What's Taking So Long?!

I have actually heard this question a few times and frankly I ask myself it sometimes.  :)  Well, all I can say is that it is amazing how long some things take.  For example, I really didn't like the zeus fasteners that came with the car and most of them were on the tail section.  So, I removed all of those fasteners and filled in all the holes so that I could install the camloc fasteners that I want to use.  I used these on my FV and I just really like how they work.  Here is a pic of one installed in the nose of the Formula F.

However, the difficult thing about all of these fasteners is that they come in different sizes.  So, in order to determine what to order, I first had to measure the thickness of the bodywork in all of the fastener mounting points and calculate the length of the fastener.  This took quite a long time in itself (maybe 4 hours) and I really won't know if I got it right until I receive the fasteners and receptacles that I ordered which should be here this week.

The brakes have also taken a lot longer than I expected.  This is quite a long story but I will try to shorten it for the blog.  The car came with LD20 calipers at all four corners which are the standard calipers for F2000 cars (what the car was).  I talked to a couple of different successful F1600 racers and they used LD20s or ICP 20s (ICP is a different brand) and LD19s in the rear.  The LD19s are a smaller caliper than the LD20s and LD20s are a fairly large caliper that of course won't work with the wheels that I bought.  ICP 20s will work with the wheels that I bought so I bought a set of ICP 20 calipers for the front and I bought a set of used LD19 calipers for the rear from a friend of mine.  Of course, the rotors need to be matched with the calipers and a smaller rotor is required with LD19 calipers so I bought a set of those for the rear and I was advised to run a different brand of rotor for the front so I bought those as well.  So all of this sounds easy right?  Just buy a bunch of parts and mount them!  Well, I went to mount the LD19 calipers and they didn't fit.  After staring at them for a while, what I realized is that the uprights needed to be milled down because the LD19s were more narrow than the LD20s and taking some material off of the uprights where the caliper mounted would allow the caliper to be centered on the rotor.  I just realized that a lot of people reading this probably don't know what an upright is so here is a pic of the left front.  The upright is the cast piece that says Van Diemen.  It is upside down in this pic.  You can also see the ICP caliper mounted and the new rotor mounted.

Ok, since I don't have the ability to mill something, I had to have someone else do that and I am currently waiting on those parts but I will get them back in the next day or so. 

Another item that I ran into was I found out that the fire extinguisher had a small leak in it.  I tried to get it fixed and re-charged but that wasn't possible so I had to order a new one.  Again, it sounds simple right?  Well the rules for fire extinguishers in race cars have changed and I couldn't find one as small as the one that came with the car.  The one that I ordered was slightly too long and I needed to send it back so I'm waiting on the next one to arrive.  Hopefully that one fits and I can get it installed.  However, I suspect that I'm going to have to take off at least one side panel so I'm apprehensive about installing the suspension until I get the fire extinguisher installed.

I think things will actually come together pretty quickly here in the next few weeks but the point of this post is that you can't help but run into unexpected delays in these types of projects and you end up depending on others along the way.  It is all part of the process!!