Caterham 170 experience

  TL;DR rinse quickly after driving on salty roads After a rather short cold snap in the middle of the week, the weather went crazy with a forecast of 16°C this Sunday. As the week-end was supposed to remain dry, I got the car out of the garage just in case I would feel like having a last proper drive for the year. I actually thought the 2 previous week-ends were the last ones, and already went to all my favourite places before those dark winter times. So I picked up the car on Saturday afternoon and went to House of Speed for a quick chat about the spark plugs and the next service that's already due soon. And also to know how their previous week-end at Interclassics went. The wind was freezing our ears off went I left just before 5PM.  Today (Sunday), I mostly planned on replacing the 24mm washers of the half-hood straps with the ones I had painted black earlier in the week. The black stainless steel screws for the expansion bottle bracket also came in the mail in the mor...

  TL;DR   Uniroyal RainExpert 5 are a solid choice. So after the Vosges trip , it was really time to replace the rear Avon ZT7.  I never found the ZT7 to be any good, but after 18 000 km they were mostly slick, and made the car unpredictable on wet roads. On a rush I called the local tyre station to know what they had in inventory. They could provide me with a pair of  Uniroyal RainExpert 5 immediately. I went there two hours later, during lunchtime. As I know that the Caterham cannot be lifted with their usual scissor jacks, I parked in the empty area of the shop and guided the mechanic for the appropriate lift point (the center of the diff). We are now 5 months later with about 9000km driven since. This feels like a good time for a proper look-back. At first, they felt really weird, with the rear-and slithering under my ass. I found it so bad that I did intent on quickly burning those things a mount something else as soon as possible. On the other hand, driving u...

You can guess that the blogs  were not the only internet Caterham content I binged on this year. Let's begin with  Caterham Seven 170 , the promotional video from the official Youtube channel, also with their promotional 6 hours build challenge .  The presentation by Caterham Gatwick is great too. Here's my pick of the " 170" reviews on Youtube, in order of interest or enjoyment : SHETALKSCAR produced the best one , in my opinion.  Hagerty provided us with a very professional review of the SS600 Driving Bex got some time with the orange 170R and tried to use it as a daily . José Windle put a yellow 170R on the Estoril circuit Alessandro Gino went full-send with "The baby Caterham" Car Obsession is really worth your time too HWM Caterham  had some fun on a very wet trackday. Paul Woodman and Tiff Needel had some fun  with Lovecars SportzNTouring went through a long-ish road trip in all kind of weather conditions L'argus put a 170R on ...

  Here is a selection of blogs I have read over the months and found most insightful. They usually focus more on the assembly than the driving or daily life with a Caterham. Caterham Seven 170R build blog by Lee, who administers the Caterham Suzuki Owners Facebook group My 170S build - a newbie tries his hand at building a car  again a great resource that details the assembly process Caterham 160 Build Diary  whose URL is just a neighbour of mine, also a step by step detail of the self assembly. Caterham 7 Diaries 420R with a lot of mechanical adventures and how-to's Caterham 7 420R build blog , the title is self-explanatory Caterham 270R racing blog by Daniel French Purplemeanie  "a Caterham Seven blog"  LE60-SEVEN build blog from Gavin, who will soon begin the assembly of his LE60-CAT  A Caterham 310S Build by David White, who maintains a rather exhaustive list of other build blogs For good measure, here are also the few vlog Youtube channels I have ...

TL;DR Some say the orange coolants eat the radiator when left sitting for too long In the end, it was replaced on March 7th.  Jump to this post to read it . I couldn't clearly remember what brought me to the coolant rabbit hole.  Trying to find the source material back, I think it was probably when reading the Caterham 7 diaries blog  that the recurrent radiator failures came to my attention. What I know for a fact is that I did discover the blog with the post about upgrading the handbrake sleeve . Anyway, the issue  seems  to be that standard pink-orange coolants do not like to be left sitting in a sleeping car for extended periods of time. This is how Radtec understand it , and why they advise the use of "blue" coolant. So here we go with the rabbit hole, and what I got from the various readings on the topic : Coolants are basically a 50/50 mix of antifreeze (ethylene glycol+additives) and distilled water The antifreeze prevents freezing down to ...

  TL;DR while the perceived quality is not a bad target in any way, some proper QC should be the main concern at the factory. We pay some serious cash for those toys and deserve better than this. EDIT : part II is here   Yes, I assume that it has to show some British heritage in some way or another. But coming from the world of the classic Mini, any sign of rust triggers some kind PTSD in me. It is really MG-Rover bad but it's since been confirmed it was a supply issue.  So here I was, calmly checking if the spark plugs I got from the Suzuki dealership would do , when a vision of horror struck me : the screws attaching the expansion bottle mounting bar to the chassis were badly corroded. They looked like an artifact from the Titanic, with rusty juice marring the bracket, chassis and main 12V lead. The other side was as bad looking, although hidden behind the 3 hydraulic hoses that feed the brakes and clutch master cylinders. A whole festival of zipties would have to be ...

  TL;DR you shouldn't let a Caterham battery unattended for over 2 months   Just out of curiosity and with some sunshine on an autumn holiday, I thought I could measure what kind of current the car uses when turned off. Doing so was facilitated by the presence of the battery master switch : it was a simple matter of connecting the multimeter on each side of the switch before opening the circuit. Using a set of probe wires with alligator clips, the Fluke was set to the 10A current mode. The voltage was 13 Volts, the power calculation is based on that.     Standby with the GKU D600 dashcams in time lapse surveillance mode : 240 mA = 3.12 Watts Cameras off (time lapse disabled) but still connected : 14 mA = 0.18 W Cameras disconnected from the power supply : 12 mA = 0.16 W Side lights on (LED units front DRL and tail lights) : 1.39 A = 18 W Dipped beams : 3.72 A (including the 1.39 from the DRL and rear lights) = 30 W from beam High beams : 3.74 A (also including ...

    TL;DR it's factory fitted with NGK ILKR7J8 I finally placed an order to Nengun, straight from Japan on Feb 21st. A set of 6 spark plugs did cost me the same as 3 at the local Suzuki dealership. With the car reaching the 2 years mark and 24 000 km, the spark plugs are due for replacement. The service schedule does mention 2 years or 12 000 miles (20 000 km). I did order a set based on the information found on the Denso website, but the dimensions of the model they specify for the Suzuki R06A engine are not suited to the Caterham 170. Note that there is no information and no part available for the 170 on caterhamparts.co.uk     EDIT from May 2025, t hey now list is as "new" product . The car came equipped with NGK ILKR7J8 spark plugs, from the NGK IR product line Suzuki OEM reference seems to be 09482-00634-000 Replacing them (on Feb 15th) with a set of Denso IXUH22FTT sold as a match for ILKR7J8 granted me with the immense joy of having my Seven towed back to...

  I'm now adding TL;DR summaries to each blog post. They will provide some idea of what each post is about or trying to convey.