Caterham 170 experience

TL;DR What a year 📄 First, I take the opportunity to shed some light on the Index page I wrote over the past week-ends. It’s available as the first item in the left-hand navigation bar of the blog. Content is sorted by topic, allowing to find what one could be looking for - the calendar thing is basically useless.  🎂 Two years then... It went both quickly and slowly, with the car stuck in the garage waiting for parts or paint for nearly five months. That made me miss the driest spring/summer season but I somehow managed to drive around 15 000 km despite that.  We did attend about 10 events and longer trips, from Mont Saint-Michel (shown above) to the Black Forest, club events, blats with Seven friends, a charity drive... and a first track day. Even if it sometimes looks and feels like a "Sisyphus' Caterham" story with the need for near constant upkeep, the worst issues so far have been a pair of 70€ oxygen sensors and a ~25€ thermostat that will be replaced wi...

TL;DR a lot of fun After two cold weeks of rain on frozen roads, any outing would mean soaking the Caterham in salt. We don't want any of that, so I jumped on the first chance of properly rinsed but dry roads one Wednesday evening after work to go for a quick 45-minutes drive. It was  just enough to keep the battery in good condition. Yes, I could have cut the master switch beforehand. I came back with really cold feet but had some good old fun. With the kids on vacation for 2 weeks, the original plan was to use it as my daily and take it to the office every day. Weather was so bad that they had to close the motorway near Francorchamps because of jackknifed tractor-trailers (on ice). Anyway, with the week-end came March showers. A bit of everything, with warmer rain. I don't know if I was craving driving so hard or what pushed me to see it that way, but it felt like a perfect day for one of my long drives around the Eifel and Rursee area. I left at around 9:15 and came ba...

TL;DR I'm really pissed this time Excuse my use of Greek letters, but What the Fυϲκ ! I just gave the car a quick power-wash after our Saturday blat to the Nürburging, and came back home to grazing sunlight that releaved strange brownish shadows behind the left-hand headlight. Looking closer, the bucket is rusty; all fυϲκed up with the paint cracked and lifting everywhere. With a car that's just 3 years old, "for the price" , this is just unacceptable. Options range from a £60 replacement that would most likely end up in the same state in a few years; to the 1000€ carbon fiber alternative from Wesmo. Or there's the obvious solution of spending hours cleaning, protecting and painting them to get them future-proof. My " perceived quality" (a strong focus at the top management at Caterham) has been never lower.   

TL;DR Pimpin' ain't easy Read part I   and part II for the full PIAA story. Even I think that a third post about those additional lights is a bit much. Yet again, the time spent 'researching' and fiddling with the adjustment make it worth my time writing it down. This whole blog could have been a collection of Post-It notes in Google Keep, all bullet points, sketches and figures. Anywho, as pleased as I was to transform my Seven into a light ball, it was too much and a plain nuisance to others if we're honest. Flooding the scenery up to the roof of houses with pissy yellow light wouldn't bring anything useful in actual fog either. The fact that the white drive beams were aiming too high was not as problematic, but the goal was for them to fill the black void left when the low beams turn off as the high beams are activated. I got a first check on the wall of the parking lot at work at the end of the day, with evidence recorded by the dashcam for later analy...

TL;DR The easy way, stealthy enough This is a follow-up from the previous post about adding PIAA LPW530 lights to my Caterham. Alignment is described at length here . With the car on hand, it took a whole 10 seconds and a wooden skewer to understand that the PIAAs wouldn't fit between the grille and the radiator. The space there is about 1 or 2 cm short. Change of plan then. I considered fitting a bracket down from the large nut where the headlight bowls and indicator pods are attached. It looked like a real chore of a project, and I didn't want to mess up with the headlights alignment. After much reflection, weighing various pros and cons, I went the easy way with a standard bracket made for that very purpose : a motorcycle clamp for 22-28mm tubes, made of cast aluminium. I was worried about adding unsuspended weight (~500g on each side) and about vibrations. I reckon that being about 1/3rd of the way out, it should be like 150g extra, which is close to what I've saved wi...

TL;DR Adding weight and complexity See them installed and in action here : part II    and finally part III about the alignment To quote Ben Jabituya in Short Circuit : "You know what many people are liking at night ? Headlights." Confession time. I'm one of those people he was talking about. Since the Vosges trip in August and the driving-mountain-roads-at-night-under-the-rain that came with it, I've been on the lookout for additional front lights for the 170. The issue comes from the void created near field when the main beams are switched on. With the original halogen headlights, you can hold the flasher button down to force both beams to illuminate at the same time. Replacement LED H4 bulbs didn't allow for that, but the illumination remained satisfactory. The proper LED headlights on the other hand alternate between two sharply defined beams that don't really crossover. The only Caterham with additional lights I know about is from Gilles in France. He l...