Welcome to the Purplemeanie build blog of our Caterham 420R. We hope you enjoy our trials and tribulations during and after the build. Please leave us a comment and tell us what you think.

Where to Start

For my most popular video take a look at “Build a Caterham 420R in 30 minutes”

For more reading…

  • If you want join us on the journey from the beginning then take a look at this post: Build Blog Index
  • If you’d like to see a bit about us then please take a look at our About page.
  • If you just want to skip to the latest news then take a look at the Blog.
  • We’ve also put a Gallery together if that’s your thing.
  • If videos are your thing then take a look at what we’ve posted to YouTube: YouTube Videos
  • If my ramblings aren’t enough for you then you can find a whole different bunch of other blogs in this post here.
  • … and some might like to jump to my tools and trinkets here.

Latest Posts


  • Finally a good Press-Stud Tool

    Finally a good Press-Stud Tool

    This one’s as much a note for me so I know what I did to make this finally work. I’ve been looking for a decent way of fitting press-studs for things like boot covers. I’d tried the standard manual tap-and-hope tools that are supplied with the car and with SoftBitsForSevens kits. But that always seemed…


  • Putting the EV in sEVen – Youtube Project Kick-off

    Putting the EV in sEVen – Youtube Project Kick-off

    While I’ve been writing articles for the Caterham and Lost Seven Club’s Lowflying magazine, and doing a few Instagram and Facebook posts, I’ve not got around to creating the kick-off video for the Electric Seven Conversion project for Youtube, until now. I’m not really expecting this video to set the world alight, but it’s necessary…


  • Putting the EV in sEVen – Lowflying part 3 : EV Bits and Pieces

    Putting the EV in sEVen – Lowflying part 3 : EV Bits and Pieces

    This article first appeared in the February edition of the Caterham and Lotus Seven Club’s Lowflying magazine. I also created an animated overview of all of this in this video below: A more detailed version of this video will be coming soon. And here’s the text of the article… Overview In this instalment, we’re going…


  • Lowflying February 2023 – Putting the EV in sEVen – EV Bits and Pieces

    Lowflying February 2023 – Putting the EV in sEVen – EV Bits and Pieces

    This is part 3, for the February 2023 issue of Lowflying, of a multi-part series of articles. An extended version of the Lowflying article can be found here.


  • Lowflying December 2022 – Putting the EV in sEVen – Conversion Trade-offs

    Lowflying December 2022 – Putting the EV in sEVen – Conversion Trade-offs

    Another article in Lowflying for December 2022. This is part 2 of a multi-part series and is a cut down version of this post: