it is functional. There are that many screws because there were that many holes!

Handbrake is neater than the gearstick

I also fitted the VDO temperature sender, which should look like this:

A strange type of connector that I have not seen before, but a female spade connector fits on it sideways.

This gave much more sensible temperature readings, with the fan cutting in around 94 C.

I also removed the oil pressure sender and fitted a mechanical gauge to check the oil pressure. The Dash2 was reading 0.5 bar on idle when hot and a maximum pressure of 2.8 bar when driven. I felt this was just way too low and the mechanical gauge agreed, showing just over 1 bar on idle and between 5 and 6 bar when revved (you could see the impact of the pressure relief valve dropping the pressure to around 5 bar after being momentarily higher).

5 bar (75 psi) at 3,000 RPM, now that's more like it!

I got a revised configuration file from Westfield, but that gave nonsensical oil pressure readings, so I am waiting for another file.

All being well, I should be able to take Mr. Westfield to the DMV tomorrow for show and tell.