2021 Caterham 310R Racer

Fifth afternoon of the build and I had a simple aim get everything on the interior of the car done and possible fit a seat or two and maybe even the rollcage.

First job was to fit the knee trim panels and rivet the side panels. Three rivets in and my riveter broke! Painfully slow trip to screwfix to pick up a replacement and I was good to go. Sometime later and several cuts later the panels were in.

Decided to keep it simple and fit the fixed passenger seat first as I still needed to sort out the 6 point harness on the driver side. Since it was a fix seat how hard can it be I thought? Turns out not simple. The harness mounting get in the way and prevent the seat going back far enough to match up the holes in the floor pan. Either i’m an idiot or the holes are in the wrong place. At this point decided to have a tidy up and give up for the weekend.

Fourth day (afternoon) of the build. First things first was a trip to Halfords to get some much needed supplies for a few of the upcoming jobs. I’m actually a bit ahead of where I thought I would be so now it was a case of skipping ahead in the build manual and finding stuff I could do that didn’t depend on the engine being in the car. Spent ages trying to find the handbrake kit. Pretty sure it’s not there so will come back to that one.

Managed to tick off the front anti roll bar, engine mounts, boot cover, 4 point harness. Then hit a problem with the 6 point harness. ‘drill a 11mm hole in floor’. I don’t have a 11mm drill bit. Added that to tomorrow’s shopping list and onto another job. That is the thing with kit cars every job has a dependency on another and if you can’t do one thing you have to abandon a whole lot of related stuff.

Second evening of the build got off to a flying start assembling the right upright and brake hoses. After the trials of the previous nights bolts which were awkward to get to fitting the uprights was a joy of simplicity.

Quickly moved onto assembling the left hand side front suspension. This was a lot easier as I knew exactly what bits were needed where and was a breeze to fit.

 

First evening of the build started off with what was going to be the start of a typical pattern. “I’ve seen that somewhere, which box was it in again”. In this case it was the elusive steering rack fixing hidden under a piece of cardboard in the bottom of a box. Took three checks of every box and a lot of wasted time but found it! Fitting it was a lot easier than finding the fixings.

Next up was the front right lower & upper wishbone. Sounded simple enough only everything is a tight fit so a little light hammering was required. Upper wishbone bolt also holds the front light bracket so had to build that as well. That sorted and onto the damper. The top bolt for this is in a stupid location and the manual says to ‘bend’ the bodywork out of the way which was a bit nerve wracking, will it bend back?
Decided to call it a night and tackle uprights and left hand side the following evening.