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


  • PTEVIS Suspension Logger Mini-Project

    PTEVIS Suspension Logger Mini-Project

     As part of my Putting The EV in Seven project, I decided I needed a big detour into suspension travel on a Seven. That sounds like a good route to getting my project finished quickly, right? Well, it goes a bit like this. In a non-linear-timey-wimey sort of way of looking at the PTEVIS project,…


  • ELECTRIC VEHICLE COMPONENTS – YOUTUBE PTEVIS 2.2

    ELECTRIC VEHICLE COMPONENTS – YOUTUBE PTEVIS 2.2

    This is the second of two explainer videos I’ve created to help YouTube viewers understand the concepts, terminology and physics of what’s going on in my Caterham Seven EV conversion. I’ve made these two videos so I can refer back to them in my progress videos and so I don’t need to explain each concept…


  • The Electric in Electric Vehicles – YOUTUBE PTEVIS 2.1

    The Electric in Electric Vehicles – YOUTUBE PTEVIS 2.1

    This is the first of two explainer videos I’ve created to help YouTube viewers understand the concepts, terminology and physics of what’s going on in my Caterham Seven EV conversion. I’ve made the videos so I don’t need to keep explaining each concept every time I mention it in a subsequent video and I’ll be…


  • 3D Scanning My EV Conversion Project Car

    3D Scanning My EV Conversion Project Car

    Excuses, Excuses Ok… so… I’ve been distracted. Since starting this EV conversion project I’ve got a bit distracted by a couple of other projects. The first was the Caterham and Lotus Seven Club, in general and specifically the move to the new website. But I also found I was getting involved in way more other…


  • PMSM Motor Internals Video

    PMSM Motor Internals Video

    As part of a larger explainer video I wanted to show how a Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor Works. I wanted to show how the stator and rotor interacted with their respective magnetic fields and currents. The video shows how a simplified motor is constructed with a Stator and Rotor and then breaks those down to…