The Preparation

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As I said in my previous post, I have a deposit down.

What I have actually ordered so far is a chassis, with a half cage, powdercoated. On addition, I have decided to pay the money for Raptor themselves to fit the floor, and all the copperwork for hydraulics. Given that I have decided to get my engine from them as well, Andy has said that they can fit and wire the engine before I take delivery. 



I've mulled this over and gone back and forth in my head. On one hand, dropping the engine in is a big step in any build and I was quite looking forward to it.

On the other hand, doing it this way gives me a load of benefits.:

  • I get a chassis where I should be able to handle everything else to get it fully ready for IVA and registration.
  • I don't risk making a hash of hydraulic tubing. From working on bicycles, hydraulics is one of my least favourite things to do, and if I split tubes or do joints badly, DOT is horrible stuff. I will obviously still need to plumb in the brakes but thats fine.
  • I don't need to shell out for an air compressor and rivet gun which could be necessary to do a decent job on the floor install. For whats remaining in terms of rivets/rivnuts I can probably make do with a manual one which is a fair saving.
  • I don't have to do engine wiring which is probably a good thing. Wiring up the lights, electrics and instruments (which I AM going to do) is one thing,  but wiring up all the myriad of sensors on an engine is something entirely different.
  • It means I shouldn't need to beg/borrow/buy/steal a few specialist things notably an engine stand and crane.
  • It means I hopefully only need to trailer the car over to raptor once - for its pre-IVA, and then I'll take it on to IVA from there.

So I have decided to do exactly that, and then hopefully I should have the car to build over the winter months! Raptor are starting the build of my chassis in a couple of weeks, and I should have it before christmas. So there are a few next steps

  • Get the garage largely cleared out - done
  • Sell a load of the things cleared out from the garage - working on it
  • Move the bicycles from one side of the garage to the other - just waiting on racking
  • Acquire some tools. I'm actually not in bad shape with this - from my bicycles I have a lot of the smaller tools - screwdrivers, hex keys, torx, spanners, rubber mallet, etc etc etc. I'm missing some decent sockets and a few other miscellaneous items - wirestrippers and so on.
  • Acquire some axle stands and a jack.

And finally, I need to finish speccing the build - and I'll talk about some of my more cosmetic choices in the next post!

Comments

  1. 7Spot JimOctober 2, 2020 at 12:03 PM

    Very cool! ... Looking forward to following your Raptor journey!

    ReplyDelete

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