Engine is here!!

Today we finally took delivery of the engine! After much wrangling with the shipping agent (read massive price increase) and not getting anywhere we finally had the engine delivered here. Very exciting once we forgot about the hassle we had! Pictures below!

The engine was delivered on a lorry as the crate was so big!

I was a bit eager to check it out so it's half unpacked here! It was packed really well and came complete with muffler fitted!!

You can see here how much packing material there was!! There are more VW/Audi boxes to the left which stopped things moving around.

Ready and waiting to be lifted off the base pallet!

Nicely settled in next to its new home!! We are actually moving the engine from the workshop into the house (into the spare dining room!!) so we have as more room to work on the actual car!

One more piece of the puzzle complete :)

Trial fitting the front brakes

There is not alot I can do at the moment while we wait for the 'pans to arrive so I've just been tinkering around! One job that needed to be done was to cut down the front wheel studs on the Strange brakes as I am running closed end wheel nuts! A mornings work and I'm pretty pleased with how they fit and look!
You can see how long the studs come originally! I removed the studs from the rear and cut them down and chamfered the edges to ensure smooth fitting of the wheel nuts.

The end result! Once the hub is really polished and the dust cap is fitted they will look awesome!!

I have decided to update the blog today (Its Adele, not Steve which makes a change!)
We have had alot of searching to do recently with regards to funds to complete the build of the car. We are SO near yet SO far, minute after minute, hour after hour i am constantly doing sums making sure invoices are paid and that we have enough to keep on going. Luckily we do, but when i added to my excel list of items bought so far it totalled just under £19,000 and we still have more stuff to buy on top of that . I then started thinking..... What exactly we could of bought for that kind of Money ? Spencers Corrado is up for sale for only £20k which would see us running back to back 8's all day long ?!

But then i thought exactly why we ARE doing this and it suddenly all made sense again ( I Think! ) I also got reading a TotalVW article at my Mum and Dad's house of my original Striptease 65 Bug where it all started 7 years ago........ That car only cost me £1400, £200 later for a 'bigger' (Read: and extra 341cc's ) engine and a cobra monaco bucket seat and away i went HAPPY as larry..... god knows how i ended up where i am now ? Actually i do..... Its the Need for Speed that all petrol (or Meth) heads have.

We are really trying to get the car out for European Finals and i hope so much that it is done. After riding in Steve D's car in America i must admit passing through the finish line on my first run i had a bit of a sniffle as it felt SO good to be back behind the wheel. Nothing more i can really say to that.

As far as a progress update, Steve has been working hard on sorting the decklid so a 'glass mould can be taken by DRE, he has actually done a real good job of straightening it out. The body is as it was 2 months ago hopefully Martin Curbishley http://www.curbishleypaint.com/ is popping over tomorrow to assess the body for prep and paint, then the Pan is off to Wayne's next Saturday. I guess after its back is when the hard work really starts... the Mega Marathon to complete the dry build so it can go over to Chris's.

Its still almost nearly there but too far away to believe its actually going to happen. I think once its back from Chris's then i will believe that the dream is nearly there :)

PS: Some pics on the above article inn question ( Cringe! )

Update..

The IRS parts arrived back from the media blasters last week. The parts were grit blasted which I found to be a bit harsh but for these type of parts it was fine.

The trailing arms were done at the same time and unfortunately the inner sections were slightly 'blasted'. I have managed to repolish them back up so should be fine.

I gave all the parts a light coating of etch primer to cover up the bare metal. Once the car is reasy for final assembly they will go off to be powder coated black.

At stanford hall VW show last weekend we picked up our custom rear valence that Joe and the guys at Autocraft had made for us! It has a 2" centre section for the header and is only single skinned at the rear. On the rear the top 'seal section' will be removed as its not needed.

I've now sprayed it with primer to protect the metal as it was supplied as you can see, bare metal.

Fitting tacho into dash.

A while ago we had decided to fit our Carbon Fibre Autometer monster tach in the stock speedo location as we aren't keen on big tacho's hanging off the dashboard! Today I managed to get it to fit! Photo's are a bit poor but are legible!

First I removed the lip from the backside of the speedo location and then sliced the hole 'into 4' I was then able to gently hammer the hole bigger allowing the tacho to sit right in.

The tacho sits in a treat and I'm quite pleased with how it looks! I now have to find somewhere to mount the 2 other guages and shift light etc!!

Wheels & Tyres

Whilst at Santa Pod last weekend we took a trip to Jon Websters Race Shop which is around the corner in Rushden to have our tyres fitted to the wheels. The rear slicks were apparently a real bugger to fit and the guys had to use the Icelandic way of getting the tyre to seat properly!!!


The rear tyres look huge but the are only 6x26! The rears have alot of air inside them at the moment so it makes them look slightly bigger too!

Not so much has been happening since the last update, I finally sourced the IRS A-Arms and spring plates and these were sent off to be media blasted today and should be back soon.