First deposit paid… what to do next?
Even with my still unbelievable June delivery date, I’m going to have to wait 3 months. That’s a lot of planning time and evenings mulling things over.
On the todo list is:
- Option selection
- Colour – a biggy
- Sort out the build space
Options, options
It’s all too easy to get carried away with the options list. But I’m thinking of the car as a journey, in many ways. So, I’m happy to leave some of the “less essential” options like carbon wings as future winter projects.
The bigger options like tuning level, S/R pack, SV, lowered floors, choice of gearbox are the critical ones for me and I guess anyone.
I’m pretty sure of what options I’ll be ticking but will wait to go through them with Lindon when we spec the car up later on.
Colour
Hmmm… that’s a biggy. The obvious choice is Purple.
We’ve had the Purplemeanie domain for 20 years or so and it seems almost rude not to take advantage of this project being “The Purplemeanie” (Don’t ask why Purplemeanie – there wasn’t a good reason). The question is whether I/we can live with that as a choice and I think key to the decision is what shade we can find that will work. I’m more of a “stealth” paint-job sort of person than a fluorescent pink sort of person, but we’ll see. Friends and colleagues have expressed the view that it needs to be a “stand out” colour, but I’m not sure.
I need some way of testing colours…. sounds like a job for a renderer. More on that in a later post.
Build Space
The build space is going to be the garage.
We had an extension built a few years ago that reshaped the garage. Originally it was a rectangular single skinned, single garage. The extension reworked the garage by adding a triangular section to the floor plan and cavity walls. See image below:
The car will fit in the original garage space but I’m hoping the triangular section will give me much needed space for the engine and gearbox before they get dropped in – other boxes can get stored elsewhere in the house. Building a Caterham was always on our mind during the extension build and I even got talked out of putting a pit in by the finance and planning committees during the build. That would have been useful now. The trick will be to fit all of what’s needed into the garage while leaving room for the beer fridge!
All that’s left to do now is:
- Find somewhere for all the non-essential tools:
- wood working – mainly Festool stuff which generally designed to be portable (all part of the master plan to allow the garage to be the build area)
- x-carve CNC – fun but can’t think of a reason to need it in this build… yet!
- Figure out what to do with 3 bikes that are not currently suspended in the ceiling
- Finish painting the walls – started after the extension build but not completed
- Apply epoxy garage floor covering – bought after the extension build but not applied before the garage filled up again
- Fix the lighting – the extension build electrical contractor only put in single tube 4′ fluorescents and every time I turn the lights on in there I think I’ll get round to sorting it out
- Possibly paint two of the 6 wall (yes 6) that are plywood
- Possibly paint the ceiling
- Wait… for… delivery…. day… that’s going to be the hardest part!
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